Watch Europe tip left and right as voters rise in fury against the austerity menu that’s been bringing them to utter ruin. In Holland, the right-wing Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders brought down the governing coalition on Monday bellowing his defiance for the “Diktats from Brussels”, and asserting that “We must be master of our own house.” Labour and Christian Democrats, Holland’s major parties, are crumbling.
COMING TO A COUNTRY NEAR YOU - REVOLUTION AGAINST ECONOMIC ENSLAVEMENT BY EURO FASCISTS
Almost certainly doomed is France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, with François Hollande poised to win in the second round, but Marine Le Pen’s fiery, anti-banker populism has reaped her deserved rewards. As Ambrose Evans’Pritchard writes in the Daily Telegraph:
“Elected governments have already been swept away – or replaced by EU technocrats without a vote, indeed to prevent a vote – in every eurozone state where unemployment has reached double-digits: Spain (23.6 per cent), Greece (21 per cent), Portugal (15 per cent), Ireland (14.7 per cent) and Slovakia (14 per cent).The political carnage has been striking. Ireland’s Fianna Fail, creator of the Irish free state, has lost every seat in Dublin. Greece’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) – torch-bearers of Greek democracy since the Colonels – has fallen to 14 per cent in the polls and faces ruin next month.
“The results are in: the hard-Left and hard-Right are on the rampage across Euroland…. France’s Marine Le Pen presents herself as a latterday Jeanne d’Arc, openly comparing France’s pro-EU camp with the Burgundians who plotted ‘English Annexation’ in the 1430s – or indeed ‘Les Collabos’ who bought peace after 1940. ‘Let us break the chains of the French people. Bring on the French Spring,’ she tells Front National rallies.“The mood feels different from past episodes of irritation with EU aggrandisement, whether the ‘No’ votes against the European Constitution in 2005 or the Irish ‘No’ to Lisbon and Nice, or the Scandinavian ‘Nej’ votes against the euro. Mme Le Pen has gone to the heart of the matter, asserting that monetary union cannot be fudged, that it is incompatible with the French nation state. She has won 18 per cent of the vote campaigning to pull France out of the euro and smash the whole project. Unlike her father – who never seriously expected to be president – she has a realistic chance of peeling off enough Gaulliste votes to emerge as paramount leader of the French Right.”
What will Chancellor Angela Merkel do as the pan-European mutiny against austerity rises? With her ally Sarkozy in all likelihood soon gone, it’s Germany that’s looking isolated. Will François Hollande be up to the task of forcing a change of step for Europe, and Keynesian reflation? I wish I had confidence in the man, but I don’t. Another limp social democrat with the muscle of a three-day old hake. Marine le Pen has the fire, no doubt about that. After her excellent report on the first round elections in France, a reader wrote to Diana , commending most of her analysis, then complaining:
“I certainly don’t agree with [Diana Johnstone’s] take on Marine Le Pen. The right-wing candidate has not changed her spots and remains as much of a racist as her Algerian-torturer father. It has been bad enough with Sarko; let us not have to suffer another fascistic right-wing government in Europe.”
Diana responded:
“Since Hollande seems most likely to win the election, there is no sign of ‘another fascistic right-wing government’ in France – unless Sarkozy achieves an upset by his current effort to win votes from Marine Le Pen’s followers by a more anti-immigrant discourse.“What do you mean by ‘fascistic’? Historically, ‘fascism’ is both an ideology and a practice, the practice including the use of violent militias to intimidate citizens and win power. There is no sign of that in France. Mere hostility to immigration is rampant in the United States, but this is not usually considered ‘fascism’.“Torturing Algerians was terrible, but surely no worsethan US torture of Iraqis or Afghans – and those who tortured Algerians believed they were defending part of their own country, ‘Algérie Française’, an excuse which Americans do not have. That particular ‘racism’ is the mental attitude that accompanies a colonial war. The Algerian war is over, and Marine Le Pen has nothing to do with it.”
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