Comments

1
It's just "Marine." She went through a reductive re-branding (like Cher and Islamic State) to rid herself of the link to her odious father.
3
"...Ends..."?

Not even close.

Not the end,
not the beginning of the end,
not even the end of the beginning.

5
@3:

I think you missed three or four B movie ending tropes.
6
5
Brush up on your Churchill.
8
@6:

Shakespeare. It's "Brush Up On Your Shakespeare".
9
By making the entire election about scary, scary foreigners - Wilders' party came in third behind 2 other parties currently in government that had over the last few years adopted his shtick, minus the most extreme insults - vast numbers of people voted yet again to have their pockets picked.

The big winners in this election are really he beneficiaries of the current neoliberal government which looks set to continue: companies that have reaped the benefits of privatization, deregulation, and austerity policies. Health insurers, banks, dodgy "educational institutions" that rip off the vulnerable, etc.

The system works.

source: I live in the Netherlands.
10
People who change their Facebook and Twitter avatars in solidarity colors dont have great memories. The dutch didnt have 130 people killed (including Americans) in the streets while enjoying a night out in November 2015, or have a coordinated military attack on Free Speech writers at Charlie Hebdo. Americans may have a memory like a sieve, but mainland Europe, who has seen attacks dating back to The Ottomans and still see them today, havent nor will forget. One election defeat does not end a revolution. If it did, Hillary would be signing executive orders now.
11
The Freedom Party actually gained seats. Wilders has made the mainstream parties adopt the rhetoric (albeit less offensive) and some of the nationalism to win. The debate continues to lurch to the right. You would have to be ignorant of the winds blowing from Russia to France to consider the nationalism and xenophobia limited to London & Washington.
12
I hate to break it to everyone who just parrots the labels they read in the corporate press -- far-right extremist or neofascist for Marine Le Pen, progressive independent or independent centrist or progressive centrist for Emmanuel Macron -- but Le Pen's professed economic and foreign policies are practically on all fours with Jean-Luc Mélenchon's on the left: anti-bank, anti-EU, anti-euro, anti-NATO, anti-race-to-the-bottom-free-trade. That's what she spends most of her time talking about, and that's what accounts for her dramatic rise in popularity. If France's media hadn't been taken over by billionaires and conglomerates as thoroughly as it has in the US (although French media is still less concentrated), Mélenchon would be getting a big chunk of Le Pen's coverage (cf. Trump and Bernie in the US), along with a big chunk of her votes (ditto). Unless something really dramatic happens in the coming month, the second and final round of French presidentials will almost certainly be between Le Pen and Macron. Macron is a multimillionaire former investment banker who served under Hollande, whose policies are in line with the dominant neoliberal wing of the Socialist Party (cf. the Democratic Leadership Council and the Democratic National Committee), who signed off on the sale of one of France's flagship industries (Alstom's world-class turbine business) to General Electric, and who favors slashing worker protections even more than Hollande has, to make France more "competitive." It's going to take a lot of propaganda, spin, and slime to make French voters forget that when they cast their votes in April and May (cf. Hillary and Trump in the US).

When Marine took over the National Front from her toxic father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, she purged the party's leadership of its worst racists, xenophobes, Islamophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes. Her right-hand man is gay. The party just suspended its local leader in Nice for making Holocaust-denial-like remarks. She's redirected the party's xenophobic focus to illegal immigrants, refugees, and protecting France's secular tradition from Islamic encroachment. On the other hand, she hangs with leaders of bona fide neofascist parties from other European countries and she tries to associate herself with "UKIP's" Brexit victory (which was actually the neoliberal EU's loss) and with Trump's victory (which was actually neoliberal Hillary's loss). Is her relative downplaying of racism and xenophobia merely a tactical pose? If elected, will she do a Trump, abandon every populist, anti-neolib, pro-worker "promise" she ever made, and double down on scapegoating and persecution? It's impossible to say for sure, but my sense is that she's less likely to do that than Trump was. (After all, when the French are pissed they don't just have drum circles in Zuccotti Park. They throw cobblestones and Molotov cocktails at cops, they shut down railway lines, they dump tons of manure on major arterials, and they set things on fire.) As an anti-racist, anti-xenophobe lefty who thinks that the EU has ended up serving as a Trojan horse for global capital, transnational corporations, and billionaires to destroy the social-welfare state, and that NATO has served to make its European members puppets of US hegemony, if I were French, I would vote for Mélenchon in the first round -- thanks to the media, he's polling too low to be a spoiler -- and then hold my nose, cross my fingers, and vote for Le Pen in the second round.

Final thought: Who's more despicable? Someone who's mean to illegal immigrants and refugees once they're in your country (Le Pen)? Or someone who forced the illegal immigrants and refugees to come in the first place by helping destroy their countries of origin (Sarkozy in Libya, Hollande/Macron in Syria)?

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