Marine le pen

After having given themselves and the rest of us a fright, France’s voters have, by a worryingly small margin, stepped back from the brink. Some polls indicated a possible victory for the two extremists, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, either of whom would have meant disaster for France. Instead, the next President will almost certainly be the youthful centrist, Emmanuel Macron, the nearest to a viable establishment candidate. Though this is certainly a far lesser evil, it is evident that the political system of Europe’s oldest large democracy has gone spectacularly wrong. The minimum requirement of a functioning democracy is that a manageable range of sensible choices is put

Emmanuel Macron is on the verge of becoming the youngest president in French history. If he is successful in defeating his far-right opponent, Marine Le Pen, it will also be the first time since 1974 that France elects a centrist president. But even in its early days, Macron’s presidency will face a huge test: his En Marche! movement is still very much in its infancy and it is unclear whether it will morph into a full-blown political party before June’s legislative elections. If it doesn’t, one of the main questions that voters will have is whether Macron will be able to govern in the absence of a clear parliamentary majority. Since the term of the presidency

It’s still rather a cheerful vibe at the French ambassador’s residence in sunny Kensington this evening. The crowd here would have preferred the exit poll to show Macron and Fillon to go through, but they’ll take Macron versus Le Pen, especially with Macron in the lead. There were sharp intakes of breath when Le Pen popped up on screen in second place. But Macron being ahead is good news as far as these Londoners are concerned. A huge number of French voters abroad turned out today – a good chunk of them in London, where people queued up outside the French Lycée in Kensington for up to three hours to cast

It was the 34th annual convention of France’s Muslims at the weekend in le Bourget, just north of Paris, and the main topic of conversation was the upcoming presidential election. Five years ago, when François Hollande beat Nicolas Sarkozy to become president, the Socialist candidate benefited from 86 per cent of the Muslim vote. That won’t happen in 2017. Jérôme Fourquet, director of IFOP, the international polling organisation, said recently that in the wake of the 2012 election ‘the left committed the error of believing that they had acquired this [Muslim] electorate permanently’. And yet in Benoît Hamon, who hopes to succeed Hollande as the next president from the Socialist Party, Islam has a

President François Hollande was unable to fix France during his presidency, now expiring. Can he fix the French election by choosing his successor?  Unable to run for a second term because of the problem French voters loathe him, Mr Hollande has told friends his final mission is to prevent the election of Marine Le Pen, candidate of the populist National Front.  A consummate political plotter, Mr Hollande has adroitly — and not even especially covertly — anointed as his successor his former aide and economy minister, the supposedly brilliant and boyish, if slightly odd, Emmanuel Macron. Macron is a former Rothschild banker, a graduate of the elite École Nationale d’Administration,

Marine Le Pen sees plots everywhere. In her view the media, the Socialists, the judiciary and even the European Union have been conniving in recent months to enfeeble her presidential campaign. As she said during last week’s televised debate, ‘I’m politically persecuted’. But the plot with the potential to cause the greatest damage to the National Front leader is likely to come from within. It will be led by her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, and her growing number of supporters within the National Front who believe Marine Le Pen’s detoxification of the party she inherited from her father in 2011 has softened their core beliefs to an unacceptable degree. Jean-Marie Le Pen