Almost certainly doomed is France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, with François Hollande poised to win in the second round, but Marine Le Pen’s fiery, anti-banker populism has reaped her deserved rewards. As Ambrose Evans’Pritchard writes in the Daily Telegraph:
“Elected governments have already been swept away – or replaced by EU technocrats without a vote, indeed to prevent a vote – in every eurozone state where unemployment has reached double-digits: Spain (23.6 per cent), Greece (21 per cent), Portugal (15 per cent), Ireland (14.7 per cent) and Slovakia (14 per cent).The political carnage has been striking. Ireland’s Fianna Fail, creator of the Irish free state, has lost every seat in Dublin. Greece’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) – torch-bearers of Greek democracy since the Colonels – has fallen to 14 per cent in the polls and faces ruin next month.
“The results are in: the hard-Left and hard-Right are on the rampage across Euroland…. France’s Marine Le Pen presents herself as a latterday Jeanne d’Arc, openly comparing France’s pro-EU camp with the Burgundians who plotted ‘English Annexation’ in the 1430s – or indeed ‘Les Collabos’ who bought peace after 1940. ‘Let us break the chains of the French people. Bring on the French Spring,’ she tells Front National rallies.
“The mood feels different from past episodes of irritation with EU aggrandisement, whether the ‘No’ votes against the European Constitution in 2005 or the Irish ‘No’ to Lisbon and Nice, or the Scandinavian ‘Nej’ votes against the euro. Mme Le Pen has gone to the heart of the matter, asserting that monetary union cannot be fudged, that it is incompatible with the French nation state. She has won 18 per cent of the vote campaigning to pull France out of the euro and smash the whole project. Unlike her father – who never seriously expected to be president – she has a realistic chance of peeling off enough Gaulliste votes to emerge as paramount leader of the French Right.”
