The week after Donald Trump won the US presidential election last November, Marine Le Pen was inaugurating the headquarters of her own election campaign in Paris, less than a mile from the Elysée Palace she hopes to move into soon.
The far-right, anti-immigration Front National leader had been the only French political leader to back Trump in his bid for the White House. She has also made no secret of her admiration for Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
Unveiling her campaign symbol, a blue rose, she said that her election as France’s president would form a trio of world leaders that “will be good for world peace”, leading “a worldwide movement that rejects unchecked globalisation, destructive ultra-liberalism, the elimination of nation states, the disappearance of borders”.
Last month, Le Pen was in Moscow for a personal audience with Putin. “A new world has emerged in these past years,” she said. “It’s the world of Vladimir Putin, it’s the world of Donald Trump in the US. I share with these great nations a vision of cooperation, not of submission.”
Clearly, there is ideological common ground between the three leaders: variations on a theme of nation-first politics, support for economic protectionism and immigration controls, mistrust of international alliances and institutions such as Nato or the EU, and a rejection of globalism and the liberal consensus.
But Le Pen’s actual ties with the two leaders differ significantly. With Russia, at least, they go beyond the ideological to the personal and the practical. Her meeting with Putin in March was reported to be their first; but according to French investigative journalists, it is possibly their third.
No comments:
Post a Comment