“Nothing is going to change. But I had no choice.”
French radicals in this morning’s runnoff election are trying to elect a far-right president who might do what Donald Trump failed to: fracture NATO. Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally (until recently the National Front), has said that once there is a Ukraine peace treaty, she would pursue “a strategic rapprochement between NATO and Russia” and remove France from NATO’s command structure. Final polls showed incumbent President Emmanuel Macron with a 10-point lead going into Sunday.
Polls have been wrong before. Polls were off by nine points in 2017, the Washington Post advises:
A runoff win by Le Pen, 53, would put an anti-immigrant populist in charge of the European Union’s second-biggest economy and its only nuclear power. It would replace a fervent defender of the E.U. with a longtime critic of the bloc. Le Pen’s past admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and her recent calls for reconciliation between NATO and Russia have also prompted concerns that a far-right victory would empower a leader who shares Putin’s worldview, and who could become a key obstacle to Western support for Ukraine.
The U.S. elected an anti-immigrant populist and Putin admirer in 2016. The country survived his four years in office, but not without a violent insurrection that left several dead and over a hundred injured. Investigators are still gathering evidence on the self-coup attempt by the former president and his allies. Key players have yet to face prosecution.
France may yet avoid that outcome. Candidates who failed to advance in the first round have urged supporters not to vote for Le Pen.
French voters are not known for their forgiving nature when it comes to incumbent presidents. Macron’s favorability has waned. But Macron may benefit from the anti-LePen sentiment (New York Times):
Slowly dragging a shopping bag through the alleys of a bustling market in Saint-Denis, a city in Paris’s northern suburbs, Assina Channa did not hide her growing weariness. She had just left the polling station where she had grudgingly cast her vote for the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron.
“Nothing is going to change,” Ms. Channa, 58, said, stopping for a moment near a stall selling secondhand clothes. “But I had no choice.”
Like many other voters in Saint-Denis, a multicultural place with many residents who are Muslim or from an immigrant background, she said she had voted without conviction for Mr. Macron, only to keep his rival, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, from power.
“At least he doesn’t threaten us like she does,” Ms. Channa, a Muslim of Algerian descent, said, pointing to Ms. Le Pen’s tough stance on immigration and her proposal to ban the Muslim head scarf from public spaces. “But with him, life will continue to be expensive.”
Ms. Channa’s tactical vote on Sunday was the same as the one she cast five years earlier, when Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen were the candidates in that presidential runoff. Her fatigue echoed the apathy that seems to have set in among many voters in Saint-Denis and throughout France, especially on the left, as they feel compelled to once again hold their noses and vote without enthusiasm for anyone but the far right.
In their debate last week, Macron painted Le Pen as “a dependent of Russia,” a reference to loans held by Russian banks. As Channa notes above, Le Pen confirmed in the debate that she would ban Muslim women from wearing a hijab in public.
The American New Right is prepared to toss self-evident truths and democratic principles onto the ash-heap of history. French radicals want to trade liberté, égalité, fraternité for whatever version of “Russian fascism” the authoritarian right has planned for Europe. The U.S. has its own house to tend.
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