Marine le pen

Thursday

Christopher Caldwell

The death of Europe

The ‘yellow vest’ protests against President Emmanuel Macron that swept through Paris and other French cities last month have evoked overwhelming sympathy: 77 per cent considered them justified, according to a poll for Le Figaro. Even after Macron offered a budget-busting package of concessions to appease his critics, it was hard to silence the lacerating self-examination one undergoes after a soured romance: God, what was I thinking? Today, France’s café-goers wonder aloud how they could have voted so overwhelmingly two years ago for a president whom they disliked and disagreed with even at the time. The simple answer is that Macron was running against Marine Le Pen, whose party, now

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

The rivalry between Macron and Salvini is a battle for Europe’s soul

When Emmanuel Macron won a resounding victory over far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French presidential elections – claiming 66 per cent of the vote – Matteo Salvini was a little known Italian politician largely scoffed at as a clown by the status-quo parties. While Salvini was posting selfies on Facebook and making outlandish comments about North African migrants, the eurozone, the European Union, and the Italian political establishment, Macron was in Paris measuring drapes in the Élysée Palace. Stories in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian gushing about Macron being Europe’s saviour from the dark forces of populism were as prevalent as stories deriding Salvini as a buffoon. A

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

Macron and Trump’s doomed bromance is good news for Le Pen

Emmanuel Macron’s hosting of sixty world leaders in Paris last weekend to commemorate the centenary of the Armistice has turned into a public relations disaster. The president of the Republic not only infuriated Donald Trump, but he also put the Serbian president’s nose out of joint. According to reports, Aleksandar Vucic was not amused with the seating arrangements at Sunday’s service of remembrance. While Kosovo’s president Hashim Thaçi was behind the leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, Vucic was shunted off to the side. “You can imagine how I felt,” Thaci is quoted as telling the Serbian media. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing before me, knowing

Thursday

Anne Applebaum

The wrong right

To the inhabitants of the British Isles, the nations of central Europe have always existed in a semi–mythical space, near enough to be recognised as somehow European, but too distant to be taken seriously. Neville Chamberlain dismissed them as ‘faraway countries of which we know little’; Shakespeare gave landlocked Bohemia a coastline. In British school textbooks, Poland appears for the first time in 1939 and then vanishes again, just as abruptly. In the feverish politics of the Brexit era, central Europe has once again returned — and, once again, it is in a semi-mythical form. This time, the region is playing the role of an imaginary alternative Europe, one perfectly

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen has no future so what next for the French right?

There have been few debates in recent political history as disastrous as the one that unfolded in May when Marine Le Pen faced Emmanuel Macron on live TV. This was the big chance for the leader of the National Front to demonstrate to her people she was presidential material four days before the second round of voting. Boy, did Le Pen blow it. Snarly and sarky, she was the spitting image of her odious father. All Macron had to do was sit tight, correcting her when she got her facts wrong, and voilà, he won the second round by a landslide. Since then Le Pen has rarely been seen and

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

France has woken up to the danger of Islamism. Has Britain?

If there’s one country that knows how Britain feels in the wake of last week’s suicide bombing in Manchester, it’s France. Similar horror has been visited on the French several times in the past five years with nearly 250 slaughtered at the hands of Islamic extremists, so the French are all too familiar with the grief, the rage and the shock still being felt across the Channel. But not Britain’s incomprehension. At first, maybe, when Mohammed Merah shot dead three Jewish schoolchildren in a Toulouse playground five years ago, but since the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were slaughtered in January 2015 the French have understood what is going on. The Islamists are

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller

François Hollande has handed his acolyte Emmanuel Macron a poisoned chalice

Every politician in France is on manoeuvres. Vast chasms have opened up in the anti-Le Pen coalition and the country faces another two-round election for the National Assembly in June. It’s likely that a fractured and dysfunctional legislature will emerge, complicating or even making impossible the program proposed by president-elect Emmanuel Macron. Nonetheless, Macron will still be hoping that amidst this electoral entropy he can push his own slate to the forefront. This is a big ask. Possibly only about 20 per cent of voters supported him for the presidency for any reason other than he was not Marine Le Pen. His program is either not understood or not supported by the vast

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The National Front loses its golden girl

The golden girl of the National Front has gone and with her go the grassroot hopes for an alternative to Marine Le Pen. The decision of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen to withdraw from political life wasn’t entirely unexpected, rumours first emerged earlier in the year, but it is nonetheless a heavy blow for the party rank and file just days after their disappointing presidential election result. And it was a disappointment, no matter how Marine Le Pen tries to dress up her 34 per cent share of the vote in Sunday’s second round against Emmanuel Macron. The truth is that she was trounced by a political novice with a manifesto that

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

Brexiteers are Marine Le Pen’s natural opponents

I’m a Brexiteer and I’m glad Le Pen lost. Those Brexit-bashers who say ‘Brexit-Trump-Le-Pen’ almost as one word, as if they are the same thing, all weird, all evil, all a species of fascism, have got it utterly wrong. Brexit was democratic, optimistic, generous, a positive people’s strike for better politics. Le Pen’s programme, by contrast, is mean, nativistic, protectionist and tragic. Its motor is fear, not confidence; panic, not experimentation. It has nothing in common with Brexit. I am a Brexiteer against Le Pen, and there are many of us. Today’s Macron-loving front pages once again give the impression that Brexit was the starting pistol of a sinister new

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

It’s time to put ‘Not In My Name’ on the ballot paper

As Jonathan Miller astutely observes, the abstainers and spoilers in the French election are now the real third force in French politics. The number of blank and spoiled votes came to some 12 per cent of the total, a record proportion. And usefully in France you can actually submit a blank ballot paper so you can purposefully vote for no one, without going to the trouble of spoiling your vote. Given a choice between Marine Le Pen, squarely unreformist economically, and a man who has never held elected office, well, you can’t quite blame them, can you? Not In My Name could be the working title of the third political force

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Can a liberal Catholic now save France?

France is a muddled nation, n’est-ce pas? And at the root of the muddle is, guess what, religion. Maybe the muddle is a godsend. For if the right were more united on religion, Marine Le Pen would surely have won. The Front National is the strongest far-right party in Western Europe, supported by about a third of the French people. But it is also the most muddled. It has a nostalgic idea of the nation as a traditional organic culture. But it seems utterly ignorant of the gaping problem with such a project. Traditional French culture is split between Catholicism and secularism. Marine Le Pen emphasised secularism, in order to project

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

After Le Pen’s defeat, is the Front National heading for a split?

So what now for Marine Le Pen and the National Front? On an evening when the party polled a record number of votes in a French election, twice as many as when they reached the second round in 2002, there was little sense of triumph away from the cameras. ‘There’s obviously a bit of disappointment, it would be dishonest to say otherwise’, said Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, niece of Marine. She had said last week that 40 per cent of the vote would represent a significant victory for the National Front but their final share of 34 per cent fell some way short of that figure. ‘We’ve clearly not succeeded to convince the

Sunday

Charles Moore

Le Pen – the female champion of the excluded – trumps Europe’s shouty men

Pierre Poujade was a French shopkeeper who, in the mid-1950s, led quite a powerful right-wing revolt in favour of the little man against the elites. The leader of his party’s youth branch was Jean-Marie Le Pen. The word ‘Poujadiste’ is not usually intended as a compliment in France or here, and the late Christopher Soames did not intend it as such — though he served in her cabinet — when he privately described Mrs Thatcher as ‘Poujade with tits’. But if, as seems quite likely, Marine Le Pen wins 40 per cent of the votes in the French presidential election on Sunday (let alone if she wins a majority), something

Saturday

Jonathan Miller

It’s now time to say: Congratulations President Macron

There is perhaps some remote mathematical chance that France’s new elected monarch will be struck down by a meteorite before he is officially inaugurated in a grand parade on the Champs Elysée on May 14th, amidst a 21-gun salute, helicopters flying overhead, the Garde Républicaine in full-dress uniform on shining horses, generals posed upright in their ceremonial 4x4s, bands playing, bunting flapping. Barring that, Mr President, you appear to have played a blinder, winning the keys to the Elysée in what appears to have been a stunning political insurgency, and you have done so promising to reform an immobilised French economy. Your victory will be hailed as evidence that Europe

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 4 May 2017

‘Emmanuel Macron est le plus grand con du monde,’ said the elderly gent taking the vacant seat on my right at the Marine Le Pen rally last week. He had slicked-back white hair, a little hog’s-bristle moustache and broken-down white trainers. Plus grand means ‘biggest’, du monde means ‘in the world’, and con means, well, have a guess. A teenage girl and her pal squeezed past to occupy the spare pair of seats on my left. They flung themselves joyfully into the chanting and singing before they’d even sat down. The Palais Nikaia, a concert venue next to Nice airport, holds 8,000 people. Ten minutes before Marine Le Pen was

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 4 May 2017

Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s main Brexit negotiator, tweeted on Monday: ‘Any #Brexit deal requires a strong & stable understanding of the complex issues involved. The clock is ticking — it’s time to get real.’ This was on the same day as media reports — allegedly leaked by associates of Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president — criticised Theresa May for her naivety about Brexit talks at the dinner she gave Mr Juncker last week. These tactics are intended to affect our general election. By throwing Mrs May’s campaign slogan adjectives ‘strong and stable’ back in her face, Mr Verhofstadt was goading her at the decisive moment of her political

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Emmanuel Macron is the perfect product of Parisian groupthink

As the polls reopen this weekend for the coronation of Emmanuel Macron, the political establishment will congratulate themselves for having once again imposed their Parisian groupthink on the entire country. Without getting too bogged down in the election, which Marine Le Pen will certainly lose, the question poses itself: how does this imposition of ideology work? To see how, and as a small distraction from the great events sweeping the national stage, may I invite you to my own corner of southern France? Specifically, to the city of Béziers, whose 75,000 inhabitants face monumental challenges in the struggle to adapt to globalisation and to escape years of decay presided over

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Queen of Scots

On this week’s episode, we look at the rebirth of the Scottish Conservatives, ask whether it’s helpful to call Marine Le Pen a fascist, and consider what the future holds for Britain’s opposition parties. First, in this week’s magazine, Alex Massie profiles Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, who has overseen an extraordinary regeneration for her party in the last two years. Are the Tories the Unionist force du jour in Scotland? And can they make significant gains off the SNP, in a country that has had a frosty relationship with their English siblings? Ruth joins the podcast to discuss their campaign, along with Fraser Nelson. As Alex Massie writes in his cover piece: “…the

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Marine Le Pen has come out with the best political line of the year

It was the best line of the night. The best line of the campaign, in fact. It might even prove to be the best political line of the year, though it’s unlikely to be acknowledged as such, because of who uttered it. It was Marine Le Pen. Fixing Emmanuel Macron in a surprisingly friendly glare during last night’s televised debate, the last one before the ballot boxes open in Sunday’s presidential election, she said the following:  ‘France will be led by a woman – it will be either me or Mrs Merkel.’ Wow. And also: ouch. It’s the definition of a killer line. It had it all. It instantly emasculated

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Slick Macron triumphs over Le Pen in France’s feisty TV debate

There were times during last night’s televised debate between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron when it resembled more a playground slanging match than a pitch to become president of France. The National Front leader and her En Marche! counterpart traded insults, exchanged stares and did their best to shout each other down during two-and-a-half hours of enthralling but unedifying television. A snap poll taken by French broadcaster BFMTV shortly after the dust settled on the extraordinary encounter showed that 63 per cent of people believed Macron had come out on top, while an online poll in Le Parisien newspaper also has the centrist candidate as the clear winner. There had been