France tests Trump effect
Election viewed as referendum on nationalist movement
WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump swept into the White House in January, some of his advisers gleefully predicted that his victory would set off a populist wave across Europe, scattering mainstream parties on the left and right and wedding Europeans to the same nationalist ideology that Trump espoused in the United States.
With far-right parties then on the rise across the Continent, it did not seem that farfetched a proposition.
Now, with the French presidential election starting this weekend, Trump faces the stiffest test yet of whether his brand of nationalism and nativism appeals to voters elsewhere in the Western world.
That may explain why the president decided to weigh in on the campaign as brashly as he did on Friday, writing on Twitter
that the terrorist shooting in Paris would upend the election.
“The people of France will not take much more of this,” Trump said. “Will have a big effect on presidential election!”
The White House insisted the president was not trying to tilt the outcome of an election abroad that includes a nationalist candidate.
Officials said he was merely extrapolating from his own experience: In late 2015, Trump’s candidacy got a propulsive lift from fears of terrorism in the aftermath of deadly terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.
A fragmented affair
But Trump always viewed his victory as part of a global populist movement. His election came just months after Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, commonly known as Brexit. Farright parties seemed to be on the rise in Austria, the Netherlands and even Germany, where nationalist parties had failed for decades to gain a foothold.
The big prize was France. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front party, has a credible chance of winning the presidency, running on an anti-immigrant platform that echoes Trump’s.
If Trump is keeping score, however, as he most assuredly is, he would have to admit the Trump wave has yet to rise. In Austria in December, voters narrowly chose a Green Party candidate over one from the far-right Freedom Party as president. In the Netherlands last month, the Party of Freedom fell short of being the largest party in the House of Representatives. Some European analysts speak of a Trump backlash.
Le Pen still has a chance
of winning. But France’s presidential election has become a fragmented affair, with her and three other candidates — a conventional conservative; a centrist, a former banker; and a rising leftist — all vying to emerge from the pack in a campaign that has been driven as much by concerns over the economy as terrorism and security. Voters will choose among 11 candidates in the first round of national voting on Sunday.
Moreover, Trump is unpopular in France, and as a result, Le Pen does not invoke his name on the campaign trail, even if his campaign is in some ways a blueprint for hers.
There is little doubt he favors Le Pen.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Trump said Friday that though he would not endorse her, the fatal shooting of a police
officer on the ChampsÉlysées, an act claimed by the Islamic State, would help her because she was the candidate who is “strongest on borders, and she’s the strongest on what’s been going on in France.”
Le Pen seized on the attack to turn the election into a referendum on what she calls “radical Islam.”
She and Trump do not know each other, but early on, she clearly sought to tie herself to his success. After his election, Le Pen exulted that it had “made possible what had previously been impossible.”
In January, during the transition, Le Pen was photographed having coffee at the Trump Tower cafe, prompting a flurry of rumors about whether she was in Manhattan to meet the president-elect. (Trump’s aides denied it.)
Russian threat
Fears about Trump’s influence over elections in Europe deepened after the disclosure that Breitbart News, the far-right website formerly run by the president’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, planned to open offices in Paris and Berlin. (Bannon has cut his ties with Breitbart, though he continues to talk to its journalists. While many are convinced that the White House exerts influence over its coverage, the website has also been critical of the Trump administration, angering Bannon in at least one case.)
There is little evidence the White House has tried to influence the election in France, beyond Trump’s Twitter post.
Even that, the White House argued, was simply the president acting as a political analyst.
“Major events have, clearly, effects on voters’ attitudes,” said the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer. “But I’m not going to weigh in. Let the voters of France decide this Sunday what direction they want their country to go in.”
Some European diplomats said the real threat of interference was not from the United States but from Russia, which has used internet trolls, “fake news” and hacking to disrupt European elections, much as it did during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
American presidents generally avoid meddling too obviously in the politics of other countries, though there is plenty of precedent for their trying to influence outcomes in less obvious ways.
Trump has little use for such diplomatic niceties. Soon after being elected, he publicly advised the British government to appoint the pro-Brexit leader, Nigel Farage, as ambassador to the United States.
Even President Barack Obama, who tried to avoid being accused of meddling, got into trouble when he warned Britain, before the referendum, that it would go to the end of the line in future trade negotiations with the United States if it voted to leave the European Union.
Obama phone call
This week, Obama’s aides played down the significance of a phone call between him and Emmanuel Macron, the former banker and independent candidate, who urged the French not to overreact to the Paris shooting.
“They want France to be afraid,” Macron said of the terrorists, sounding a lot like Obama.
In France, where political experts and pollsters were struggling to gauge the consequences of Thursday’s attack on the psyche of voters, Trump’s Twitter message was expected to carry little weight.
“It’s nonexistent,” said Thomas Guénolé, a political scientist and lecturer at Sciences Po, a political science institute in Paris. Voters who would possibly be influenced by Trump’s views were “very politicized,” he said, and were probably already voting for Le Pen.
None of the presidential candidates, nor other major French politicians, reacted to Trump’s Twitter post, and it was barely mentioned by French Twitter users, said Guilhem Fouetillou, the head of Linkfluence, which monitors the impact of social media services.
“It mostly has Americans reacting,” he said.
“The people of France will not take much more of this. Will have a big effect on presidential election!” President Trump, via Twitter