Tonight We'll Get A Good Idea Of How Successful Putin Has Been In Doing To The EU What He Did To The U.S.

Señor Trumpanzee with Italian would-be Mussolini, Matteo Salvini

In Europe, voting for the EU Parliament ends today. But Holland and the U.K. went first-- on Thursday-- and unofficial Dutch results show a gargantuan loss for Geert Wilders, the far right hate-monger who was leading in the polls. This is how it looks right now for the the Dutch delegation (26 seats):

• Labour- 18%
• VVD (mainstream conservatives)- 14%
• Forum for Democracy (neo-fascists)- 11%
• Freedom Party (Wilders' far right Trumpist/Islamaphobic party)- 4%

Turnout was up in Holland to around 37% but North Ireland, where there are 3 seats, shows over 45% voting. Votes there won't be counted until Monday, although the rest of the U.K. should have election results tonight. Here's how the U.K.'s seats are apportioned:

• Southeast England- 10
• London- 8
• Northwest England- 8
• West Midlands- 7
• East England- 7
• Southwest England- 6
• Scotland- 6
• Yorkshire & Humber- 6
• East Midlands- 5
• Wales- 4
• Northeast England- 3
• Northern Ireland- 3

This is how the British parties participating in the election stand on Brexit:

Brexit Party- leave
UKIP- leave
Conservative Party- leave but almost as confused as Labour
Lib Dems- favors remain but wants a new Brexit vote
Labour- complete confusion though most members want a new referendum
Green Party- remain with new referendum
Change UK- new referendum

Der Spiegel published an exhaustive look at the elections: The Right-Wing Populist Plan to Destroy Europe. The German magazine's point is that dramatic exposure of the far right's catastrophic Russian bribery scandal in Austria hasn't stopped the pan-European neo-fascists from battling on towards their goal of destroying the European Union from within its own institutions. Despite Geert Wilder's setback on Thursday, the elections ending today are likely to help them move along towards their goal.

Last Saturday European fascist leaders met in Milan, summoned by the would-be Mussolini, Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini. 11 neo-Nazi parties were represented, including Marine Le Pen from France, Geert Wilders, Jörg Meuthen from the Alternative for Germany party, as well as fascists from Bulgaria, Slovakia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland and Estonia.

Together, they performed what is by now well-known work, one with some surreal features: Full of bluster, the self-proclaimed "true Europeans" campaigned for entry into a parliament they despise. And they asked the people to give them the power to hollow out a European Union that has been painstakingly built over decades. All of it to the tune of Nessun dorma, along with Puccini's Turandot, its aria ending in fierce chanting: "Vanish, oh night! Set, stars! Set, stars! At dawn I will win! I'll win! I will win!" Vincerò!





On the stage in Milan, not a word was said about the drama unfolding in Vienna, as Heinz-Christian Strache, the head of the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), stepped down from his position as vice chancellor following the leak of a video demonstrating the depth of his corruptibility-- a scandal that also threatened to take down the entire Austrian government. And yet, in Milan they all pretended that nothing had happened. Even as they all knew: Quite a lot had happened.

This time around, it's not about some low-level party official sending Hitler pictures via WhatsApp on the Führer's birthday in provincial Austria. This time it goes right to the top level of the Austrian government, casting light on the worrying state of the Austrian political scene. The videos raise fundamental questions about whether the populists are fit for power. And whether they can be entrusted with government business. And whether Strache and his protégé Johann Gudenus should be regarded as isolated cases or as symbolic figures of a fast and loose relationship between right-wing populists and donations from foreign donors, rule of law and the truth.





Most Austrians, with the exception, perhaps, of FPÖ supporters, were likely to have been deeply shocked by the disregard to the country's constitution shown in the recordings, and many Europeans were astonished by the crooked behavior displayed by the second in command of a government of an EU member state. If the scenes in the Ibiza videos had been part of a TV crime show, people probably would have dismissed them as having been exaggerated and overdone.

..."IbizaGate" feeds into the well-founded suspicions that those thumping their chests as über-patriots in their countries have little problem with conniving with foreign powers, obtaining financing from dubious donors or even being pulled like puppets on a string when it comes to policy. The Strache scandal is undoubtedly detrimental to the original narrative offered by the right-wing populists-- namely that the parties are the lone forces defending the good people against "old parties" and other corrupt elites. But as Strache has now shown, it's the right-wing populists themselves who are in fact the corrupt elite.

Strache's German counterparts from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) have recognized the dangers of such discussions, but they don't want to admit it. Meuthen, one of the party's leaders, has been in damage control mode since last Saturday, describing the Strache Video as a "singular matter" reflecting abominable behavior, but also as a domestic issue relevant only to Austria.

...The Strache circus is of course also a problem for right-wing populists outside of Austria, because the issues raised by the video are a problem for them all across Europe. For months the AfD itself has been tangled up in several party donation scandals involving Alice Weidel, the party's floor leader in German parliament, as well as its leading candidates heading into this weekend's European elections, Meuthen and Guido Reil. Weidel is under scrutiny over a dubious election campaign donation of around 130,000 euros. In Meuthen's case, he is being scrutinized over 90,000 euros from dubious sources used to finance his campaign in a state election in Baden-Württemberg. And there are questions surrounding the nearly 45,000 euros used in a state election campaign in North Rhine-Westphalia for Reil, a member of the AfD's national board.

[Note: UK neo-Nazi, Nigel Farage is in the midst of a scandal showing that he's financed by Putin and devoted to Trump.]

No less troubling is the fact that the Ibiza video once again sheds light on the close contacts many right-wing populists in Europe have with Russia, a problem for which the AfD has also been in the headlines. In April, Der Spiegel, ZDF, La Repubblica and the BBC reported on the activities and connections of Markus Frohnmaier, a member of German parliament with the AfD. A document circulated inside the Russian presidential administration at the time of the Bundestag election campaign describing the politician as potentially becoming "a deputy under absolute control" of Russia.

The BND, Germany's foreign intelligence agency, and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the country's domestic intelligence apparatus, are currently detecting a change in the Kremlin's strategy. Rather than relying solely on its own media and channels for campaigning and aiming to steer the agenda, it is now focusing much more on individuals, a small group of parliamentarians were recently told in a classified meeting. They were informed that the people selected by Moscow included somewhere between a half-dozen and a dozen members of the Bundestag. One is Markus Frohnmaier. When contacted for comment, he responded: "I do not allow myself to be used by the Russian government for its purposes and would always refuse to accept attempts of this kind. The reporting about me is nothing more than a campaign."

Senior AfD politician Alexander Gauland is also a frequent guest in Russia, but he rejects any criticism because he claims to be following the foreign policy footsteps of Bismarck, who believed in strong German-Russian relations. Marcus Pretzell, at the time a member of the AfD and current member of the European Parliament, visited the Russian-occupied Crimea as "Guest of Honor" in 2016 and thought it petty when he was later questioned about who paid for the trip.

Similar episodes can be found all across Europe. When Marine Le Pen's Front National, now known as Rassemblement National, convened a party conference in Lyon in November 2014, the guest list was similar to that of Salvini's rally in Milan and delegates from Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party also attended. That same year, Le Pen's party had received two loans from Russian banks amounting to 11 million euros to help finance its election campaigns.

Two years later, the French right-wing populists asked Moscow for another 3 million euro loan, but it is unclear whether it was ever granted. There are, though, indications that Marine Le Pen may have promised not to criticize Russia's annexation of the Crimea and to promote Moscow's interests in exchange for the money. The suspicion, which Le Pen denies, is supported by mobile text messages from a well-known and high-ranking Kremlin official, who wrote among other things: "Marine Le Pen has not disappointed our expectations." And: "We will have to thank the French in one way or another."

In Great Britain, the National Crime Agency is investigating suspicions that Brexit leader Nigel Farage received money from Russia through indirect channels. Many consider it probable that the Kremlin sought to manipulate the Brexit vote to destabilize the European Union.

There is a greater amount of urgency surrounding these questions in the aftermath of the Strache-Ibiza video. Are economic interests at stake when Matteo Salvini's Lega party repeatedly advocates an end to the EU's "useless, or even harmful" sanctions against Russia? Do the Greek far-right parties get money for their frequently expressed conviction that there is a "natural alliance" between Greeks and Russians? How does Russia's president exploit the image he enjoys as being one of the last guardians of true values among European groups of both extremes? A leader who seeks to prevent what he describes as a weakened, immoral, decadent EU from prevailing?

"There is conspiracy of all the radical right-wing nationalists everywhere, apparently with the help of the Kremlin, or of oligarchs round the Kremlin, to disrupt this union," Guy Verhofstadt, a prominent Belgian member of European Parliament, told the Times of London on Wednesday. The German newspaper Die Welt this week quoted former French President François Hollande as saying that whoever votes for populists in Europe is "giving their vote to Trump and Putin."

That may sound preposterous, but it has long since become apparent in the European Council, where European heads of state and government still establish the broad parameters of EU policy. Coalition governments that include populist parties are often more open to influence from abroad than others. Once example is Middle East policy. Countries like Hungary have begun diverging from the European stance to serve American interests. Because Hungary stood in the way, the EU was not able to condemn the Trump administration's decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as a diplomatic mistake in December 2017. Budapest essentially became Donald Trump's advocate in Brussels.

The unanimity requirement for important decisions in the European Council thus gives populists veto power. And their partners abroad are quick to praise them for services rendered. Twelve days ago, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was showered with praise by the U.S. president himself during a visit to the White House. Orbán, Trump said, does a "tremendous job" and is "highly respected all over Europe."

That, of course, is far from the truth. In many countries, respect for Orbán is a thing of the past, and when it comes to domestic policy and the judiciary, his government is seen as having betrayed European values. Externally, Hungary has become a gateway for all those wishing to divide the EU. And the number of these open gateways is growing: Russia and the U.S. are not alone in their desire to weaken the EU block. China has also incorporated the EU, the world's largest internal market, into its geopolitical considerations and is searching for access.

The EU isn't equipped to stand up to such adversaries. It does have a couple of instruments it can use to punish intractable member states, but it hardly ever uses them. EU countries worried about being punished in the future regularly block their deployment. The dream of outgoing European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker that the EU might one day become a global political player seem illusory.

By chance, Juncker was in Vienna this week for a visit that had long been planned. He had apparently decided that he would remain silent about the Strache scandal-- but couldn't ultimately resist. "The idea that one country is put on a silver platter so that others can help themselves," he said, "does not reflect my idea of patriotism."

Jean Asselborn, Juncker's compatriot who is the foreign minister of Luxembourg, expressed deep discomfort. "The European right wing is unified by its desire to bring the free press and the judiciary under its control wherever they have power," he says. "That is true of Hungary and Poland, and that is shown by Strache's comments in the video."

The dangers presented by populists to European unity is significant, says Asselborn. "If European citizens continue placing their trust in these people, there is a risk that we could end up landing where we were back in the 1930s," he says.

The Austrian scandal was also of interest to Angela Merkel. On the Saturday Salvini's party in Milan and the political earthquake in Vienna were taking place, the German chancellor was standing in a basketball arena in Zagreb fulminating against the populists. "Nationalism is the enemy of the European project," she said from the stage. In the press conference that had preceded her speech, she said, "We are faced with populist currents that want to destroy a values-based Europe." Apparently referring to Strache, Merkel added: "That includes putting politicians up for sale. We must decisively stand up to all of that."

But the populists are currently finding success with their assault on the political establishment. They have representatives in parliaments across the continent, and established parties in almost every country in Europe are worried about their advance. In Sweden, the xenophobic Sweden Democrats received 17.5 percent of the vote in last year's elections, a result recently matched by the True Finns, whose overt nationalism fueled their success. The Conservative People's Party of Estonia, which has dedicated itself to the defense of the Estonian ethnicity, jumped from 8.1 percent support to 17.8 percent in March elections.

The numbers show that the populists are generally still far from securing a majority on a national or European level-- Poland and Hungary notwithstanding. But in places like Italy and Austria, they are becoming more than just convenient partners for parties in need of parliamentary majorities and in France, they could become the largest party in the country. In many European nations, it has become increasingly difficult to put together stabile governments made up of moderate political parties.

The communication strategies adopted by the right-wing populists are simply far better than the rather old-fashioned methods of the established parties. It is impossible to ignore the parallels to the 1930s, when the Nazis discovered the power of film and the possibilities presented by television-- as exemplified by the broadcast of the 1936 Olympic Games. The populists and extremists of today were much quicker to understand the opportunities inherent in the digital world than their political rivals, many of whom remain stuck in analog antiquity. Populists still use traditional media outlets, but are increasingly circumventing them.

The Germans may still be playing catch-up, but in Italy, France and Austria, the populists have learned to take full advantage of what the new media world has to offer. They may like to complain that they are being treated unfairly by the "leftist media" and libeled by the "fake news," but in truth, other channels have long since become more important for them.

Matteo Salvini reaches 3.7 million people directly via Facebook, the kind of follower numbers otherwise only seen with pop stars. It helps explain why he always seems to be the center of attention. The traditional political reports seen on Italian public broadcasters or in critical newspapers merely serve to round out his brand. As strange as it might sound, Salvini is one of the largest mass-media outlets in Italy, which works to his tremendous advantage. It means that he can present himself and his worldview free from pesky critical questions.

Austria's fallen Vice Chancellor Strache has 779,000 Facebook followers in a country with a population of not even 9 million. Like Salvini, he and his team are adept at using emotion, both positive and negative. Mother's Day and children's birthdays are celebrated with pretty pictures, hearts and kisses - the idyllic world the FPÖ professes to protect. Then he posts stories about ungrateful asylum seekers, sex criminals and unwanted migrants, often with his own indignant commentary. Strache's posts aren't just read and liked, they are also shared and commented on thousands of times, increasing their value.

Marine Le Pen similarly has 1.5 million followers on Facebook. Victor Orbán has 657,000. Some might argue that these numbers are something of a counterfeit currency and that their appearance in an article such as this represent the downfall of political analysis, but it is almost impossible to overrate their value. In this day and age, for politicians and others in positions of power, large follower counts mean message control, the ability to disseminate one's own messages without the inconvenience of a filter.

The more people follow a politician on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Instagram, the less dependent that politician is on the reporting of independent media and the fewer critical questions from journalists he or she needs to answer. Of course, it's not all hearts and kisses on their social media accounts-- they are badgered and taunted, and not all of their followers are fans. But anger and controversy serve to jack up the click numbers-- and in the new currency of digital attention, clicks are good, no matter where they come from.

It has become something of a parallel reality. Manfred Weber, the lead candidate in the European elections for the center-right European People's Party, doesn't even have 60,000 followers on Facebook. Weber presumably prefers devoting himself to projects he believes are more important than improving his internet presence. But it is doubtful that today's politicians can afford the luxury of such an approach. What has been true for the media for the last several years is now true for politicians as well: If you're not present in the digital world, you soon won't be present at all. Low name recognition translates to diminished election prospects, not to mention a weakened ability to attract younger voters or those voters who tend to stay away from politics.

Clever politicians like Salvini or Strache are perfectly suited to an era in which voters prefer watching videos than reading essays. But the current wave of populism aimed at the European Union and its Brussels headquarters is more than just a game being played by self-obsessed demagogues online media. The current form of populism, whose actors pose as the uncorrupted in a sea of corruption, has many roots: real problems and unrealistic expectations; broad fears of eroding financial security; feelings of being left behind. That is where populism derives its strength. And the anger that comes with it is perhaps best studied in the Eastern European countries that joined the EU a decade and a half ago.

These European elections are falling on a European anniversary that is being largely ignored. Fifteen years ago, the EU incorporated an entire group of Eastern European countries, enabling the peaceful unification of the continent-- an historical godsend that led to a Nobel Peace Prize for Brussels. Today, however, this same EU has a terrible-- catastrophic even-- image within the right-wing governments in these countries.

Bannon with a bunch of European neo-Nazis in Budapest

In many parts of Eastern Europe, the EU is seen as a conspiracy of overpaid, traitorous bureaucrats. Like the communists before them, it is said, the EU technocrats are intent on reeducating the Eastern Europeans. They see the EU as trying to tame nation, tradition and religion. The women are to have fewer children, gays and lesbians are to be allowed to get married and adopt, and Muslims from Africa and the Middle East are to be permitted to settle wherever they want. And the blame, in this view, lies entirely with Brussels.

That is the message delivered by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party in Poland, and by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party. The governments in Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia also include similar figures. EU-skeptics have become established everywhere in the region.

And yet, contradictions abound. No halfway influential party in Eastern Europe wants to leave the EU. Despite the success of the Kaczynskis and the Orbáns, the EU enjoys tremendous support from the Baltics to the Balkans, including 90 percent support in Poland. The governments clearly have no mandate to escort their countries out of the EU. Indeed, surveys indicate that people there have more trust in the EU than in their own elites.

There is an economic explanation. Between 2004 and 2020, 356 billion euros will have flowed into the 10 accession countries from the European Structural and Investment Funds alone. Struggling state economies have transformed into regions of significant growth. The EU brought in investors, financed road construction, built universities and developed data networks. City halls and hospitals were renovated with EU money. And Brussels also helped reform the public administration and the judiciary - and strengthen civil society.

The EU triggered a wave of modernization in Eastern Europe that took three decades longer to unfold in the west. Prosperity, of course, is not equally divided. Statistically, however, the standard of living has risen significantly in all the accession countries. Eastern European societies have also become freer and more mobile in the last 20 years. There is no "objective" reason to be opposed to the EU in Warsaw, Budapest or Ljubljana.

There are, however, subjective, less concrete reasons. Karel Schwarzenberg, who spent several years serving as Czech foreign minister and is a passionate supporter of the EU, argues that people know what the EU has done for them, but don't feel at home in it. He says that all too often, Eastern Europeans have been delivered the message that they are second-class members of the bloc-- poorer and still backwards, and that they should become real Europeans, real democrats before they speak up. A comparison can be drawn to the feeling former East Germans often have in reunified Germany.

It is a feeling not just experienced by politicians from Eastern Europe sent to Brussels, but by millions of Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks in their day-to-day lives. Around 20 million people have at least temporarily left their Eastern European homelands to work in the West. Instead of getting to know the continent as student travelers or vacationers as many in the West were privileged enough to do, an entire generation of Eastern Europeans have experienced Western Europe as cleaning ladies, itinerant farmworkers and manual laborers. As domestic help for the wealthy of the West.

The resulting feelings of inferiority have fueled right-wing populists. The decades in which Eastern Europeans wanted nothing more than to emulate the West are over and a phenomenon has developed that the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev describes by saying: "Imitation engenders resentment." That resentment, he says, is directed at the erstwhile role models. It is stoked by the populists, who transform feelings of inferiority into aggression directed against the Brussels elite and the "servants" of the EU in their own capitals.

In places like Warsaw and Budapest, people have begun to feel like they have already experienced the best of what the EU has to offer. Now everything coming from Brussels is a threat to their own culture and lifestyle: environmental requirements, gay rights, migrant quotas, all kinds of duties and obligations, the arduous negotiations that are the hallmark of democracy.

The 2015 refugee crisis plunged half of Europe into temporary chaos, but more than anything, it gouged out a chasm between West and East. The demand primarily from Western European countries - or, to be more precise, from Germany - that all countries must help when it comes to distributing the refugees triggered the release of dissatisfactions that had been developing for quite some time. People in the east felt like they had survived the collapse of communism, lost jobs and got jobs, changed themselves, changed everything, and still hadn't caught up to the West. And now they were supposed to look after people even weaker than them?

In Brussels, such a point of view is seen as petulance and leads to a loss of influence. Exaggerated nationalism and unilateralism aren't welcome in the EU. They are a dead end. Poland and Hungary, in particular, sideline themselves in negotiations, frequently avoid complicated issues and tend to pound testily on the table rather than patiently pursuing their own interests and trying to listen to and understand the interests of others.

This leads to a dangerous cycle: countries driven by nationalism achieve less and less in Brussels, which leads to increasing alienation from the EU back home. Blame for a lack of success is pinned on anonymous powers in Brussels, the technocrats, the immovable and corrupt elites, thus paving the way for the empty yet pithy slogans of the populists.

The disruptive potential of the right-wing fringe in European Parliament has long been limited to mere spluttering expostulations from the plenary floor-- and their occasional misuse of EU money for their own benefit. Instead of using parliament for serious policy work, they saw it as a stage from which they could send messages back home-- a stage adeptly used by Farage, Salvini, Le Pen and others of their ilk. For some time, they were content to mock Europe's legislative body, but that is now changing. Le Pen has undergone perhaps the most profound metamorphosis, and for her opponents, that should be rather unsettling.

For a long time, her focus was on "Frexit," on leading France out of the common currency. She saw anything European as evil and abhorrent. These days, though, she ends her campaign speeches with the battle cry: "Long live the real Europe! Long live France!"

The chant "vive l'Europe" is, despite the qualification represented by the word "real," a 180-degree reversal. Until this year, Le Pen had consistently campaigned on the promise of freeing her country from the yoke of the common currency. It is a promise that, most recently, failed to generate its desired result in 2017, when she performed so badly in a now legendary televised debate on EU issues with the ultimate election winner Emmanuel Macron that it seemed like her political career may have come to an end.

In the parliamentary elections that followed, her Front National party didn't even win enough votes to form its own parliamentary group, a failure that Le Pen interpreted as the result of widespread fear in France of leaving the eurozone. As a result, since fall 2017, she has been an ardent supporter of the "real Europe," a message that proved divisive in her party. But she was determined. She no longer wanted to frighten people away with "Frexit"-- and now she appears to really believe that an alliance with her new friends in Italy, Poland, Austria, Germany and elsewhere represents a plausible path to power for the right-wing movement.

That's not particularly realistic. Thus far, every attempt at a broad, right-wing alliance in Europe has failed miserably, with the Front National itself having been part of many of those failures. The new concept for a European Alliance for People and Nations is also unlikely to go anywhere and conflict seems unavoidable.

The AfD in Germany and Lega in Italy are roughly as far away from each other on economic and finance policy as the liberals from the FDP and the far-left Left Party are in Germany. There are also deep, seemingly unbridgeable ideological rifts between Le Pen's party and the PiS in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary when it comes to society, family and women. As such, the planned right-wing "super fraction" is nothing more than a typical populist mélange of braggadocio and canniness. Likely the most important motivation for cooperation is the prospect of forming a large fraction that would automatically become more visible in European Parliament. It would also be handed more responsibilities, receive more speaking time and, most importantly, get more money.

France Defeated The Fascist/Elected The Centrist

A significant plurality of French voters (43%) who cast their ballots for Emmanuel Macron Sunday told pollsters that had done so primarily to stop Le Pen-- more of the ole "lesser of two evils" vision of politics, generally espoused by the Democratic Party to such ill-effect. Everyone I know-- in Europe and here at home-- was rooting for Le Pen to lose (except for Monsieur Trumpanzèè, Bannon, and neo-fascist Congressmen Steve King and Dana Rohrabacher). But no one-- no one I know-- was rooting for centrist former banker Macron to win. He was just the way to stop Le Pen. (He's already talking about naming right-wing Bordeaux mayor Alain Juppé as prime minister.)

But, there are people-- even if I don't know them-- who are actually excited about Macron right here in America. Early Monday morning a group calling itself the Centrist Project sent out an e-mail celebrating. Do you know who Nick Troiano is? In 2014 he ran as an independent centrist against Pennsylvania Republican Tom Marino and got 13% of the vote. He's now the executive director of the Centrist Project and wrote that "Macron's election to the French presidency as a first-time, independent candidate demonstrates that constructive political disruption can come from the political center. And it can happen here, too. A similar En Marche! movement in France has already begun at the state level, where several centrist independent candidates were elected in 2016. Since the Centrist Project's public launch last month, we have already begun fielding dozens of inquiries from potential independent state and federal candidates for the next election. With a majority of Americans now holding an unfavorable view of both parties, we believe the political moment is ripe to challenge the two-party duopoly in the United States, and win."

Le Pen only one two departments across France-- Pas-de-Calais (52.1%) and Aisne (52.9%) in the northeast. She lost all 8 southern departments where polls had shown her leading before the Kremlin's cyberattack on Friday. Macron beat her 20,753,798 (66.1%) to 10,644,118 (33.9%). Macron picked up the majority of first round supporters of the two left-wing candidates, Jean-Luc Mèlenchon and Benoît Hamon. More surprisingly, Macron won almost half of the votes of those who went with cconservative right-winger François Fillon in round one. According to the Financial Times, the strongest predictor of voter preference was education. Areas with higher numbers of university degrees is where Macron found his biggest support.

This pattern echoes the findings of a Financial Times analysis of the predictors of the Leave vote in 2016 Brexit referendum, US presidential election and recent Dutch election. In each of the plebiscites, education emerged as the strongest predictor of vote for a populist option, where the less educated chose it more often than those with degrees.

First-round voting projections and research reported on by the FT indicated that higher income voters were more likely to vote for Macron. This trend reinforces the narrative of the presidential race as a battle of haves versus have-nots, embodied respectively by Macron and Le Pen... Like education, income was also a factor in the recent Dutch election, in which less affluent areas voted in proportionately higher numbers for the populist Geert Wilders. This was also true in the UK's EU referendum, where analysis suggested lower income voters were more likely to vote Leave.

...Macron did well where life expectancy is higher, in line with the theory that [lack of] health and wellbeing are proxies for pessimism-- a known predictor of support for Le Pen. There is a growing school of thought that health metrics, including life expectancy, can be used as precision proxies for imprecise concepts such as wellbeing and pessimism, allowing researchers to identify social breakdown without resorting to large-scale surveys and self-reported measures.

This allows us to interpret the positive relationship between life expectancy and the Macron vote as additional evidence that general wellbeing and a positive outlook on life lead voters to reject Le Pen's appeals to negative emotions, and vote instead for a candidate with a more positive message.

The NY Times analysis of Macron's win, which "brought joy from Europe’s political establishment," was less in the weeds, claiming that "the French presidential runoff transcended national politics. It was globalization against nationalism. It was the future versus the past. Open versus closed." But Macron's victory has it also be seen in what is unique in French history-- Nazi occupation and collaboration.

For the past year, a pressing political question has been whether widespread public frustration against Western political establishments had morphed into a global populist movement. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union last June, followed by the presidential election of Donald J. Trump in the United States, created the impression of a mounting wave. Ms. Le Pen, stalwart of the European far right, was the next truly big test.

But Ms. Le Pen’s challenge was different because French history is different. She has spent the last six years as president of the National Front single-mindedly focused on one objective: erasing the stain of her party’s association with the ex-collaborationists, right-wing extremists, immigrant-hating racists and anti-Semites who founded it 45 years ago.

She knew-- as her father, the party patriarch Jean-Marie Le Pen, always refused to acknowledge-- that she would always be a minority candidate as long as she reminded the French of perhaps the greatest stain in their history, the four years of far-right rule during World War II. Inside and outside the party this process was called “undemonization”-- a term suggesting the demons still associated with her party. The French do not want them back.

“There was no choice. I couldn’t vote for Le Pen. You’re not going to vote for the extremist,” said Martine Nurit, 52, a small-restaurant owner who had just cast her ballot in Paris’s 20th Arrondissement on Sunday. She had voted for the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round, on April 23, and it was with “not an ounce of joy” that she voted for the “business-oriented” Mr. Macron in the second.

“Mostly, I voted against Le Pen,” she said.

In the end Ms. Le Pen failed to “undemonize,” spectacularly. She failed during the course of the campaign, when her angry rallies drew the Front inexorably back into the swamp from which it had emerged. And then she failed decisively in one of the campaign’s critical moments, last week’s debate with Mr. Macron, when she effectively “redemonized” herself and the party, as many French commentators noted.

It was an hourslong tirade against Mr. Macron, laced with name-calling and epithets, and woefully deficient in substance. She appeared lost on subject after subject, fumbling on one of her signature issues-- withdrawing from the euro-- that is opposed by a majority of French. Something essential about Ms. Le Pen, and the National Front, had been revealed to France.

...Macron’s pro-market views stirred much opposition. Mr. Mélenchon not only refused to endorse him, but also encouraged the idea that Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen were equivalent menaces-- a calculation endorsed by many far-left voters. Nearly half the first-round electorate voted for candidates hostile to the free market and to capitalism. Even if they voted for Mr. Macron on Sunday to save the country from Ms. Le Pen, they did so without enthusiasm.

Some of the antipathy sprang from his hermetic persona, as a caricature of the elite-educated, know-it-all technocrats, perpetually encased in a dark suit, who have guided France for much its postwar history, usually from behind the scenes, and whose record is mixed.

“He’s not someone I feel a lot of conviction for,” said Thomas Goldschmidt, a 26-year-old architectural firm employee in Paris who voted for Mr. Macron after supporting the Socialist Benoît Hamon in the first round. “He’s someone who raises a lot of questions. It’s a vision of society that is too business-friendly,” Mr. Goldschmidt said. “It’s this whole idea of making working life more uncertain. We just can’t bet on it, that everyone out there can be an entrepreneur. Society isn’t built like that.”

Mr. Macron seems aware that his large victory isn’t a large mandate, that the pressure is now on to ensure that France’s reprieve from the National Front is not just a temporary one. “If I fail to solve” France’s problems “or fail to offer a solid start to solving them, in five years it will be even worse,” he told the left-wing news website Mediapart on Friday night. “What nourishes the National Front will be even more virulent,” he added.

Trump Will Be Toxic For Republicans In 2018-- But This Sunday His Endorsement Will Help Sink French Fascist Marine Le Pen

This weekend French voters will chose between a drab establishment centrist, Emmanuel Macron (their version of Hillary, only with less accomplishments) and neo-fascist leader Marine Le Pen, politically the French Trump, although probably not as ignorant as the New York version. So Obama endorsed Macron (video above).

Needless to say, Trump (and Putin) have both let it be known that they prefer Le Pen. Of course they do-- but a new poll suggests that their support isn'y going to help Le Pen this weekend at the polls, especially not Trump's support... while Obama's support could actually do Macron some good.

A new Suffolk University poll of French voters finds that 82 percent view Donald Trump unfavorably. Former President  Obama fares considerably better, with a nearly 90 percent favorable rating among the same respondents.

Mr. Trump is the lowest-ranking foreign leader among French voters. The survey shows they hold him in lower regard than Russian president Vladimir Putin, who garners a 70.9 percent unfavorable rating.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister Theresa May are viewed mainly unfavorably by more than 40 percent of French voters.

However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel receives high marks, with a nearly 70 percent favorability.

The two most recent French presidential polls, one from Ifop-Fiducial released yesterday and one from Opinion Way released the day before, both show Macron leading Le Pen 61% to 39%, which would give him the biggest presidential win since Jacques Chirac beat her Nazi father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, 82-18% in 2002.

And now this! (Watch Olberman's video below.) Is France investigating how the Kremlin has been working furiously to throw their country's presidental elections to Le Pen, the way they did here in the U.S. for Putin's cockholster?



Moments before the French election news blackout tonight, the Kremlin's top hacking battalion went after Macron and his campaign with a Wikileaks attack that can't be discussed in the French media until after voting is over Sunday. This evening The Guardian reported that the hacking attack was "massive and coordinated" and by... Fancy Bear.

Less than 48 hours before polling day, around nine gigabytes of data was posted by a user called EMLEAKS to the document-sharing site Pastebin that allows anonymous posting. It was not immediately clear who was responsible.

Macron’s political movement, En Marche!, confirmed the hack, saying it had been the “victim of a massive and coordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information.”

The statement added that the data consisted of “diverse documents such as emails, accounting documents and contracts” hacked several weeks ago from the personal and professional accounts of some of the movement’s staffers.

“Coming in the final hours of the campaign, this operation clearly amounts to democratic destabilisation as was seen in the United States,” it said, adding that En Marche! had “consistently been targeted by such initiatives” through the campaign.

It said “many false documents” had been added to genuine stolen documents on social media “in order to sow doubt and disinformation” as part of an operation “clearly intended to harm the movement.”

The authentic documents were all lawful, however, and “reflected the normal functioning of an election campaign,” the statement said. Their publication “does not alarm us as to the prospect of any questions being raised about their legality.”

The WikiLeaks website posted a Twitter link to the cache of documents, saying it “contains many tens of thousands (of) emails, photos, attachments up to April 24, 2017.” It indicated it was not responsible for the leak itself... Trend Micro, a cybersecurity firm, said last month a hacking group, believed to be part of a Russian intelligence unit, was targeting Macron and his campaign team, adding that it appeared to be the same Fancy Bear group behind the hacking of Democratic campaign officials before last year’s US presidential election.

Macron Might Not Be Any Good-- But There Is NO Excuse To Allow Putin To Enthrone Le Pen

Papa threatened a Jewish opponent with a gas chamber, but Marine isn't as bad as THAT

Once or twice a year I get a craving for matzoh brei and I go down to Canter's on Fairfax and get one. And when I visit some off-the-beaten-path foreign place-- like Yangon or Cochin or even St. Petersburg, for example, I go visit a synagogue. That's about as Jewish as I've been since the 1960s. That said, anti-semitism infuriates me, the same way any kind of racism does. And that brings us to Ross Douthat's clueless OpEd in yesterday's NY Times, Is There A Case For Le Pen? Being a right-wing provocateur, Douthat appears to think so.

But her neo-Nazi, proto-fascist party, the National Front, openly promises to ban kosher butchers as well as yarmulkes being worn publicly. I don't eat kosher food or wear a yarmulke but that promise is anti-Semitic and Douthat should know better. And he does. He admits that "Parties matter, their histories and undercurrents matter, and the Front’s Vichy taint is a good reason to prefer a world where a Le Pen never occupies the Élysée Palace."

The two polls released Friday-- one from BVA and one from Ifop-Fiducial both show Macron crushing Le Pen-- 59-41% in the first and 60-40% in the second. Pretty steady since the first round. The only region where it's even close is Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, where there's a kind of see-sawing tie. But Douthat still wants to make a case for Le Pen. "[I]ndividual personalities and their policies also matter," he wrote, "and there the case for #NeverLePen seems weaker in important ways than the case for #NeverTrump." His excuses for her are almost entirely right-wing bullshit.

To begin with, nobody seriously doubts Le Pen’s competence, her command of policy, her ability to serve as president without turning the office into a reality-TV thunderdome. Trump’s inability to master his own turbulent emotions is not an issue with his Gallic counterpart.

Nor is there much evidence that Le Pen herself draws any personal inspiration from the Vichy right. However incomplete the project, she is the reason that her party has ejected Vichyites and disavowed anti-Semitism and moved toward the French mainstream on many issues.

This has been done, of course, in the hopes of gaining power. But that is how the purging of poisons always happens, and being disowned by one’s father is a quite costly and dramatic act of political purgation.

Some argue that Le Pen has simply replaced anti-Semitism with Islamophobia. But her attacks on Islamic fundamentalism and her defense of a strict public secularism have been echoed by many mainstream French politicians. An argument for quarantining her perspective would apply to Nicolas Sarkozy or François Fillon, not just her.

Over all, the politician that Le Pen has obviously strained to imitate is not her father or Marshal Pétain, but Charles de Gaulle-- the de Gaulle who fiercely opposed European political integration, who granted Algeria its independence in part because he doubted France could absorb millions of Muslim immigrants, whose “France First” worldview consistently gave other Western leaders fits.

Even the most controversial utterance of Le Pen’s campaign, a denial of widespread French complicity in the deportation of French Jews, was deeply Gaullist: An insistence that the true France existed with de Gaulle’s government-in-exile, not Pétain’s regime.

This is comforting myth, of course, and perhaps de Gaulle’s style of nationalism is too chauvinist and mystical for our era.

But on the other hand, our era’s “enlightened” governance has produced an out-of-touch eurozone elite lashed to a destructive common currency, and an experiment in mass immigration that has changed French society faster than integration can do its necessary work.

These are the same sort of issues that helped Trump win the presidency, but in the European context the challenges are more severe and the populist critique more compelling.

There is no American equivalent to the epic disaster of the euro, a form of German imperialism with the struggling parts of Europe as its subjects. There is no American equivalent to the challenge of immigrant-assimilation now facing France-- no equivalent of the domestic terror threat, the rise of Islamist anti-Semitism, the immigrant enclaves as worlds unto themselves.

Which means that while much of Trump’s notional agenda was an overreaction to the country’s problems, some of Le Pen’s controversial positions are straightforwardly correct.

She is right that France as a whole, recent immigrants as well as natives, would benefit from a sustained mass-immigration halt.

She is right that the European Union has given too much unaccountable power to Brussels and Berlin and favored financial interests over ordinary citizens.

And while many of her economic prescriptions are half-baked, her overarching critique of the euro is correct: Her country and her continent would be better off without it.

Macron isn't the kind of candidate I would want to vote for, anymore than Hillary Clinton was. But those who refused to vote for Clinton in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Florida... they're responsible for Trump (and Bannon... and Putin) being in the White House. The French can-- and apparently will-- do better, regardless of what some crackpot goldbug like Ross Douthat gets to write on the editorial pages of the NY Times. Humanity can't afford Marine Le Pen. Trump is bad enough. There is no excuse for electing Nazis, no matter how awful another establishment careerist like Macron may be. None.

French Elections Tomorrow-- Putin Gambling Big On Neo-Nazi Marine Le Pen

French elections are on weekends, when most people aren't at work and find it easier to vote. Makes sense, right? Tomorrow is the first round of the presidential election. The two top contenders will face-off on May 7. (Elections of the National Assembly come in mid-June.) Last we looked at the race, it appeared neo-Nazi Marine Le Pen would make it into the run-off. It still looks that way. Her polling numbers are stayed steady at around 23%. And the conventional wisdom at the time that an old right-wing-- though not neo-Nazi-- crook (crook as in dripping with corruption), Republican François Fillon would be the alternative. The French would be left to pick between a version of Trump and a version of Ted Cruz. Then a couple of Fillon's corruption cases exploded and he lost most of his credibility, causing the anti-Le Pen center to coalesce around independent Emmanuel Macron. So it looks like he is the most likely to face off against Le Pen in May. The tracking polls released yesterday show Macron with between 23% and 24.5%, Le Pen with between 22.5% and 23%, the left-wing candidate, Fillon with between 19% and 19.5%, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon with between 18.5% and 19.5%. No one else is in double digits.

Every single poll going back to January, 2016 shows Macron beating Le Pen by a landslide-- over 60% for him, mid-30s for her. Should Fillon somehow win tomorrow, polls show him also beating Le Pen comfortably. Ditto for Mélenchon-- he would beat either Le Pen or Fillon in May, but would be beaten by Macron.

Macron is a 39 year old ex-bankster (at Rothschild & Cie Banque) and an ex-Socialist, but more like a Blue Dog than what we think of as a socialist. He's straight down the middle politically, mostly hiding a platform and just campaigning on bullshit and claptrap. He finally released a program in March. His policies fit in perfectly with establishment conservatives like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. A couple of days ago he was kind of endorsed by Obama. A year ago he was Hollande's right-of-center Economy Minister but he has managed to recast himself as "an outsider."

Seeing Obama, who is well-regarded and admired in France, endorse Macron, Trump couldn't prevent himself from rising to the bait and more or less endorsing the neo-Nazi Le Pen. Trump is viewed as a figure of derision in France and he is widely disliked. After Trump jumped into the GA-06 first round against Ossoff, Ossoff's 43% polling shot up by 5 points in 4 days to finish just north of 48%. And the French have even more disdain for Trump than the suburban voters north of Atlanta do. It will be interesting to see if Trump's little kiss of death drives Le Pen's numbers down tomorrow. A friend of mine in Bordeaux told me not to count on it and that French voters wouldn't be likely to pay any more attention to a Trump endorsement than to a Putin endorsement or an endorsement from a random mime. "Trump has no credibility in France," he told me. "People here either laugh at him or worry what happened to America."

Gallup reported yesterday that "Trump averaged 41% job approval during his first quarter as president, 14 percentage points lower than any other president in Gallup's polling history. Bill Clinton had the previous low mark of 55%. The average first-quarter rating among post-World War II presidents elected to their first term is 61%, with John Kennedy's 74% the highest." He's far less popular in France.

Trump, in his incoherent way of off-the-cuff speaking, channeled fascist advisor Steve Bannon in telling the Associated Press that Le Pen is "strongest on borders, and she’s the strongest on what’s been going on in France." Le Pen, firmly allied with Vladimir Putin (who gave her $10 million), wants to take France out of NATO and out of the EU. After Trump's victory in November, Le Pen told CNN that Monsieur Trumpanzéé "has made possible what was presented as completely impossible. So it's a sign of hope for those who cannot bear wild globalization. They cannot bear the political life led by the elites."

Echoing Trump's "Make America Great Again" election slogan, she vowed to oversee a return to France's glory days, saying if she were in power, the country would be "nothing like you have seen in the last 30 years."

"It would be very different. It would be the comeback of France, of the France that you like, of the France that hundreds of millions inhabitants of the earth love."

She said there would be no place for multiculturalism under a Le Pen presidency.

"I am opposed to a multicultural France, I think that those who have a different culture and who arrive in France have to submit themselves to French culture. Like the old saying, 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do.' I think that in France we should do like the French people.

"That doesn't mean discriminating against, (or) persecuting; it means we have a culture, we have values, and all those who come to our place have to submit themselves to this culture and these values. ... Saying ... 'Come as you are, keep living like you do, keep your culture and we will add all that together,' doesn't work. Multicultural societies are multi-conflict societies."

Le Pen praised the US President-elect for what she called "his willingness to break with the idea that the USA has to police the world."

Oops. I guess Trump is disappointing European neo-Nazis the same way he's disappointing his moron supporters in America. Our old friend emorej a Hong Kong came up with a way to map what he calls French Presidential Candidates’ Weirdness by using American equivalents that he encouraged me to share with you:

One way for Americans to keep track of the five major French Presidential candidates (especially the favored Centrist), in tomorrow’s ‘jungle primary,’ is by equating them with American politicians.

This works best by in a counter-history where:

• Barack Obama did not become a national figure; and
• The 2008-2016 Tim Geithner-guided bailout and “recovery” (and the US occupation of Libya and Syria) was presided over by President Hillary and her Vice-President Tim Kaine.

In this counter-history’s 2016 US Presidential election:

• The American version of Benoit Hamon is Democratic nominee Martin O’Malley (who defeated Hillary-backed Tim Kaine in the primary), who then faded in opinion polls;
• The American version of Jean-Luc Melenchon is Bernie Sanders, running as an independent (with platform written by Jill Stein and Noam Chomsky), who has surprised everybody with a late surge in opinion polls;
• The American version of Marine Le Pen is Steve Bannon;
• The American version of Francois Fillon is Republican nominee Dick Cheney (with a mouth transplant from Spiro Agnew), whose corruption scandals have undercut his moralizing rhetoric; and...
--Now we get to “the weird part” (!)--
• The American version of Emmanuel Macron (the “favorite” running ‘up the middle’), is Tim Geithner!

Yes, the young architect of reviled President Hillary’s most-reviled economic policies, who has never before stood for election, even for High School Class dog-catcher, has been projected as the round-two run-off winner in virtually every poll.

So what will happen?

• If Brexit and Trump-ocalypse are any guide, then the undecided (who are numerous), along with late mind-changing voters, should break heavily against Macron-Geithner.
• If moderate Left voters feel any debt towards the harder Left, which has held its nose to help elect many moderate Left politicians, then supporters of the fading Hamon-O’Malley should break heavily towards the surging Melenchon-Sanders.
• A majority of downwardly mobile small-town Whites (does this sound familiar?) will vote for Le Pen-Bannon, out of anger at Muslims, other Browns and Blacks.
• The big question is whether a substantial minority of these voters will vote for Melenchon-Sanders out of anger at German economic dominance and American strategic recklessness.

And then two weeks later comes the top-two run-off, when:

The Macron-Geithner central platform plank,
to ‘reduce government spending, and
share what's left with more immigrants’,
makes him the perfect foil to lose to either of the
previously “unelectable” candidates Le Pen-Bannon or Melenchon-Sanders.

Of course the MSM insists that President Melenchon would be catastrophic but, from a Progressive perspective, many of Melenchon’s most extreme platform planks are easy to see as negotiating positions that could result in useful compromises.

In contrast, the truly terrifying (and probably most-likely) scenario of President Le Pen, pushing France out of Europe and “foreigners” out of France, would put much of Europe into freefall, towards a bottom that nobody can predict.

Putin's New World Order

Brits were freaking out this weekend over an old, first-released statement by mass-murder and Trump Commerce Secretary-designate, Wilbur Ross to a much of shady Cypriot banksters. He told them that “I recommend that Cyprus should adopt and immediately announce even more liberal financial service policies than it already has so that it can try to take advantage of the inevitable relocations that will occur during the period of confusion.”

The British press is interpreting Ross’ comments as a call to steal marketshare from the U.K., still trying to figure out a way forward after the Brexit vote. And guess who Britain will be negotiating a future trade deal with.

Wilbur Ross, the billionaire incoming commerce secretary, has the task of striking a free trade deal with Britain. His comments will increase fears that the US will seek to take advantage of British isolation after its departure from the European Union.

Brexiteers such as Iain Duncan Smith and Jacob Rees-Mogg have asserted that Britain is well placed to secure a free trade agreement with the US, our largest single trading partner.

However, the remarks from Mr Ross suggest that US negotiators will seek to exploit Brexit uncertainty to tempt financial companies away from London. Days after the referendum, he urged an audience of Cypriot financiers to strike during the “period of confusion” to draw businesses away from the City.

…Britain’s departure from the EU was a “God-given opportunity” for the City’s financial rivals, he added [when speaking to the Cypriots], naming Frankfurt and Dublin in particular. This month a Lords committee warned that tens of thousands of City jobs could be lost from next year if banks feared that the UK would lose access to the single market.

Last night Labour said that Mr Ross’s comments, made before his appointment by the president-elect, were a “salutary warning” that other economies were seeking to take advantage of Britain’s break with Europe.

Barry Gardiner, the shadow international trade secretary, said: “Wilbur Ross’s comments are a stark reminder that the trade deals Britain will agree in future will not depend on goodwill from our partners, but on their own shrewd political and economic calculations.

“Theresa May’s government has failed to articulate a coherent vision of what kind of economy Brexit Britain will be. This makes us weak and vulnerable in the eyes of others.”

Theresa May and Boris Johnson are split on how best to handle Mr Trump, with the foreign secretary frustrated at the prime minister’s cautious approach. Mr Johnson has been lobbying No 10 for permission to make contact with the Trump transition team but has been told that he must wait until Mrs May’s first meeting.

In the past British prime ministers have tended to be among the first visitors to a newly occupied White House, often in late February about a month after the inauguration of the president. So far, however, Downing Street has been given no indication of when — or indeed if — Mr Trump wants to receive Mrs May, and Mr Johnson fears that chances are being lost.

“Boris doesn’t think it’s smart to wait on the formalities,” a Foreign Office source said. A senior government figure admitted that the question of whether Mr Johnson would be allowed to visit the US before Mrs May was “unresolved.” Since his appointment as commerce secretary with responsibility for trade agreements, Mr Ross has spoken warmly of the special relationship, saying in a recent interview that a trade deal with a post-Brexit Britain would be an important and “very interesting development.”

However, the 79-year-old private equity baron has also referred to Brexit as the “most expensive divorce proceeding in the history of the world.”

He has endorsed the “Trump trade doctrine,” which stipulates that any new trade deal must reduce the US trade deficit, strengthen manufacturing and boost growth. Britain has a trade surplus with the US.

Trade experts in the US believe that the Trump administration will give priority to a deal with Britain once the campaign pledge to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) has been fulfilled and after the UK has extricated itself from the EU.

Susan Schwab, George W Bush’s US trade representative between 2006 and 2009, told The Times that the Trump administration would be “ready, willing and able” to negotiate a free trade deal with Britain using enhanced powers that he will inherit from President Obama to push through trade policy.

There have also been suggestions that Mr Trump’s pledge to renegotiate Nafta with Mexico and Canada may provide an opening for the UK.

Meanwhile, Putin’s thus-far successful program of undermining the post-War security and financial pacts is moving along like a freight train. With the installation of his buffoon-like puppet Trump, Putin is now turning his attention to whittle down both NATO and the EU by installing right-wing extremists in France and the Netherlands, respectively Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders. Le Pen has been telling the press that closer ties to Russia and Frexit are integral to her plans for France.

Speaking to Greek newspaper Dimokratia, the 48-year-old said: “Frexit will be a part of my policy.

“The people must have the opportunity to vote for the liberation from slavery and blackmail imposed by technocrats in Brussels to return sovereignty to the country.”

“I am against the policy which would promote the entry of immigrants into Europe, which cannot accept them,” Ms Le Pen said.

“This tsunami of migrants should be limited.

“Europe does not have the power to ensure they all find work and opportunities to enrich themselves.

“Immigrants are illegal since once they set foot on European soil they have violated the law.

“They must be sent back to their homeland.”

The 2017 presidential candidate also claimed Nato had become an outdated organisation which was no longer needed in the post-Cold War world.

“It [Nato] was established when there was a risk from the Warsaw Pact and the expansionism of the communist Soviet Union.

“The Soviet Union no longer exists, and neither does the Warsaw Pact.

“Washington maintains the Nato presence to service its objectives in Europe.”

Many of Ms Le Pen’s comments echoed the sentiment of President-elect Donald Trump, who wants to reverse the Obama administration’s frosty relations with Russia.

Her probable May run-off opponent, a less flamboyan, less extreme right-wing lunatic, the Republican Party’s Francois Fillon, agrees that France needs to forge closer ties with Putin’s Russia. One-upping him, Le Pen is now urging Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Greece and Cyprus to join France in leaving the EU. For most of us, 2016 has been a real annus horribilis that can’t end soon enough. Moldova's new president, Igor Dodon, an undisguised puppet of Putin, took down the EU flag hanging at his official residence in Chisinau, just one day after his inauguration. I’m not sure how Putin feels about the death of George Michael on Christmas Day but over all, 2016 has been a grand old year for the former KGB agent, clearly now the most important man on earth.