French Frustrations Could Further Deteriorate the European Union

Matt Purple

Politics, France

Marine Le Pen could win the French election and dismantle the European Union.

The only point of agreement between French voters in Sunday’s presidential election was that much needed to change. Their country, one of the tent poles of the European Union, had been shaken by everything from economic insecurity to the fallout of Brexit to terrorist attacks, culminating in last week’s machine-gun murder of a police officer on the iconic Champs-Élysées by an Islamist terrorist. The appetite for radical overhaul has at times seemed bottomless: “Everything has to be rebuilt,” one farmer recently told Euro News.

This was an election where even the Europhile centrist, Emmanuel Macron, upbraided the establishment and pledged a revolution for France’s economy. His bête noire, nationalist Marine Le Pen, thundered against mass immigration and Islam, with promises to cordon off French civic life for the native French. François Fillon of the center-right Republicans has promised to fire half a million civil servants. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left soapbox fixture, has said that he would jettison the Fifth Republic entirely and chisel out a new social contract. The true ruling establishment, not Macron but the center-left Socialist Party which controls the National Assembly and the presidency, saw its candidate, Benoit Hamon, languish in single digits.