Le Poison Le Pen

This wasn't supposed to happen.

French President Emmanuel Macron was seen as a shoo-in for re-election because of his ability to stand up to Vladimir Putin in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.   But, as in America, inflation, immigration, and intolerance have contaminated the electorate in France  to the point where right-wing populism has not only become acceptable, it's become, like an Ungaro outfit, fashionable.  And the far right's best known spokesperson, Marine Le Pen (below) could possibly be elected president of France on April 24. 

With her plain-speaking campaign style and her resemblance to a kindly but strong matriarch in an André Téchiné movie, Le Pen seems harmless enough.  Until you remember she's the leader of the ultra-nationalist National Rally (formerly National Front) party, and her campaign platform includes restricting immigration from Third World countries, forcing Muslim women to stop wearing headscarves, ending free trade, privatizing public broadcasting stopping subsidies for renewable energy, and pulling her country out of NATO.  Sound familiar?

Le Pen blames the stagnating economy and rising energy prices in France on the centrist Macron government, and she's even taken to speaking out against what we Americans call "wokeism" to incite fear and envy among the French working class that she claims the elites have forgotten.   Le Pen, 53, isn't trying to copy Trump.  She, like her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been spewing this right-wing populist rhetoric since before Trump got into American politics.

If there's anything positive to say about Le Pen (and I'm stretching it here), it's that she's not as extreme on social issues as she used to be.  She's more accepting of abortion and same-sex marriages and she no longer calls for the reinstatement of the death penalty, which France abolished in 1981.  Trump Republicans aren't yet where she is on those issues now.  None of this, however, should obscure the fact that, if elected, she'd be the most reactionary French leader since Pétain.

Like voters in the United States who are ticked off at President Biden, voters in France are fed up with COVID restrictions, inflation, and economic malaise.  They look to be ready to punish Macron and replace him with an ogress who would terrorize liberals, minorities, and intellectuals with her raw-meat fascism.   Here's what I don't get.  Americans have a lot to be mad about, because we haven't been able to have nice things for at least forty years.  The French, on the other hand, have the highest-ranking health-care delivery system in the world, high-quality public transportation (including the intercity bullet trains), a first-rate school system, and paid maternity leave.  What the hell do they have to be upset about?

You know, I sort of hope Marin Le Pen wins on April 24.  We Americans had to live for four years and suffer under his policies while our country became the skunk of the world. I'd like to see French spend the next five years learning how that feels!  Maybe a President Le Pen will abolish and repeal some of those nice things we Yanks still lack.  How did Joni Mitchell put it?  "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til its gone."

(And, maybe she'll demonize anyone opposed to her to the point where they get guys with tiki torches marching through Cherbourg and chanting anti-Semitic slogans.  In France they hate on Main Street.)