Marine Le Pen: France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back" on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia"

Leftists in France, and all over the world, have tarnished America's conservatives by comparing them to the alleged fascists in what they call the Le Pens' ultra-right Front National party. Meanwhile — and conversely — America's (rightfully skeptical) conservatives have wondered whether France's Front National isn't perhaps the equivalent of the Tea Party in another sense, of simply being common sense-minded free marketers, falsely accused of being far right and "fascistic". Indeed, now that a new, younger generation of leaders has taken over the FN and a younger Le Pen has replaced the older one, maybe there is something more inviting in the party?

As it turns out, the castigators of America's conservatives are wrong — fortunately or unfortunately, as you would have it — as are America's conservatives.

It seems that if anything, Jean-Marie Le Pen's ideas in the 1980s and the 1990s might — might — have been close to those of the Tea Partiers, at least as far as a French journalist like Le Monde's Jonathan Parienté might be concerned (Jean-Marie Le Pen did use to be a big admirer of Ronald Reagan), but his daughter is the one who is, or who has become, radically anti-free-market and anti-American.

Not only has Marine Le Pen said that Obama is way to the right of us (many more examples at the hyperlink), she is now denouncing the American "hyper power" and saying that she would prefer that France should leave NATO, turn its back on America, and turn towards Russia.

In the 1980s, Jean-Marie Le Pen had been a sympathizer of Atlanticist policy, something that he abandoned during the war in Iraq. Marine Le Pen is highly critical of U.S. foreign policy [even in the age of Obama's smart diplomacy?!]. She wants France to exit NATO. And in a recent interview with the Russian daily Kommersant, she explained that she would prefer that France "turn towards Russia," all the while "turning its back on the United States," something that, she believes, the current crisis [echoes of Rahm Emanuel's pet phrase?], allows the country to consider doing.

***

… l'idéologie de Marine Le Pen […] dénonce la "toute puissance" américaine. …

Depuis qu'elle a amorcé son ascension à la tête du parti d'extrême droite, M^me Le Pen a infléchi la position que défendait son père dans les années 70 et 80 qui, économiquement, avait une certaine proximité avec celle défendue aujourd'hui par les Tea. Le Front national se bat désormais pour "bâtir un Etat fort et stratège" qu'il conspuait jadis.

… En 2007, le dernier programme présidentiel de l'ancien élu poujadiste trace une nouvelle voie. L'"étatisme" et le "syndicalisme archaïque" ne sont plus les seuls maux de l'économie. Il faut désormais y ajouter le "mondialisme ultra-libéral".

Marine Le Pen a poussé plus loin cette logique. Réhabilitation de l’Etat fort qui doit orienter l’économie, souveraineté monétaire et retour au franc, protectionnisme, remplacement du clivage droite gauche par celui des nationaux contre les mondialistes, constituent désormais la base de son programme.

Dans les années 1980, Jean-Marie Le Pen avait eu une sympathie atlantiste qu'il a abandonnée au moment de la guerre en Irak. Marine Le Pen est très critique sur la politique étrangère des Etats-Unis. Elle prône la sortie de l'OTAN. Et, dans un entretien accordé récemment au quotidien russe Kommersant, elle expliquait préférer que la France se "tourne vers la Russie" tout en "tournant le dos aux Etats-Unis", ce que, estime-t-elle, la crise actuelle lui permet d'envisager.

The Reason that Marine Le Pen Lost the French Election Is That, in Reality, the Front National Leader Is a Leftist

Following the defeat of the Front National, Éric Zemmour says on RTL (Dankeschön für Hildegard von Hessen) that Marine Le Pen is a leftist and that all her reflexes are on the Left, confirming, indeed, what No Pasarán has been reporting on the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen for years…

• Related: The Leader of the Front National, Allegedly France's
Equivalent of the Tea Party's Extreme Capitalists,
Says That “Obama is way to the right of us”…

• The Question Arises: Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist
or Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party? 

• Marine Le Pen: France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back"
on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia" 

In Le Figaro, Éric Zemmour adds that Marine has rewritten the King Midas legend upside down: everything golden that she touches, she transforms into lead.

Éric Zemmour a donné son analyse des résultats de l'élection présidentielle, lundi 8 mai sur RTL. Marine Le Pen était dans le viseur. "Elle était donnée à 30% au premier tour, elle finit à 21%. Elle était donnée à plus de 40 % au second tour, elle finit à 35%. Ça, c'est l'effet campagne de Marine Le Pen. À chaque fois, ses idées sont bien plus hautes qu'elle. Il y a un vrai problème Marine Le Pen aujourd'hui", explique le polémiste.

"Marine Le Pen est de gauche"

Pour Éric Zemmour, le principal problème provient de sa stratégie de campagne. En d'autres termes, de la ligne Philippot, plus sociale qu'identitaire, plus économique que culturel. Une stratégie mortifère aux yeux du polémiste. "Même si dans ses discours, elle tient compte davantage de l'identité et de l'immigration, de l'islam qui sont les vrais sujets qui peuvent rassembler au-delà de son électorat, elle retombe dans sa stratégie inspirée de Florian Philippot, de gauche. Elle privilégie le social sur l'identitaire" a-t-il déclaré.

Mais Éric Zemmour ébauche également le scénario qui risque de secouer le FN dans les prochains mois : le remplacement de Marine Le Pen. Lors du débat face à Emmanuel Macron, elle a montré une incompétence crasse et une incapacité à prendre de la hauteur (...) Elle est tombée dans tous les pièges que lui tendait Emmanuel Macron, sans être capable de répliquer sur le plan économique et de parler de la France. Elle n'a pas la culture qu'avait son père ou la génération précédente.", a expliqué Éric Zemmour.

Enfin, après avoir rappelé que la présidente du FN était "de gauche, et que tous ses réflexes [étaient] de gauche", Éric Zemmour a évoqué l'union des droites qui permettrait selon lui d'asseoir des idées "majoritaires dans le pays" (sur l’immigration, l’islam…), mais cela dit-il, "ni Marine Le Pen, ni la droite classique ne veut de cette union". 

Rehash of 2017: The Run-Off for French President Will Again Feature Macron Vs. Le Pen

The results of the first round in the French presidential elections are in, and the second round will again, just like in 2017, feature Emmanuel Macron — this time the incumbent — against Marine Le Pen. 

President Emmanuel Macron will face Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, in the runoff of France’s presidential elections, according to projections with 92 percent of the vote counted.

Mr. Macron led with about 27 percent of the vote to Ms. Le Pen’s 24 percent, after she benefitted from a late surge that reflected widespread disaffection over rising prices, security and immigration.

With war raging in Ukraine and Western unity likely to be tested as the fighting continues, Ms. Le Pen’s strong performance demonstrated the enduring appeal of nationalist and xenophobic currents in Europe. Extreme parties of the right and left took some 51 percent of the vote, a clear sign of the extent of French anger and frustration.

Although many conservatives in America have equated the rebellious Le Pen family with their own brand of politics and see them as kindred souls — including when a Le Pen came to CPAC a few years ago (it was in fact not the leader but her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen) — this blog has on warned many times over the past dozen years how that may amount to wishful thinking.

Even if there is no disagreement that France's political and cultural élite are fully deserving of having their noses rubbed in the dirt, the following should not be forgotten: Marine Le Pen has repeatedly advanced left-leaning, statist policies (yes, at least she does intend to keep the services from illegal immigrants) in addition to, on the subject of foreign relations, expressing her desire to choose Russia as an ally over the U.S. (walked back recently, but only after the Kremlin invaded Ukraine).

More on the leader of le Front National, which was renamed le Rassemblement National in 2018:

• The Leader of the Front National, Allegedly France's
Equivalent of the Tea Party's Extreme Capitalists,
Says That “Obama is way to the right of us”…

• The Question Arises: Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist
or Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party? 

• Marine Le Pen: France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back"
on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia"

Update: Thanks for the hyperlink, Ed.

In response to a handful of criticisms in Instapundit's comments section, we responded with various excerpts from the following base message.

As the main blogger on No Pasarán for the past 18 years — as well as the author of this post — I would be very grateful to learn exactly where in the text above there is any endorsement of Emmanuel Macron or any "NeverLePen" argument.

All we are saying is that, fortunately or unfortunately, Marine Le Pen is not the equivalent of Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis and that there are (many) reasons to take the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen with a grain of salt.

In that perspective, it is no sin to admit that conservatives, foreign as well as American, have been wrong in the past:

To take two recent examples: Boris Johnson was, and is, a maverick whom most of us (not least this blog) have been quite fond of. Therefore, nobody can deny that it was eye-opening (to say the least) when the Brexit champion 1) brought about one of the most abusive lockdowns in Europe and 2) betrayed Donald Trump by declaring his delight that 45 had been defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. (Still, that doesn’t make any of us a NeverBoriser or make us not prefer him to a lunatic Labor candidate during the next election).

Before the 2016 election, there is no denying it, a number of us NP bloggers were skeptical of Donald Trump (although nothing that made us anything close to NeverTrumpers). Most Republicans in Paris were depressed the day Ted Cruz threw in the towel. That changed when 45 proved as wrong (already before the inauguration when the president-elect brought down the price of the next Air Force One Boeing and chose a real soldier, Jim Mattis, to head the defense department).

Two recent examples where many conservatives, foreign as well as American, were wrong.

What would you have us do? Refrain from reporting that Marine Le Pen has said that “Obama is way to the right of us” and that France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back"
on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia"?

How does that not guarantee more unpalatable surprises? How does that make us better than the mainstream media?

We need to keep our eyes open, ladies and gents, don’t you think?

And the truth is that there is no equivalent of America’s conservative wing outside the United States— none, at least, that can compete on a national level.

In addition, we would be very grateful to learn what exactly makes any of us, or the No Pasarán blog, anything approaching RINO status.

And that, in view of the fact that we have never opposed the Tea Party — au contraire (what on Earth have you been smoking?!). We further challenge you to find any post in which we have not always enthusiastically endorsed any opposition to the Deep State — in the United States, in the UK, in France, or in any other Western country.

As for Donald Trump, we have said — long before Jon Voight did — that he is the best president this country, and the world, have had since Abraham Lincoln.

If you can find anything — any post, any sentence — that shows we are not true conservatives or that the above is not true, please be kind enough to share them in Instapundit's, or in this post’s, comments section

The Leader of the Front National, Allegedly France's Equivalent of the Tea Party's Extreme Capitalists, Says That “Obama is way to the right of us”

How often have you heard that conservatives, that Tea Partiers, that capitalists, that inhabitants of the American heartland are the equivalent of fascists, of neo-fascists, of extremists from the far right as embodied by European parties like France's Front National?

As usual, when confronted with facts, the narrative comes up wanting… Very wanting.

Indeed, it just so happens that an extremist (a real one) like the Front National's Marine Le Pen criticizes privatization and "extreme" free market policies, holding that France needs "a strong state", while one of her top aides speaks of taking advantage of the fears engendered by globalization and surfing on insecurity and on social suffering. Meanwhile, one leftist leader got incensed when journalists suggested that the Left and the extreme right's Le Pen family are fighting over the same (anti-capitalist) backyard. (All links in this paragraph are to posts in French…)

Marine Le Pen sums it up in one sentence when the New York Times's Russell Shorto "pointed out [to her] that in the U.S. she would sound like a left-wing politician". She shot back that “Obama is way to the right of us”!

[Marine Le Pen] has come out with a detailed critique of capitalism and a position promoting the state as the protector of ordinary people. “For a long time, the National Front upheld the idea that the state always does things more expensively and less well than the private sector,” she told me. “But I’m convinced that’s not true. The reason is the inevitable quest for profitability, which is inherent in the private sector. There are certain domains which are so vital to the well-being of citizens that they must at all costs be kept out of the private sector and the law of supply and demand.” The government, therefore, should be entrusted with health care, education, transportation, banking and energy.

Inside the New York Times Magazine, Russell Shorto has an in-depth portrait of France's (Kinder, Gentler) Extremist, whose economics are "frankly leftist" and whose "economic stance is drawing interest from the left as well as the right": "When I pointed out that in the U.S. she would sound like a left-wing politician, [Marine Le Pen] shot back, “Yes, but Obama is way to the right of us,” and opined that proper government oversight would have averted the American financial crisis." Mainstream parties across Europe "have not found answers to this pan-European movement," adds the director of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam, "for which the term “far right” seems increasingly inadequate."

Read also (en français) :
• "Le besoin d'Etat fort" : les mots de Le Pen prouvent que la (l'extrême-)droite française n'a rien à voir avec le Republican Party et les Tea Partiers
• Critique de la privatisation et de la politique ultralibérale : Marine Le Pen prouve que les conservateurs US n'ont rien à voir avec les thèses du FN
• Le programme officiel du Front National : un Etat fort et interventionniste ainsi que le refus du libre-échange
• FN et la gauche, même combat ? Un leader du Parti de gauche énervé qu'on dise que les gauchistes et les Le Pen sont sur le même terrain (anti-libéral)
• L'objectif du FN : capter les peurs engendrées par la mondialisation et surfer sur l'insécurité et la souffrance sociales

…Sarkozy’s recent and highly visible use of the French military has given Le Pen another opening to exploit. She is opposed to his involvements in Libya and Ivory Coast and to globalist enterprises in general; she sees the uprisings in the Middle East to be partly a result of “policies put into place by the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization toward an impoverishment of the North African countries.” Sarkozy’s aligning France with NATO might win support in the White House and 10 Downing Street, but it has done little for his popularity at home. For the country’s disaffected, it only reinforces views of him as an elitist and a globalist. Where in the United States many of the disaffected might look to a return to Christian and free-market values, their counterparts in Europe find comfort in a turn toward nationalism, which includes state protection, and away from the institutions of globalization. Le Pen is locked into that mind-set.

Update. Marine Le Pen: France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back" on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia"

Instapundit Learns that Le Pen's Front National Is Actually Left-Wing, Something a French-Based Blog Has Been Reporting on (and Trying to Bring to Their Attention) for at Least 6 Years

So on Monday, February 6, Instapundit admitted that, contrary to reports that seemed to depict the iconoclasts of the Front National as perhaps a French equivalent to the members of America's tea party movement, Marine Le Pen turns out to be really quite Left-wing. Stephen Green authored the post after seeing a news item penned by the usually reliable Daniel Hannan.

Of course, this is hardly news to No Pasarán. Being a blog whose primary focus, when it debuted 13 years ago, was France and foreign anti-Americanism (the internal danger from the last eight years did change the focal point somewhat), many of whose bloggers through the years have been based in Paris — along with its sister (mainly French-language) blog Le Monde Watch — we have been reporting on the Le Pen clan and its party for years.

Throughout the years, No Pasarán and Le Monde Watch have reported on such various news items (most of them from the French newspaper of record, Le Monde) as the Front National's Marine Le Pen criticizing privatization and "extreme" free market policies, on her opining that France needs "a strong state", and on one of her top aides speaking of taking advantage of the fears engendered by globalization and surfing on insecurity and on social suffering.

Meanwhile, one leftist leader got incensed when journalists suggested that the Left and the extreme right's Le Pen family are fighting over the same (anti-capitalist) backyard.

Indeed, in 2015 one libertarian critic was led to ask, Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist or Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party?

Moreover, a Harris poll in the Fall of 2012 found that members of the Front National supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in that year's election by almost 3 to 1 (70% vs 26%).

Last but not least, there is Marine Le Pen's assertion that France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back" on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia".

The post that summarizes all the rest is perhaps a No Pasarán item from the Spring of 2011, detailing the time when a New York Times reporter attempting to write an in-depth portrait on Marine Le Pen reported that, to his utter surprise, the economics of the leader of France's French "far-right party" turn out to be "frankly leftist"!

The money quote was the following:

Marine Le Pen sums it up in one sentence when the New York Times's Russell Shorto "pointed out [to her] that in the U.S. she would sound like a left-wing politician". She shot back that “Obama is way to the right of us”!

Since at least the Spring of 2011, just about every time that the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen has been mentioned on the internet (certainly if the coverage was positive), we sent emails to the blogger(s) involved and/or left messages in the appropriate comments section (if applicable) referring to the above-mentioned post with the NYT's in-depth portrait of Marine Le Pen and warning that the members of her Front National may not be the equivalent of America's tea partiers, while Marine herself may be no Geert Wilders and, certainly, no Nigel Farage (as the British iconoclaust pointed out himself by refusing to link his UKIP with her FN).

Of course, 10 years ago, a Le Monde interview with Michael Moore revealed the amazing (albeit hardly surprising) news that the director of Sicko and Capitalism (A Love Story) admits in so many words — "Dude, I am on Marx's Tomb!" — to being nothing less than… a full-grown Marxist(!). Ten years of attempting to contact American bloggers (again, by mail and/or in the comments section) every time Moore was in the news and/or mentioned in a post with this earth-shattering admission has likewise failed to register.

We don't know if we sometimes go overboard trying to contact you. Possibly we have, once or twice. But, generally speaking, we have tried to send you no more than one email or at most two emails a month.

All we wish to do here is join in spreading the good word and fighting the good fight.
Or, certainly, hand the ammunition to the band of brothers in the front-lines fighting the good fight.

It's simply, especially when we sometimes discern that our ammunition is occasionally of a particularly potent mixture, that we wish you would reach out and take the ammunition that we hand to you.


P.S.:

Speaking of really good, outstanding material: Last week, we found on a friend's Facebook page of all places — by a denizen from flyover country (in Tennessee, no less) — what we truly and honestly believe to be the very best singular statement (and not only of the past year) on Donald Trump's so-called Muslim ban, on immigration in general, on America's character, on the Statue of Liberty, and on the true and full meaning of the Emma Lazarus poem at its base.

Here, in a couple of sentences, Chip Crain sweeps away all the leftist arguments in the process of plunging to the very heart of the matter: it is hard to believe, he says, that

many people have read the entire poem or understand what was being said in it preferring to quote one part of one line "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" while conveniently ignoring the rest of the sentence "yearning to be free" or the rest of the poem itself.

 … I am against allowing those who want to change our country. I'm against those who are coming not with the intention of assimilating into a free society but rather to establish a society like they left. The poem doesn't protect those who are coming to our shores to recreate the life they left. In fact it says the opposite.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp. Cries she with silent lips."

In other words, stay at home those who wish to bring your old ways here. We aren't a society saying 'give us anyone.' We are opening our shores to those who want to live in a free society that is different from what you left.

(Read the whole thing™.)

Finding a Hero in Putin: Snubbing the U.S. and the EU, Europe's Fringe Parties Look Towards Russia

At a rally last week near the Palace of Versailles, France’s largest far right party, the National Front, deployed all the familiar theatrics and populist themes of nationalist movements across Europe

reports Andrew Higgins in the New York Times;

the event, part of an energetic push for votes by France’s surging far right ahead of elections this week for the European Parliament, also promoted an agenda distant from the customary concerns of conservative voters: why Europe needs to break its “submission” to the United States and look to Russia as a force for peace and a bulwark against moral decay.

While the European Union has joined Washington in denouncing Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the chaos stirred by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, Europe’s right-wing populists have been gripped by a contrarian fever of enthusiasm for Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin.

“Russian influence in the affairs of the far right is a phenomenon seen all over Europe,” said a study by Political Capital Institute, a Hungarian research group. It predicted that far right parties, “spearheaded by the French National Front,” could form a pro-Russian bloc in the European Parliament or, at the very least, amplify previously marginal pro-Russian voices.

 … among far right groups, the sympathy for Russia and suspicion of Washington are in part tactical: Focused on clawing back power from the European Union’s bureaucracy, they seize any cause that puts them at odds with policy makers in Brussels and the conventional wisdom of European elites.

But they also reflect a general crumbling of public trust in the beliefs and institutions that have dominated Europe since the end of World War II, including the Continent’s relationship with the United States.

“Europe is a big sick body,” said Alain de Benoist, a French philosopher and a leading figure in a French school of political thought known as the “new right.” Mr. de Benoist said Russia “is now obviously the principal alternative to American hegemony.” Mr. Putin, he added, is perhaps “not the savior of humanity,” but “there are many good reasons to be pro-Russian.”

Some of Russia’s European fans, particularly those with a religious bent, are attracted by Mr. Putin’s image as a muscular foe of homosexuality and decadent Western ways. Others, like Aymeric Chauprade, a foreign policy adviser to the National Front’s leader, Marine Le Pen, are motivated more by geopolitical calculations that emphasize Russia’s role as a counterweight to American power.

Russia has added to its allure through the financing, mostly with corporate money, of media, research groups and other European organizations that promote Moscow’s take on the world. The United States also supports foreign groups that agree with it, but Russia’s boosters in Europe, unlike its leftist fans during the Cold War, now mostly veer to the far right and sometimes even fascism, the cause Moscow claims to be fighting in Ukraine.

Hungary’s Jobbik, one of Europe’s most extreme nationalist parties and a noisy cheerleader for Moscow, is now under investigation by the Hungarian authorities amid allegations that it has received funding from Russia and, in a case involving one of its leading candidates for the European Parliament, that it has worked for Russian intelligence.

No longer dismissed, as they were for decades, as fringe cranks steeped in anti-Semitism and other noxious beliefs from Europe’s fascist past, the National Front and like-minded counterparts elsewhere on the Continent are expected to post strong gains in this week’s election, which begins on Thursday in Britain and the Netherlands and then rolls across Europe through Sunday.

But they are unlikely to form a cohesive bloc: Nationalists from different countries tend to squabble, not cooperate.

Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, a group zealously opposed to the European Union, and a critic of American foreign policy, is already engaged in a bitter feud with Ms. Le Pen.

But Mr. Farage and Ms. Le Pen have at least found some common ground on Russia. The British politician recently named Mr. Putin as the world leader he most admired “as an operator but not as a human being,” he told a British magazine.

Ms. Le Pen has also expressed admiration for Mr. Putin and called for a strategic alliance with the Kremlin, proposing a “Pan-European union” that would include Russia.

In general, said Doru Frantescu, policy director of VoteWatch Europe, a Brussels research group, the affections of far right Europeans for Mr. Putin are simply opportunistic rather than ideological, “a convergence of interests toward weakening the E.U.”

  [At the recent election rally, Mr. Chaprade lambasted Washington for trying, unsuccessfully, to pressure France to cancel a contract with Russia for the sale of two amphibious assault ships. "We have the right to be partners with whomever we want without referring to the State Department of the United States," he said.]

The European Union, said Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a member of the French Parliament and the niece of Marine Le Pen, “is the poodle of the United States.”

Russia offers the prospect of a new European order free of what Mr. Chauprade, in his own speech, described as its servitude to a “technocratic elite serving the American and European financial oligarchy” and its “enslavement by consumerist urges and sexual impulses.”

The view that Europe has been cut adrift from its traditional moral moorings gained new traction this month when Conchita Wurst, a bearded Austrian drag queen, won the annual Eurovision Song Contest. Russian officials and the Russian Orthodox Church bemoaned the victory — over, among others, singing Russian twins — as evidence of Europe’s moral disarray.

At the National Front’s pre-election rally, Mr. Chauprade mocked the “bearded lady” and won loud applause with a passionate plaint that Europeans had become a rootless mass of “consumers disconnected from their natural attachments — the family, the nation and the divine.”

National Front's Le Pens Call Putin a "Patriot", Worthy of "Admiration", Whom the World Is "Lucky to Have"

As No Pasarán has written before, anybody likening American conservatives or the Tea Party to France's far-right Front National is, deliberately or otherwise, ignoring the Le Pen Family Members' anti-American, pro-Russian statements in the press (not to mention their anti-free market demagoguery).

Now even Le Monde can no longer ignore the "Putin-fan National Front", as its weekly magazine publishes a full-page article enumerating
1) the admiration of Marine Le Pen — who was welcomed with open arms in the Duma — for Vladimir Putin, coupled with a desire for France to turn away from the United States
2) the doffing of hats to Russia's president
3) the assurance that homosexuals are not persecuted in Russia (unlike places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar)
4) Marion Maréchal-Le Pen calling Putin "a patriot", whose defense of his country's interests "functions rather well"
5) Jean-Marie Le Pen calling the world lucky to have a leader (Putin) with sang-froid.

En visite à Moscou, Marine Le Pen regrette la... by lemondefr

Following the Charlie Hebdo Massacre, the Le Pens' Front National Is Back in the News

Marine Le Pen … who campaigns on an anti-immigration and anti-European platform, is increasingly seen as a serious presidential candidate in the 2017 elections

writes Susan Dominus in a lengthy New York Times Magazine piece…

 … a recent poll found that if Le Pen ran for president now, she would finish ahead of all presumed contenders, including Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative former president of France, and François Hollande, the current Socialist president. Much of her party’s support comes from regions far from Paris, in areas gutted by deindustrialization or in tiny towns struggling with budget cuts and trying to keep traditional village life going

There are many who find good things to say about France's Front National — notably the party's attempt to get rid, or to diminish the number, of the repressive and extortionate radars ubiquitous on all the country's highways — but just because the party is said to be a part of the right should not let people forget such things as the fact that Marine Le Pen is a critic of the free market and an interventionist in favor of a strong state (like all the other politicians) — having indeed said that "Obama is way to the right of us” (!) — and that France ought to "turn its back" on the American "hyper-power" and "turn towards Russia" and its leader, Vladimir Putin.

Indeed, the New York Times' Susan Dominus writes that

Both anti-establishment and populist, the National Front has cast itself as a party for the little people, with a mix of proposals that confound current American notions of right and left. Its platform calls for the preservation of local services, protectionist trade policies and higher taxes on the rich…

Vincent Pons, a French academic [and] a campaign expert — a company he founded provides technological support to candidates — reminded me how difficult it is to map basic American assumptions onto the French political landscape. “In France, officially, we don’t have race,” he said; it is illegal, for example, to ask about race or religion on any government form. “We just pretend that race does not matter, but it’s this crazy thing — of course it matters,” he said. “There are no statistics, so you can make no policy around it. But even if you tried, you’d be accused of making too much of race.”

Dans l'émission Toutes Les France sur la chaîne France Ô, Erwan Lecoeur et François Durpaire débattent Alexandre Del Valle et Jean Robin sur le sujet "FN et Pouvoir (Si Loin, Si Proche)". Ce dernier, éditeur d'Enquête & Débat, essaie de dénoncer la censure généralisée.

Toutes les France 1ère (dernière?) télé Jean Robin par enquete-debat

As the FN Wins Big in the France's Regional Elections, the Question Arises: Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist or Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party?

As the Le Pen family's National Front emerges victorious from the first ballot in France's regional elections (check out Anne-Elisabeth Moutet's report in The Daily Telegraph), the head of a libertarian think tank warns that the Front National is not extreme right, as commonly depicted, but actually the direct opposite, i.e., nothing less than a modernized rehash of the Communist Party (merci à Carine). (Needless to say, outside of the United States, the word "liberal" retains its original meaning…)

GenerationLibre's Gaspard Koenig in Les Échos:

If one is to believe the polls, the Communist Party is poised this weekend to surpass its historic high-water score of 28% reached in the parliamentary elections of October 1946. Seventy years after "Red Autumn", here she comes again, up to the gates of power, even if by a trick hardly novel to the course history, it is slipping in under a borrowed skin: that of the National Front.

I am one of those candid voters who actually reads the programs of political parties. The one that can be read on the website of the Front National, rejecting "ultra-liberal globalization" as well as "the dictatorship of the market" or "the dogma of competition", could be signed Maurice Thorez [leader of the French Communist Party for 34 years]. Beyond the occasional promises on keeping the 35-hour workweek, returning the retirement age to 60, or the alignment of taxation of capital and labor, beyond rhetorical outbursts against big capital for not sharing profits, what the FN is proposing, in a coherent and detailed manner, is nothing less than a total nationalization of France.

 … Spearheading this takeover will be the civil servants, whose numbers will be stabilized, and whose status will be preserved — provided, however, that they follow the party line: Thus the ENA civil servant school will see to the "recruitment of bureaucrats who are highly patriotic" (sic). Finally, in a tragicomic wink to history, the FN promises to reorient French foreign policy in order to work towards an "in-depth strategic alliance" with… Russia!

 … The tragedy is that all of France's major parries, left as well as right, remain marked by a faint nostalgia for the planned economy, and are careful not to criticize the FN on this matter. One can find all sorts of explanations. In his book, La Grande Parade, Jean-François Revel considers that the vocabulary derived from socialism held by the ruling élites has been the fertile ground that has given birth to the "illiberal single-thought narrative". More radical still, the historian Robert Paxton, in pages from his book on Vichy that were not studied enough, sees in the Pétain government the birth of le dirigisme à la française, which has continued to permeate all governments since the war. Whatever the case, it seems that the FN is doing little but saying out loud what other members of the élite think in secret: that everything in life would be rosier under the sunshine of the State.

Marine Le Pen, 4 Years Ago: France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back" on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia"

Related: “Obama is way to the right of us”

French Radio Listeners Curious About Conservative and Republican Viewpoints Are Advised to Tune In to Instapundit and No Pasarán

In response to queries from French radio listeners about which blogs to read to get a conservative viewpoint, No Pasarán was mentioned, as was Le Monde Watch, and of course Instapundit, which was called incontournable, and the best of all.

Specifically, what the listeners skeptical of France's MSM and state media were told — during Évelyne Joslain's Libre Journal du nouveau monde chat (1h28m35) on Radio Courtoisie with Republicans Overseas member Paul Reen, Comité Trump France leader Georges Clément, and blogger/journalist/author Erik Svane (41:27) —was that (42:37)

il y a un site web qui s'appelle Instapundit que tout le monde devrait lire — qui montre ce que disent [et pensent] les conservateurs américains — qui dit "This will bring more Trump" [Ceci va amener plus de Trump] et il dit "Do you want more Trump?" (Est-ce que vous voulez plus de Trump?). Eh bien, ce que vous faites [avec toutes ces marches et toutes ces protestations et toute l'hystérie], ça va donner plus de Trump. Donc, Trump en profite.

Translation: there is a website named Instapundit that everybody should read, which shows what conservative Americans say and think — which has been observing, This will bring more Trump. And it asks leftists, Do you want more Trump? Because, all that you are doing [with all your demented demonstrations and protests], is bring more sympathy for the man you oppose. So, what you are actually doing is work for Trump's benefit.

Towards the end of the show, as the readers' questions were read aloud (1:01:11), one question puzzling Frenchmen that came up concerns which conservative blogs besides (Infowars and ZeroHedge — in one reader's opinion) are the best to consult on American affairs?

Here is Erik Svane's (translated) response, after mentioning his own blogs, No Pasarán and Le Monde Watch — both of which celebrated their 13th anniversaries recently (1:01:55):

But the best one of all — I am not associated with it, unfortunately — if you want non-caricatural views on conservatives or on Republicans, you should read PJ Media's Instapundit — Instapundit is spelled I, N, S, T, A, P, U, N, D, I, T — their bloggers are the best, they broach all kind of subjects, they often display humor, and — again — this is where we get the aforementioned sentence addressed to leftists, If you want more Trump, you'll have more Trump, with all your displays of demented hysteria, with the latest hysterical bout concerning the latest decision from The Donald's White House.

This comes after Instapundit was mentioned on French TV a number of times, between 2004 and today.

PS: Click at 17:28 to hear Lee Greenwood sing God Bless the U.S.A. (I'm Proud to Be an American).

Libre Journal du nouveau monde du 15 février 2017 : “Les festivités de la cérémonie d'investiture de Donald Trump ; Les débuts de la nouvelle administration américaine”

Par Évelyne Joslain | 15 février 2017 | Libre Journal du nouveau monde | Mots clés : Donald Trump . Erik Svane . États-Unis . Georges Clément . Paul Reen

Évelyne Joslain, assistée de Stanislas, recevait Georges Clément, président du Comité Trump France ; Erik Svane et Paul Reen, républicains de base. Thèmes : “Les festivités de la cérémonie d'investiture de Donald Trump ; Les débuts de la nouvelle administration américaine”.

RELATED (to the French presidential election):
• The entire machinery of the French state did everything in its power to undermine the competitors of Macron, Hollande's successor
• The Leader of the Front National, Allegedly France's Equivalent of the Tea Party's Extreme Capitalists, Says That “Obama is way to the right of us”

Marine Le Pen sums it up in one sentence when the New York Times's Russell Shorto "pointed out [to her] that in the U.S. she would sound like a left-wing politician". She shot back that “Obama is way to the right of us”!

• Marine Le Pen: France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back" on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia"

LCI: Trump and Musk, "the New Revolutionaries" Who Have the Gall to Criticize Europe as the "Cathedral to Bureaucracy"

Russia and the future of the Ukraine war were the initial subjects of Darius Rochebin's Sunday 6 pm show on LCI with part of the focus on Donald Trump's telephone call to Vladimir Putin. And as the subject changed (at about 29:30) to President Trump's domestic fight against the swamp — and to cries of outrage about Elon Musk calling Europe a "cathedral to bureaucracy" — Vanessa Biard-Schaeffer, a member of Republicans Overseas France (ROF), was brought into the debate (from about 30:50 to 50:50, video at the link), where she proceeded to be… regularly interrupted, although she persisted and held her own.

18H Darius Rochebin du dimanche 9 février 2025

Publié hier à 19h54

Au sommaire : Toretsk tombée aux mains de l'armée russe ? Trump/Poutine : un nouveau coup de fil ? Trump/Musk : les nouveaux révolutionnaires ? Musk s'en prend à l'administration européenne.

Source : 18h Darius Rochebin

The pundits on LCI thunder against Trump and Musk (who the hell does Musk think he is?!) before one of them puffs his chest with pride, stating that he is proud of being European — presumably in no need whatsoever of administrative simplification. It might do them good to read Nicolas Conquer's Figaro article ("While America seeks to restore its ability to be one step ahead, Europe persists in a systematic distrust of risk, success, and initiative"). A word, writes The Smallest Minority, that  we should all know (Americans, French, other foreigners, and not least pundits on… French TV shows) is Statolatry (thanks to Instapundit's Sarah).

Economist Ludwig Von Mises coined the word to describe the literal worship of government. He said: “People frequently call socialism a religion, It is indeed the religion of self-deification.”

Statolatry is about worship for the state to replace a God they have rejected, a relationship with some entity more powerful than themselves to which they swear their love and fealty, the goal of which is to receive blessings (which are drawn the public till).

The people on the statolatrist left have landed on a toxic mixture of statism, politics, mysticism, and atheism rolled up into a loose ball called “progressivism” as a substitute for Judeo-Christian theology. Progressivism is as much a religion as Catholicism, it just replaces a Pope with government, counting on the senior leadership of [leftist parties] to be their High Priests.

LCI :

Présenté par Darius Rochebin tous les dimanches. Chaque dimanche, à 18h, Darius Rochebin reçoit une personnalité française ou internationale marquant l’actualité. Les interviews sont menées dans un esprit d’ouverture à tous les domaines et de diversité des opinions. De Marine Le Pen à Jean-Luc Mélenchon, en passant par François Hollande ou Edouard Philippe, les acteurs politiques de tous bords et leurs interventions exclusives ont jalonné l’émission durant l’année écoulée. Il s’ensuit le duel des idées, qui oppose Luc Ferry à Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

A fundamental misunderstanding: The truth about European "conservatism" that American conservatives must understand

Over at the Washington Examiner, Ian Haworth insists that American conservatives must understand the truth about European ‘conservatism’ (danke zu Stephen Green).

The American political system is unique: a system built in pursuit of deadlock rather than “progress,” a system that fully understands human nature and proactively defends against it, and a system that holds itself accountable, at least when it works as designed.

But at its heart, American politics is unique because the United States of America is unique. It is a miracle of human ideological experimentation that, thanks to the genius of the Founding Fathers, has almost single-handedly provided the country and the world with levels of peace and prosperity that would have seemed unimaginable at any other point in human history.

Despite these marvelous attributes, however, there is a persistent and dangerous flaw in the American psyche: an assumption that the rest of the world is just like us. You see it when leftists make the laughably absurd argument that all cultures are equal. If you think that’s the case, please explain how life in modern-day Nashville, Tennessee, for example, is as good as, say, that of the Mayans, who routinely performed child sacrifices to satisfy the hunger of supernatural beings.

The other side to this misguided coin is an insistence on seeing all other nations and cultures through an American lens as if Disney’s image of multiculturalism provided in Orlando’s Epcot is a window into global reality. And how does this manifest in the context of politics? One clear example is the projection of American politics onto other political movements in Europe.

How many times have British conservative politicians or figures been celebrated by American conservatives as their ideological counterparts, with even President Donald Trump praising former Prime Minister Boris Johnson as the British Trump?

How often do American conservatives celebrate nations such as Hungary for their supposed commitment to conservative principles? How often do American conservatives throw their weight behind foreign political campaigns after skimming the blurb and picking the self-professed conservative choice, as with Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk’s recent rush to cheer on the German AfD party?

But at the center of these misguided alignments, and so many others, is a fundamental misunderstanding: the assumption that foreign conservatism bears any meaningful resemblance to American conservatism. Newsflash, it doesn’t. In fact, it’s about as similar as chalk and cheese.

American conservatism is built upon a set of foundational principles, principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The rights to free speech, gun ownership, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly and the notion of limited government are not mere policy preferences. They are the core tenets that define what it means to be an American conservative. At least, they used to be.

True American conservatism is not just a political leaning. It is a philosophy rooted in the preservation of individual liberty and our God-given inalienable rights. Meanwhile, European conservatism is mere branding. What passes for “conservatism” in Europe depends entirely on the alternative, which often makes it little more than a nationalistic version of its left-wing opposition with a half-hearted call for marginally lower taxes and a growing opposition to unfettered illegal immigration.

Sure, these European conservative parties might occasionally borrow from the American conservative playbook in terms of their rhetoric, speaking passionately of freedom or tradition or liberty, but they lack the ideological backbone and the political will to turn these words into action. Let alone the fact that American conservatism is tied to the ideology that birthed the nation itself. European conservatism is tied to nothing.

In the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party enjoyed power for more than a decade before being unseated by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. What conservative values that are central to American conservatism did the Conservative Party defend? The U.K. is still anti-gun, still pro-abortion, still pro-socialized medicine, and still hostile to free speech.

Our trans-Atlantic cousins have hate speech laws that criminalize political expression, knife control laws that would be laughable if they weren’t so dystopian, and a public healthcare system that is as mandatory as it is inefficient. If that’s what passes for “conservatism,” count me out.

Hungary’s right-wing populist Fidesz party, led by Viktor Orban, is often praised by American conservatives for its hard-line stance on immigration and defense of national identity. While there certainly are aspects of Orban’s policies that merit discussion, let’s not kid ourselves. Hungary is not a beacon of conservatism in the American sense, and its claims of conservative victories often rely on a heavy dose of marketing-based creativity.

What about Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland? While it brands itself as a nationalist, anti-globalist party while being arguably and oxymoronically pro-Russia, it is by no means a party that champions the ideals of small government and individual liberty. Germany remains deeply embedded in the European Union’s bureaucratic nightmare, and the AfD, despite its populist rhetoric, has shown no real commitment to dismantling this supranational control. Just like there is no word for “fluffy” in German, there is no German word for “small government.”

Then there’s France, where “conservatism” is often nothing more than a slightly slower march toward socialism. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party may reject mass immigration and Islamic extremism, but it is hardly a bastion of free-market policy or constitutional rights. You could even argue that it represents a nationalist brand of leftism, with economic policies that would make Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) blush.

Of course, the “America First” crowd will now ask: Why does this matter? Well, because if you care about American conservatism, you should care when our flag bearers start waving other flags at the same time. While it’s obvious that European politicians have a lot to gain by aligning themselves with us, when we align with European “conservatives” in return, despite sharing few or no actual ideological positions, we risk diluting our movement and becoming more like them.

If American conservatives look to Europe for inspiration, we risk normalizing the idea that big government is acceptable as long as it wears a different hat, and we risk embracing a watered-down version of our own ideology that makes room for policies we would otherwise reject.

The truth is we don’t need to look abroad for examples of conservatism. We already have the greatest example right here at home. We are a nation built on not only independence from a foreign government but independence from big government, a nation that enshrined inalienable rights into our Constitution.

Instead of looking to Europe for guidance, we should be strengthening what makes American conservatism unique. We should be fighting to uphold the principles of limited government, free markets, and individual liberties — not seeking validation from parties that wouldn’t recognize true conservatism if it smacked them on the nose.

So, the next time you see a European politician being lauded as the “Trump of [insert country here],” take a step back and ask yourself: What do they actually stand for? Do they defend the right to bear arms? Do they oppose government overreach in healthcare and the economy? Do they protect free speech from government interference? If the answer is no, non, or nein, then they are not conservative in the American sense. 

And the American sense of conservatism is the only one that matters. Here’s a radical idea: Stop looking to Europe. We are still the best. Act like it.

Related: The Censorship Industrial Complex — Vance's Message to Europe Was in Fact "Stop secret information warfare against the United States"