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11-16-2016, 04:42 AM
:bism: (In the Name of God, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful)

For Le Pen, the Impossible Now Seems Possible
by Sylvie Kauffman

PARIS — Last Wednesday, as the world sought to absorb the news of Donald J. Trump’s electoral triumph, France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen was up early, already commenting on Twitter. Even before the American president-elect gave his victory speech, she rushed to congratulate him and “the free American people.” This was hardly surprising, since Ms. Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, is hoping to become the next French president.

On Wednesday evening, we watched her holding forth on mainstream television news, where she has not been a regular guest. Most journalists have as little sympathy for her as she has for them, and she had been staying out of the public eye over the past 10 months, working hard to build an electoral strategy. During the period between France’s regional elections last December, when her party scored 27 percent of the popular vote but failed to win control of any region, and the presidential election next spring, she has set herself a single goal: to build enough respectability to shatter the so-called republican front through which mainstream parties unite in the second round of a French election to prevent the National Front from winning.

Ms. Le Pen, 48, has worked patiently to transform her party from a marginal extremist movement into an organization able to seize and exercise power. Now she needs to ramp up the frustration among French citizens, which has already propelled her to the top of opinion polls ahead of the first round of presidential voting on April 23, into a force powerful enough to break the barrier of conventional politics and push her through to victory in the second round, scheduled for May 7.

She is emboldened by Mr. Trump’s upset of Hillary Clinton, which she thinks has significantly enhanced her chances of achieving just that. What the president-elect has done, she said on French public television, has been to “prove that what was presented as impossible can be made possible.” Now she confidently says she believes that it can also happen here — that France in 2017 will provide the third stage of a global political uprising begun by Brexit and reinforced by Mr. Trump’s victory.

She is not the only one to believe it. Former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a respected center-right senator, thinks the news delivered to France by the American election is this: “Marine Le Pen can win.” Just as a Trump candidacy, let alone a victory, was unthinkable a year ago, most French experts had dismissed the possibility of the far-right leader’s winning the Élysée Palace in 2017. Brexit and Mr. Trump have changed that. “This is the people’s choice,” Ms. Le Pen boasts. “If the people deliver so many surprises to the elites,” she said, it is because the elites “are disconnected.”

“You don’t draw the right lessons,” she told an interviewer who tried to get her to condemn Mr. Trump’s sexism. “This question is of no interest in the face of this gigantic change.”

Ms. Le Pen is walking a fine line. She does not want to be Donald Trump. She is wary of his excesses. She wants to avoid accusations of racism and sexism: that image belonged to her anti-Semitic father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, whom she managed to expel last year from the party he had founded. Remember: She wants to be respectable.

Nowadays, she looks poised on television, does not display anger at reporters, gets published in The New York Times and gives interviews to Foreign Affairs. She pays tribute to the role played by Senator Bernie Sanders in the American campaign. It’s not being Mr. Trump that interests her; it’s the dynamics that propelled him to the White House, the way he harnessed popular anger and channeled it into an electoral machine.

This anger, she feels, has the same foundations in France as in the United States or Britain: Alienated by “wild globalization” and open borders, she says, people want their nation back. They want to “regain control over their destiny” from arrogant elites who “despise the people.” Her supporters are mostly blue-collar workers who have deserted leftist or social-democratic parties, but she has also been making gains in the white-collar world. There are, though, some differences that make her case even stronger: A high level of unemployment (9.6 percent) and an undeniable European migrant crisis have fueled discontent in France. But Mr. Trump’s candidacy was endorsed by a major political party, while France’s traditional parties still view the National Front as an outsider.

However, the mainstream parties also feel the heat of the American turmoil. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right party, Les Républicains, will hold a primary this month, and Mr. Sarkozy, following Mr. Trump’s lead, has stepped up his provocative rhetoric about immigration and Islam. Though he denies being a populist, he does not mind playing this card, sometimes even more so than Ms. Le Pen. In Mr. Sarkozy’s eyes, Mr. Trump’s rise shows that Americans have had enough of political dogmas and of candidates supported by the establishment and the media — candidates like his main rival in the primary, former Prime Minister Alain Juppé. Yet it is hard for a candidate to run against the system only four years after leaving the Élysée.

Whether Ms. Le Pen or Mr. Sarkozy will succeed by taking up the Trump mantle is uncertain. But after the American’s victory, French politics will not be the same. “It is not the end of the world, it is the end of a world,” Ms. Le Pen lectured. The French media are keeping a close eye on the post-mortem being carried out now by their American colleagues who were certain of victory for Hillary Clinton, rather than Mr. Trump; it is time for soul-searching on this side of the Atlantic, too. Politicians are having panic attacks as fault lines in the political debate are displaced from left-wing ideological differences to opposing views about globalization or the establishment.

Interviewed by Le Monde, former Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine, a longtime aide to President François Mitterrand, spoke of “an era of electoral insurrections.” Unless French elites “finally listen to the social distress and understand people’s attachment to security, identity and sovereignty,” he said, the insurrection will reach France. The historian Pierre Rosanvallon regrets that “many genuine democrats hate populism but fail to understand its deep roots.” It is not enough to protest the consequences of populism, he told me; you also need self-criticism. And Mrs. Clinton, he noted, has not been particularly good at self-criticism.

Now let’s see if the French can do better.
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kritikvernunft
11-16-2016, 06:15 AM
format_quote Originally Posted by Search
Alienated by “wild globalization” and open borders, she says, people want their nation back.
Well, these people don't really understand that their current misery is the best they can get. A few wrong moves, and France moves from the first world to the third. They are running the risk of turning into something that looks like Russia. Poor. Destitute. And irrelevant. Ever held a Russian IPhone in your hands? Or anything Russian at all? Do you know why? Because the Russians cannot compete in any industry. Not one of their products manage to entice anybody elsewhere in the world. Outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the Russian base salary is 250 USD/month and further falling still. That is also the natural monthly wage that France is heading to. They can still delay this outcome for a while, but not for long. Le Pen will happily manage to accelerate this process.
format_quote Originally Posted by Search
Her supporters are mostly blue-collar workers who have deserted leftist or social-democratic parties, but she has also been making gains in the white-collar world. There are, though, some differences that make her case even stronger: A high level of unemployment (9.6 percent) ...
What they desire, cannot be done. It is not possible to design a global trade system in which poverty-stricken white people would still make systematically more than people from other races with similar low-level skills. They are yearning for the colonial days, but the colonial days will not come back. China will not hesitate to strike back with nuclear weapons, if they ever try to pull off again one of their notorious "unequal treaties".

The real problem are the poor whites. They want to regain their position above other races. The rich whites are, of course, not interested in that. My suggestion is to find a way to let the poor whites fight for what they believe in. The inevitable outcome will be that they will still be poor. As veterans, half of them will also have lost their legs. I do not see a problem with that outcome. The USA is already full of that type. What is the difference between a two-legged idiot and a one-legged one? Only a tour in Afghanistan or Iraq. You know what? Send all of them there again. The Afghans will solve the problem for us.
format_quote Originally Posted by Search
... and an undeniable European migrant crisis have fueled discontent in France...
Let all the discontented go on a landmine tour in Afghanistan. I will be cheering for the Pashtun and their famous ability to blow off discontented legs! ;-)
format_quote Originally Posted by Search
Mr. Sarkozy, following Mr. Trump’s lead, has stepped up his provocative rhetoric about immigration and Islam.
Idiots tend to descend into poverty, no matter how white they are. They somehow hope that the 50+ million European Muslims are a bit like themselves or like the Jews in the 1940ies. Sarkozy will soon come to understand that they are not like that. It will simply not be possible to pick them out one by one. He will have to deal with all of them at the same time, and when that happens, neither his police force nor his military forces will last for even a week. So, Sarkozy is counting on Donald Trump to stop his deployment in the Middle East, and urgently redeploy to Western Europe. That will not work either, because in that case, we can happily predict that the Middle East will simply authorize a general advance on the European front. Everything that Sarkozy may try, will simply accelerate the inevitable. Now that everybody understands that Sarkozy and his friends cannot even handle the Pashtun tribes in Waziristan -- too many NATO veterans coming back on just one leg -- of what bluff is he going to try convince us now? I don't care, because I already don't believe it. Seriously, don't you see it all coming already?
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