Courtesy of Mish.
In response to Trump’s “America First” policy, can anyone blame citizens in other countries for insisting upon the same?
Today Marine le Pen, promised a Crackdown on Immigration and Globalisation in a speech in Lyon, France.
France’s far-right party leader Marine Le Pen promised a crackdown on foreigners and the forces of globalisation if she won the presidency as she kicked off her campaign for a highly unpredictable election.
Launching her bid in front of a 3,000-strong crowd in Lyon on Sunday, she laid out a plan to pull the country out the euro, tax foreign workers, impose trade barriers and stop “uncontrolled immigration”.
Interrupted by chants of “France! France!” and “On est chez nous!” (“This is our country”), she told a raucous crowd that the country was threatened by the “two totalitarianisms” of economic globalisation and Islamic fundamentalism.
A report by UBS Wealth Management last week gave Ms Le Pen a 40 per cent chance of becoming president.Since Ms Le Pen succeeded her father as party head in 2011, the FN has softened its xenophobic rhetoric and developed a statist platform designed to attract blue-collar workers disappointed by the left.
This strategy has helped her party thrive in areas of France that have felt the brunt of deindustrialisation, tapping into growing disillusion among traditional leftwing voters who feel abandoned by the mainstream political class.
Le Pen Platform
- Special tax on job contracts for foreigners
- Slashing migration by 80 per cent to 10,000 people a year
- Make it much harder to become a French citizen
- Jobs should go to French workers first
- Reshape the EU into a loose confederation of nations.
- If talks failed to reshape EU in 6 months, hold a referendum on leaving the EU.
- Exit the euro, reestablish the French franc as the national currency.
Le Pen depicted the election as a choice between those who were pro-globalisation and those who were not. “There is no right wing and no left wing any more. There is only those who support globalisation and patriots,” said le Pen
Election Odds
Le Pen has been widely viewed as a candidate who would be crushed in the second round. That’s a position I scoffed at for a long time.
UBS Wealth Management now gives Le Pen a 40% chance. I find that a reasonable assessment, but le Pen’s chances may be much higher.
Points 1-4 above will ring a bell for a majority of French voters. And given Brexit, the idea of reshaping the EU can hardly be a shock.
