Conventional political wisdom has it that the National Front's Marine Le Pen cannot win the French presidency. She will make it through Sunday's first round to the run-off on May 7. But thereafter she will be defeated as all the supporters of conventional parties put aside their convictions and rally round the candidate who is not Le Pen. Unfortunately, conventional political wisdom has of recent proven unconventionally wrong. Trump triumphed against all the odds in the United States. The UK voted to quit the European Union. And even though he did not become the largest party in the Dutch parliament, as many had feared, Holland's openly Islamophobic Geert Wilders still increased his base in the legislature. Right-wing racist parties in Europe are on a roll and are turning the tragedy of migrants seeking shelter in the EU into a key election issue. Marine Le Pen has sanitized the National Front, even to the extent of pushing out the party's founder and her own father Jean-Marie Le Pen because of his consistently open race hatred. But on Sunday Le Pen produced her most aggressive statements on migration, vowing to halt it altogether. The suspension would be temporary, she claimed, to be replaced by a more humane system of permitting outsiders into France. She characterized present migration as "a mad and uncontrolled situation". The subtext which is being peddled on the doorsteps by National Front canvassers is that France's current migrant population, for which read Muslims, is a security risk, a drain on the country's already huge welfare budget and taking jobs that should be going to white ethnic French citizens. Le Pen's minions are also whispering that if she wins the Elysee Palace, there will be a crackdown on migrants already in the country with mass deportations of those who are present illegally and the removal of citizenship from anyone suspected of sympathizing with terrorists. Equally attractive to French voters grappling with unemployment of over 10 percent, high taxes and economic stagnation, is Le Pen's assault upon the EU, which she blames for many of France's social and financial woes. The British voters' decision to quit has emboldened Le Pen in her demand that France leave the eurozone and the EU itself. She is seeking to exploit the confusion in Brussels as the Euro-enthusiasts grapple with how the UK should be allowed to depart the union and the nature of future trade and security relations with London. Emmanuel Macron who has come from nowhere to appear as Le Pen's likely challenger in the second round, is promising to drive through reforms to the EU which will restore sovereignty to France. But Macron's establishment background, a former top flight civil servant, investment banker with Rothschild›s and a socialist minister in Francois Hollande's administration, is likely to count against him in the present electoral mood. As in America and elsewhere in Europe, there is widespread disillusionment with the political classes and the increasingly unaccountable political structures they have created. The deadly threat from Marine Le Pen is that she is untainted by establishment connections. She is a rebel who promises radical change even though her economic promises do not add up and her Islamophobic and chauvinistic policies threaten severe social breakdown. The alarming possibility remains that on May 7, not enough voters will hold their noses and cast their ballot for whoever is Le Pen's opponent.
