Marine Le Pen not Donald Trump is the bigger danger
The National Front leader promises return to a past Europe thought it had left behind forever
Donald Trump is disgraceful; Marine Le Pen is dangerous. The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination has a flair for the outrageous. The Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln could well find itself eaten by its own grotesque creation. American democracy will endure. The leader of France’s National Front could upturn the politics of a continent.
This week, Mr Trump’s call for a bar on the entry of Muslims to the US stole the headlines from Ms Le Pen’s triumph in the first round of the French regional elections. Rivals in the US Republican race disowned the latest outburst from a candidate whose campaign has peddled unabashed xenophobia. Politicians across the globe joined the general condemnation. Even against his own debauched standards, Mr Trump had gone too far.
The opinion polls will tell us soon enough whether the Republican base shares such disgust.
Past outpourings of unvarnished nativism have done Mr Trump no harm among GOP activists.
Yet it is still hard to find a serious Republican who believes he will secure the nomination. If they are wrong, Hillary Clinton seems assured of a smooth path to the White House.
The fear generated by the terrorist attacks in Paris probably contributed to her party’s first place in the regional elections. Ms Le Pen has exploited the outrage in much the same way as Mr Trump has traded off the Isis-inspired shooting in San Bernardino, California. And the flight to Europe of refugees from the wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan has been a gift to a party that elides Islam with terror.
To see the success of the National Front as a cyclical phenomenon, however, is to miss the way populists of the far right and hard left across Europe have tapped into deeper discontents. After years of high unemployment, stagnant living standards and rising immigration, globalisation has become the midwife to aggressive nationalism.
She is on to something. Cast an eye across the continent and extremists of every shade blame globalisation for the insecurities of the age. The mainstream parties are accused of colluding in a project in which the only winners have been the elites. Euroscepticism, once the eccentric preserve of British Conservatives, has become a convenient vessel for hostility at once to immigrants and multinational corporations.
The ugly nationalism of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, a self-confessed admirer of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, merges seamlessly into the unvarnished anti-semitism of his country’s Jobbik party. In language reminiscent of the 1930s, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the far-right leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, claims the refugees arriving in Europe from the Syrian civil war will spread “parasites and disease”. Elsewhere, the electoral gains of such populists are pulling mainstream parties to the nationalist right.
Ms Le Pen is not yet the frontrunner for the Elysée. But the fact she has become an entirely plausible contender should be warning enough. The National Front leader is not just another unpleasant populist. She promises a return to a past Europe thought it had left behind forever.
In 1940, George Orwell reviewed Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Prescient as ever, the great English writer alighted on the Nazi leader’s emotional connection to the German people. Hitler understood that, sometimes, people looked beyond materialism for “struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades”.
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