I am becoming increasingly convinced that Marine Le Pen will win the French presidential election in April of next year. Part of this feeling is undoubtedly Brexit/Trump echoes – but it’s more than that. One, the mood in France has been affected by the terrorism inflicted on it over the last couple of years and Le Pen is the one who is channeling that fear most effectively at present; two, I think it will be her and Juppe in the final round of voting, and that looks worryingly like a French version of Trump-Clinton, with Juppe looking like the sane, rational, technocratic one next to the populist. We all know how that goes in this day and age.
If this does indeed happen, I fear for the future of the EU. As in, I really give it less than a 50% chance of surviving another decade. If Le Pen takes France out of the EU (she’ll definitely take France out of the Euro) via a Frexit referendum, then the essence of the EU is gone. It becomes Germany and some satellites. Italy probably would go at that stage and then it’s curtains for the project.
How did we get here? From an indomitable force on the world stage to in its death throes within a couple of years is one hell of a fall from grace. What started the slide? I think I know where historians would look back on in a hundred years time as step one: the election of Jean-Claude Juncker to the presidency of the European Commission in late 2014.
If I was going to invent the worst possible president of the EU Commission, someone to give the perfect image for Eurosceptics to hold up to the world that the whole thing is a corrupt mess, I would have struggled to have come up someone as perfect as Juncker. A former Luxembourg prime minister who is known to like boozy lunches, he is everything Eurosceptics don’t like about the EU made flesh. He projects an unearned superiority every time he speaks. His latest stuff post-Trump victory has been embarrassing, even by his low standards, basically how wonderfully intelligent and rational Europeans are next to Americans. The only bright side to Le Pen winning will be seeing what Juncker has to say then. Perhaps something about how the Low Countries are so much smarter than the French. Unless the Dutch screw this line up for him by giving the PVV the most seats in March, which they probably will.
I want to be clear that I’m not blaming the impending dissolution of the European Union on one man, however flawed he might be. There are a myriad of forces at work here and there is no way to know whether a better president of the Commission would have made any difference. But that still doesn’t make his election not a really, really terrible idea.
I’m surprised you think Le Pen is likely to win, especially as a Lib Dem. The distinguishing feature of being a Lib Dem is usually an encyclopaedic knowledge of electoral systems and any acquaintance with the electoral system for the French presidency would show that it could not have been better designed to disadvantage candidates who do not hail from the broad middle of the political spectrum. It is easy to see how she could get into the run-off, harder to see her beating off whoever is the strongest centrist candidate she would end up facing. Le Pen therefore remains in my view a significantly less than 50/50 shot.
From an indomitable force on the world stage to in its death throes within a couple of years is one hell of a fall from grace
But that’s what happens when you have something that was inevitably doomed from its conception. You can paper over the cracks, hide the internal contradictions, for a while, but when it all unravels and comes crashing down it does so at lightning speed because the foundations were never there to support it.
(Personally, I think historians will realise that ‘step one’ was the Euro. Its design made something like the crisis of 2012 inevitable — if the sub-prime crash hadn’t triggered it, something else would have — and form then on everything followed like dominoes. The only possible way out of the crisis would have been full federalism and a money-transfer union, but there is no popular will for that among the various European peoples, so from the moment the Euro was mooted, the EU was doomed.)
I’d think that Sarko’s defeat makes this more likely. He was an excellent Le Pen tribute act, drawing support from the same poisoned well as her and possibly the last gasp of what’s no longer recognisable as the “centre”.
The rest of them are far less likely to draw this pool of right-wing tossers away from the FN, and the FN combine their racism with a remarkably socialist platform the way UKIP should do if they want to command mass support, but thankfully are too short-sightedly Thatcherite at the highest levels to actually do.
Thus, they can be assured of mass working-class support from a pool of voters that I can’t see Susanne Evans, for instance, being able to tap. They also have middle-class support of a kind that might have gone to Sarko, except that this now won’t happen.