EUROPE’S FAILING DREAM:
If French presidential elections were held today, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, could come out on top in the first round. Ms. Le Pen would easily beat the current president, François Hollande, and might even edge out the center-right’s most likely candidate, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, according to recent polls. Voters hostile to the National Front would still band together to hand Marine a defeat in the second round if elections were held today, the same polls show. She would, however, end up carrying between 41 and 45 percent of the vote.
And that poll was held before the migrant crisis convulsed Europe.
The National Front, the party founded by Ms. Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972, has never been as popular as it is today. At the height of his own popularity, Mr. Le Pen won 16.9 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, but was soundly defeated in the second round. His daughter, who took over the party leadership in 2011, beat her father’s best showing on her first try, coming in with 17.9 percent of the vote in the 2012 elections. With the atmosphere in France increasingly uncertain, she may well have the shot in 2017 that her father never did.
And the National Front is not the only far-right party on the popularity upswing. All across Europe, far-right parties are making big strides. In Hungary, the ultranationalist Jobbik party, whose members have been accused of holding rabidly anti-Semitic views, is riding high in the polls and is now the second strongest party in Hungary. In April of this year, Jobbik’s Lajos Rig defeated the favored candidate from the ruling center-right Fidesz in a by-election that the party’s gloating leader, Gabor Vona, described as “historic.” Similar successes are on display in Austria, where the Austrian Freedom Party had one of its best performances in 2013 when it captured 20.5 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections; in Denmark, where the Danish People’s Party is the second largest party in parliament as of the 2015 elections; in the Netherlands, where the anti-immigrant PVV is currently pulling ahead of the mainstream VVD in aggregate polls; and in Finland, where the euroskeptic True Finns have joined the government after getting 13 percent in the latest elections. Even in traditionally left-leaning Sweden, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats are the number one force in the country. With far-right parties becoming a rule rather than the exception in mainstream politics, the political landscape in Europe has been transformed.
Who could have seen this coming?