France gets ready
A Moscow trip adds intrigue to presidential race
French far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen put a new twist into the country’s current fiveparty race for the presidency by traveling to Moscow and meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday.
The election contest is probably a two-stage affair. The first round of voting takes place April 23; the second and final polling, if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the votes the first time around, takes place May 7.
The list of competitive candidates includes Ms. Le Pen, probably in the lead, the daughter of longtime French rightwing, racist, near-fascist political figure Jean-Marie Le Pen. Others include Republican Francois Fillon, Socialist Benoit Hamon, ex-Socialist Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron and farleft candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon. The presidential candidates also include a Trotskyite and a Gaullist.
Mr. Fillon’s prospects have been seriously damaged by charges of his having put his wife on his payroll as a member of the National Assembly for years in a no-work position. Mr. Hamon is close to being an unknown, with Socialist President Francois Hollande having decided not even to run, based on his low popularity ratings. Mr. Melenchon is an outside long shot.
Mr. Macron is considered to be the most serious competition to Ms. Le Pen. However, the way the National Front candidate has classically been thwarted in the second round of elections is for the two large parties, the Republicans and the Socialists, to unite behind a candidate to keep the National Front out of the Elysee Palace.
Mr. Macron, of course, is not the candidate of either of the two larger parties although he can be characterized as centrist. A product of the elite educational system in France, he has the pedigree to rule but not an established party structure to back him up, though he and his movement, called En Marche! (Forward!), have been collecting endorsements from veteran political figures.
Whether Ms. Le Pen has helped herself or hurt her prospects by her trip to Moscow and meeting with Mr. Putin is hard to say. While she was in the Russian capital, an opponent of Mr. Putin’s met an untimely end in the streets of Kiev. Denis Voronenkov, a former member of the Russian parliament, was shot to death Thursday morning; Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko blamed the Russian government, calling it “an act of state terrorism.”
Underlining the Russian president’s style of operation, it may remind French voters and others just how totalitarian governments of the left and the right work. Mr. Voronenkov’s death occurred in advance of his expected testimony in an investigation of the financial dealings of Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president who was ousted in 2014 and escaped to Russia. It’s considered a warning signal.
In any case, observers continue to watch the French campaign closely and are looking for trends, with reference to the British vote to leave the European Union, the American election of Donald Trump, the Dutch defeat of rightwing flag-holder Geert Wilders on March 15, the German elections later this year and possibly elections in Italy. Ms. Le Pen’s visit to Moscow is interesting in regard to what it may mean in terms of international political alignments.