France’s Le Pen extols far-right awakening
National Front party leader sees ‘rising up’ ahead
KOBLENZ, Germany — Marine Le Pen wasted no time in proclaiming 2017 as the year of far-right awakening in Europe.
“We are living through the end of one world and the birth of another,” Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front party, told a cheering gathering of members of European right-wing parties Saturday in this Rhine River city to chart a joint path to success in elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany this year.
“In 2016, the Anglo Saxon world woke up,” Le Pen said. “In 2017, I am sure that it will be the year of the Continental peoples rising up.”
The triumph of anti Europeans in Britain and Donald Trump in the United States has galvanized the Continent’s far-right parties, who are making appeals to disillusioned voters already bitter over social inequality, loss of sovereignty and waves of migration.
And, amid suspicions that Russia is trying to destabilize the Continent by allying with the right, Europe’s mainstream parties may be forced into awkward, or ineffectual coalitions, to preserve their power and keep extremists out.
Geert Wilders, a Dutch nationalist whose anti-Islam Dutch Freedom Party leads the polls for spring elections in the Netherlands, was emblematic of the confidence of the farright at the meeting.
“The world is changing,” he said. “America is changing. Europe is changing.” He added: “It started last year with Brexit, yesterday there was Trump and today the freedomloving parties gathered in Koblenz making a stand.”
“The genie will not go back into the bottle again, whether you like it or not,” he said.
Wilders and other farright leaders have successfully tapped in to a sense of lost identity across Europe that has been heightened by the arrival of waves of migrants, the effects of a globalized and digitized economy and perceptions that attempts are being made by institutions like the European Union to impose uniformity on diverse European cultures.
Patrick Bauer, 22, a member of Alternative for Germany, a far-right party that has benefited from widespread opposition to Chancellor An- gela Merkel’s decision to allow in about 1 million mostly Muslim migrants in 2015, said he was drawn to the meeting mostly by Wilders.
The Dutchman epitomizes the choice and variety that should be available in Europe, without citizens being forced to accept policies and economic models fashioned by pan-European institutions, said Bauer, who sits on a local council in the Taunus hills north of Frankfurt.
He described himself as a Christian strongly opposed to abortion and worried by what he sees as the advance of Islam —“up to 80 percent of students at some schools in Frankfurt,” he said.
The gathering Saturday was notable for bringing together the two women, Le Pen and Frauke Petry, joint leader of the Alternative for Germany, who hope to lead the right’s advance in France and Germany, the traditional motors of the weakened 28-nation EU, which Britain voted in June to leave.
The task of negotiating a British exit has fallen to a third woman, Prime Minister Theresa May.
All three are arrayed against Merkel, who has been in power 11 years but may fail in her bid for a fourth term in September elections.