In response to Trump’s “America First” policy, can anyone blame citizens
in other countries for insisting upon the same?
Today Marine le Pen, promised a Crackdown on Immigration and Globalisation in a speech in
Lyon, France.
France’s far-right party leader Marine Le Pen promised a crackdown on
foreigners and the forces of globalisation if she won the presidency as she
kicked off her campaign for a highly unpredictable election.
Launching her bid in front of a 3,000-strong crowd in Lyon on Sunday, she
laid out a plan to pull the country out the euro, tax foreign workers, impose
trade barriers and stop “uncontrolled immigration”.
Interrupted by chants of “France! France!” and “On est chez nous!” (“This
is our country”), she told a raucous crowd that the country was threatened by
the “two totalitarianisms” of economic globalisation and Islamic
fundamentalism.
A report by UBS Wealth Management last week gave Ms Le Pen a 40 per cent
chance of becoming president.Since Ms Le Pen succeeded her father as party
head in 2011, the FN has softened its xenophobic rhetoric and developed a
statist platform designed to attract blue-collar workers disappointed by the
left.
This strategy has helped her party thrive in areas of France that have
felt the brunt of deindustrialisation, tapping into growing disillusion among
traditional leftwing voters who feel abandoned by the mainstream political
class.
Le Pen Platform
- Special tax on job contracts for foreigners
- Slashing migration by 80 per cent to 10,000 people a
year
- Make it much harder to become a French citizen
- Jobs should go to French workers first
- Reshape the EU into a loose confederation of nations.
- If talks failed to reshape EU in 6 months, hold a
referendum on leaving the EU.
- Exit the euro, reestablish the French franc as the
national currency.
Le Pen depicted the election as a choice between those who were
pro-globalisation and those who were not. “There is no right wing and no left
wing any more. There is only those who support globalisation and patriots,”
said le Pen
Election Odds
Le Pen has been widely viewed as a candidate who would be crushed in the
second round. That’s a position I scoffed at for a long time.
UBS Wealth Management now gives Le Pen a 40% chance. I find that a
reasonable assessment, but le Pen’s chances may be much higher.
Points 1-4 above will ring a bell for a majority of French voters. And
given Brexit, the idea of reshaping the EU can hardly be a shock.
In March of 2016, before Brexit, Newsweek reported “Research from Edinburgh University
shows that 53 percent of French would like to hold their own vote on EU
membership, and in Spain, Germany and Sweden more people are in favor of
doing so than are opposed.”
Thus, it’s reasonable to believe that much, if not most, of France would
agree with six of seven platform points I mentioned above.
In September of 2016, French Member of Parliament responsible for
European affairs in President Francois Hollande’s party, Philip Cordery,
stated “Almost all EU states could follow UK”
“I think what happened in the UK at the referendum could have happened
[in] almost every other country in the European Union – except in the other
countries no Prime Minister would have been as irresponsible as to ask for a
referendum,” Cordery, who is half English, said, as quoted by The
Independent.
“We’ve suffered from 10 years of tough austerity policies at the
European level and people don’t see the EU as progress in terms of jobs, in
terms of the economy, in terms of social progress.”
In The Netherlands: Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch right-wing,
populist PVV party, currently topping opinion polls, openly expressed hopes a
‘Nexit’ could follow a ‘Brexit.’ In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister
Bohuslav Sobotka said in February that “if Britain leaves the EU, we can
expect debates about leaving the EU in a few years too.”
At the end of June, a survey showed that 40 percent of Austrians want
their own referendum on EU membership. In March, a poll in France showed that
53 percent of the country’s citizens wanted to hold a vote. In May, a poll
conducted in Germany indicated that 29 percent of Germans were in favor of
leaving the bloc.
Le Pen Strategy vs. Trump Strategy
Trump won the US election because he struck a chord with people who blamed
globalization for their woes and also because he was an outsider who cared
little for the establishment.
Le Pen has nearly the identical strategy, minus Trump’s derogatory
mud-slinging.
Once perceived front-runner, Francois Fillon, has stumbled badly,
following allegations that he paid his wife 500,000 euros over 10 years with
parliament money, for doing virtually nothing.
I spoke about the woes of Fillon on January 29, in Reassessing Le Pen’s Chances.
It’s a serious mistake rule out Le Pen. Incumbent politicians are also in
trouble in Italy. the Netherlands, and Germany.
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Mike “Mish” Shedlock
