Marine le pen

It's Remembrance Sunday and Marine Le Pen has just appeared on the Andrew Marr show to hail a new world order. The timing of the interview has opened the BBC to some criticism, with the National Front leader attacking NATO, discussing her father's Holocaust comments, and waxing lyrical about Putin on a day the nation remember those who sacrificed themselves to secure our freedom. In the interview, Le Pen said that Donald Trump's win ought to be seen as 'an additional stone in the building of a new world destined to replace the old one'. She drew parallels with the Brexit result and said if there were more referendums across Europe tomorrow, she was 'absolutely convinced the elites would be in for another surprise'.

In September, Marine Le Pen travelled to Brachay, a microscopic right-wing commune in northeastern France. Despite its diminutive size, this French locality has the greatest percentage of Front National voters – 72 per cent - so its politicians consider it emblematic. With her raucous gusto, produced thanks to decades of smoking, Le Pen regaled the local, mainly middle-aged assembly with a Trump-like speech, claiming she was there to listen to ‘les oubliés de la France’, the forgotten voices of this country, all 59 of them. There she was, in an outfit the French media appropriately described as ‘Madame Tout Le Monde’.

His comeback is being called ‘Sarko 2’. Now, four years after the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy lost out to Francois Hollande, Sarkozy has announced he will be running again in the country’s 2017 Presidential election. The announcement was not much of a surprise: Sarkozy has made no secret of his political intentions and has done much to try and generate publicity for himself (not least in being frequently spotted on the arm of his pop star wife). But Sarkozy is more than just a self-publicist and is proving himself shrewd in clawing back French public support. His key strategy is presenting himself as the safe pair of hands in a country reeling in the wake of a sequence of terror attacks which have left hundreds dead over the last 18 months.

Last Friday I noted that you don’t have to go back many months to get the latest mass-casualty terrorist atrocity in Europe these days.  But even while people were still trying to find ways to portray the Nice truck driver as a victim of urban-planning laws we had the next attack. Yesterday it was an ‘Afghan asylum seeker’ who went around a train in Germany with an axe shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’.  That’s the same ‘Allahu Akbar’ (or ‘Allah is greatest’) that the man who drove the truck into the crowds in Nice was shouting as he ploughed through the crowded streets.  Like last week's Nice attacker, yesterday’s attacker in Germany also happened to be called Mohammed.

The second round of the French regional election was surprising in many ways. Surprising, because the strategy of the 'Front Républicain' worked well against the Front National. But Socialists are now in the awkward position of having zero seats in two important regions that until recently they governed. Even if the Socialists were able to save face by winning a few regions, their defeat was a big one, because in the last regional election five years ago, they won every region in mainland France (except for the Alsace). For the left to lose in Île-de-France, the region where Paris is located, is indeed quite a dramatic blow for them.

A bad night for Marine Le Pen, then, in France’s regional elections. Having been ahead in six regions in the first round last Sunday, her Front National appears now to have failed to win one. Cue lots of somewhat contrived jubilation from every right-thinking human on social media. Tonight does indeed represent a significant blow to Marine Le Pen’s presidential aspirations. Winning control of a region or two would have given FN the legitimacy it craves. The huge boost in voter turn out for the second round shows that, when push comes to shove, the French remain far more likely to come out and oppose her party than support it. But before liberals everywhere sound too triumphant, it’s worth reconsidering what has just happened.

When President de Gaulle was asked to authorise the criminal prosecution of Jean-Paul Sartre for civil disobedience during the Algerian war, he declined. ‘One does not lock up Voltaire,’ he added, unhistorically. In France, ‘public intellectuals’ have a quasi-constitutional status, so it’s not surprising that a furious bunfight has broken out over a handful of philosophers known as ‘les nouveaux réactionnaires’. The new reactionaries do not see themselves as a group, but they defend a common point of view about the causes of France’s diminishing status and influence.

François Hollande appears to have been consigned to the political mortuary. The first Socialist French president since François Mitterrand has been more unpopular than any of his predecessors in office — his approval rating sank to 13 per cent towards the end of last year. His style of government has been ridiculed. His private life has been the subject of mockery. He is compared to a hapless captain of a pedalo navy or a wobbly French pudding, a Flanby. But don’t write off Flanby just yet. Thanks to the peculiarity of French presidential elections, he may well win a second term.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the French Front National, really is determined to muzzle her father Jean-Marie Le Pen once and for all after his latest refusal to shut up about the Holocaust. On Monday, she won round one after it was revealed that her father would no longer stand in the regional elections. During the departmental election campaign last month, Monsieur Le Pen flouted his daughter’s orders and deployed his usual stock put-downs of the Holocaust as, for example, ‘a detail of history’. Marine was furious with her father, the founder and honorary president of the FN, and ordered him to appear before a party disciplinary committee at which, if no alternative were found, she would ensure he be banned from standing in the key December regional elections.