Marine le Pen inaugurates her presidential campaign in Paris, November 16, 2016.Christophe Ena/Press Association. All rights reserved.As I was teaching in the US this autumn term both during and after the presidential elections, all my friends, students and colleagues would sooner or later ask me the same question: who is next? Do you think that Le Pen will win the French election in May?
Deploying various scenarios stretching from a kind of domino theory whereby each “liberal government” that crashes destabilizes the next one, to a contagion spread by the ruin of the distributive social policies that are universally targeted by neoliberalism, they tended to view Brexit as a prefiguration of the new “surprise” result. Clinton’s defeat together with Renzi’s fall and Hollande’s defection became aspects of the same disaggregation of the “center left”.
The defeat of the neo-fascist right in the Austrian presidential election appeared as a brief respite, and Poland’s civic demonstrations against the Kaczynski regime, a fragile element of resistance. The strategic question (this was before the recent murder rampage in Berlin) would be: will Merkel “stand her ground” before the offensive of the xenophobic alliance attacking her opening of the borders for the Syrian refugees last year (“Wir schaffen das”)?
