RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Some will say I am the anti-Merkel. It is an honor for me.

I don’t agree with the entirety of Marine Le Pen’s party platform but I really do get a kick out of her oratorial bombast and watching her kick Angela Merkel’s butt – and those of the unelected EU technocrats who are on the US State Department’s “unofficial payroll”.

Here, she blasts how the EU maintains itself “With blackmail, threats and intimidation…Your model is to become a servant of the USA, austerity, disloyal competition, mass spying on citizens, ‘social dumping’, migratory submersion.

“I represent another model that unites Europe’s people. One of independence, of a Europe of nations in a multipolar world, of intelligent protectionism, of individual liberties…some will call me the ‘Anti-Merkel’. I accept that label with honor. I don’t acknowledge you, Madam Merkel!

“The ‘right of self-determination’, is a ridiculous attempt at the German domination of Europe. The defense of German interests does not justify the vassalization of the other peoples of Europe. I am the voice of sovereign Europeans. They thirst for the freedom of their nations. I represent the French people, who have turned their backs on you, Mr. Hollande, the same way they turned their backs on Sarkozy – because they thirst for a France that’s free!”

Daniel McCarthy is editor at large of The American Conservative. This article first appeared in The National Interest and has been republished with permission.

The populist Right that seems to be rising throughout the advanced world has two goals. One, obviously, is to win office. But the second, which can be achieved short of actually taking power, is simply to replace the center-right. Marine Le Pen will almost certainly lose to Emmanuel Macron in a few weeks’ time. She and her supporters can count it as a victory, however, that there will be no center-right candidate in the second round of France’s presidential election for the first time since Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic.

The Left has been undergoing a shakeup of its own. Macron represents a tendency toward the pro-market center that bears some comparison with the direction in which Bill Clinton and Tony Blair took the Democrats and Labour in the 1990s. But unlike Clinton and Blair, Macron does not lead an established party. He was formerly a finance minister in the Socialist Party government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls. In picking a nominee earlier this year to succeed the disastrous incumbent Socialist president, François Hollande, the party ultimately faced a choice between the center-left Valls and a left-wing candidate, Benoît Hamon. Hamon won, but so deep is the disaffection with the Socialists that another, independent leftist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, outperformed him in Sunday’s first-round general election.

The hard Left can take comfort in the thought that the votes for Mélenchon and Hamon together exceeded those for Macron. But this only means that the French Left’s civil war—like the backbiting between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters in the Democratic Party, or between Jeremy Corbyn and his Blairite critics in the Labour Party—will continue.

As different as France, Britain and the United States may be, the similarity of ideological struggles within—as well as between—the Left and Right in all three countries suggests a profound realignment in the politics of the West. Yet where the Right is concerned, the nature of that realignment is all too often misunderstood. There is more than one kind of right-wing populism, and the kind associated with France’s National Front has so far been the least successful. The country’s traditional center-right might even chalk up its failure to get a candidate into the second-round election as a mere fluke—though this would be dangerously overconfident.

Certainly what happened this year to France’s major center-right party, the Republicans, was unusual. The leading contenders for its nomination were two former prime ministers—Alain Juppé, who had served in that role from 1995 to 1997, and François Fillon, who held the office from 2007 to 2012. Fillon prevailed and briefly became a sensation in French politics, before a financial scandal suddenly made him seem virtually unelectable. He stayed in the race and still finished less than 2 points behind Le Pen. Were it not for the scandal, he would now be headed to a runoff with Macron, and the National Front would once more have failed to repeat its performance in 2002, the only other time it advanced to the second round. Even Juppé would have had a solid chance of getting beyond round one. Only the combination of Fillon’s initial appeal and unexpected detonation doomed the Republicans—or so they might tell themselves.

This would, however, overlook the inroads that the National Front has made under Marine Le Pen. She has already improved upon her party’s previous best showing (when she ran in 2012 and received 17.9 percent of the vote) and her father’s high-water mark in the 2002 election, where he received 16.86 percent in the first-round election; this year, she won over 21 percent. Her father won less than 18 percent of the vote in the second round against Jacques Chirac, who swept to re-election by a 64-point margin. Marine Le Pen is certain to improve upon those numbers in her showdown with Macron, though he can still be expected to win easily. (Fillon and Hamon have already endorsed Macron for the second round, and while Mélenchon has not, his left-wing voters can be counted on to prefer Macron to Le Pen. Macron goes into the second round with the center-left and most of the Left and center-right behind him.)