Marine le pen

Unemployment is crucifyingly high. Factories have lost competitiveness. The share of euro-zone exports is in relentless decline. Industrial production is still lower than it was in 2008. The euro might have been a French idea – but France has turned into one of its main victims. The National Front Leader Marine Le Pen is certainly right to insist that France can’t recover while it is inside the single currency. There is a problem however. Her plan for getting out is completely deranged. The first round of voting in the Presidential election is only three months away, and the National Front leader seems almost certain to make the second round.

I have a friend who lost three members of his family when an Islamic extremist drove a truck down the Promenade des Anglais in Nice on Bastille Day. When we saw each other at Christmas he said he had yet to decide whether to cast his vote for François Fillon or Marine Le Pen in the election, the two presidential candidates he considered best placed to restore law and order to France. When I asked what he thought of Emmanuel Macron he laughed. It was a cold contemptuous laugh. In the weeks since, I've conducted my 'Macron Test' on a number of occasions, throwing his name into the conversation with my French friends to gauge their reaction. Laughter is the recurring theme. 'Macron!

François Fillon's bid to become president of France has suffered another serious blow with more allegations of financial impropriety in today's Le Canard Enchaîné. Last week the investigative weekly, France's equivalent of Private Eye, claimed that Fillon's Welsh wife, Penelope, had been paid €500,000 over eight years for fictitious employment. In today's paper it is alleged she actually received €900,000 with further accusations that a decade ago Fillon hired two of his five children as parliamentary assistants while he was a senator, the pair of them earning 84,000 euros.

The National Front were out in force at my local Parisian market on Saturday. A coterie of volunteers handing out leaflets with suitably festive bonhomie. I took one from a smiling middle-aged woman. It was titled ‘Au Nom Du Peuple’ and there was a photograph of the party's leader, Marine Le Pen, looking pensive. She's dropped the surname for her election campaign. It's deemed too toxic, what with her reptilian father's reputation for playing down the holocaust and playing up the sins of homosexuality. There's a message from Marine at the top of the page, an extract from a speech she gave in September this year. ‘Nobody should ignore that this presidential election is about an inescapable choice,’ she said during an address at Frejus on the Côte d'Azur.

When The Spectator was founded 188 years ago, it became part of what would now be described as a populist insurgency. An out-of-touch Westminster elite, we said, was speaking a different language to the rest of London, let alone the rest of the country. Too many ‘of the bons mots vented in the House of Commons appear stale and flat by the time they have travelled as far as Wellington Street’. This would be remedied, we argued, by extending the franchise and granting the vote to the emerging middle class. Our Tory critics said any step towards democracy — a word which then caused a shudder — would start a descent into chaos. On the contrary, we said, the choice was between reform or a ‘revolution of the most sweeping character’.

It is more than possible that before any Brexit deal is discussed, let alone concluded, the EU will have effectively collapsed. And the key factor could be the demise of Algeria’s leader of 17 years. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is 79 and has needed a wheelchair since having a stroke in 2013. ‘His mind is even more infirm than his body,’ one observer tells me. Bouteflika returned home recently after a week’s stay at a private clinic in France. His prognosis isn’t good. Officially, Bouteflika underwent standard ‘periodic medical tests’ in Grenoble. But no one believes this. Among people who know Algeria well, there is little doubt that he is severely incapacitated and does not have much time left.

François Fillon crushed Alain Juppé on Sunday night in the second round of voting for the presidential nomination for France's main conservative party. Having knocked Nicolas Sarkozy out of the race last weekend, the 62-year-old Fillon won 66.5 percent of the vote in yesterday's run-off against the more moderate Juppé. It's a devastating blow for Juppé who, until a fortnight ago, was the clear favourite to represent the Républicains party in the spring election. There may have been a touch of complacency in Juppé's campaigning, such was the feedback from the polls, which suggested he had an unassailable lead throughout the early autumn. What did for him ultimately, though, was Fillon's tougher and more conservative approach.

And once more the polls have got it wrong. For months French pollsters confidently predicted that the first round of voting to find the centre-right candidate to represent Les Républicains in next year's presidential election was a straight shootout between Nicolas Sarkozy and Alain Juppé. The other five contenders? There to make up the numbers in the three televised debates. One or two whispers began to emerge a few weeks ago that François Fillon was gaining ground but few believed that the man who served as Sarkozy's Prime Minister nearly a decade ago would romp to victory with 44.1 per cent of the vote. Juppé was a distant second, with a 28.2 per cent share, and way back in third was Sarkozy on 21 per cent.