© PASCAL ROSSIGNOL/REUTERS Marine Le Pen waves to supporters at the end of a political rally in Lille, France on Sunday.
The European Union will disappear, French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen told a rally on Sunday, promising to shield France from globalisation as she sought to fire up her supporters in the final four weeks before voting gets underway.
Buoyed by the unexpected election of Donald Trump in the United States and by Britain's vote to leave the EU, the leader of the eurosceptic and anti-immigrant National Front (FN) party, told the rally in Lille that the
French election would be the next step in what she called a global rebellion of the people."The European Union will die because the
people do not want it anymore ...
arrogant and hegemonic empires are destined to perish," Le Pen said to loud cheers and applause. "The time has come to defeat globalists," she said, accusing her main rivals, centrist Emmanuel Macron and conservative Francois Fillon, of "treason" for their pro-EU, pro-market policies.
Opinion polls forecast that Le Pen will do well in the April 23 first round of the presidential election only to lose the May 7 run-off to Macron. But the
high number of undecided voters means the outcome remains unpredictable and motivating people to go to the polling stations will be key for the top candidates.
Its opposition to the EU and the euro currency underlines an
anti-establishment stance that pleases the FN's grassroots supporters and
attracts voters angry with globalisation. But it is also likely to be an obstacle to power in a country where
a majority oppose a return to the franc.
Le Pen has over the past few months tried to tackle this by criticizing the unpopular EU while telling voters she would not abruptly pull France out of the bloc or the euro but instead
hold a referendum after six months of renegotiating the terms of France's EU membership.On Sunday, while predicting the EU's demise, she was careful to say
she would seek to replace it with "another Europe," which she called "the Europe of the people", based on a loose cooperative of nations. "It must be done in a rational, well-prepared way," she told
Le Parisien daily in an interview. "I don't want chaos. Within the negotiation calendar I want to carry out ... the euro would be the last step because I want to wait for the outcome of elections in Germany in the autumn before renegotiating it."
Reacting to Le Pen's comments on the death of the EU, France's ambassador to the United States, Gerard Araud, tweeted:
"That'll be the real significance of the French elections: the survival or the demise of the EU. A quasi-referendum."Some 72 percent of French voters want to keep the euro, an Ifop poll published in
Le Figaro newspaper showed. But unlike voters overall,
a large majority of FN voters back a euro exit, the poll showed."I'm convinced it will explode anyway, so
she is right to anticipate it and prepare for an intelligent and organized exit from the euro before we head for even more of a disaster than we are in now," 56-year-old bank employee Marie-Dominique Rossignol said after the rally.
U.S. and U.S.S.R. But European nations never voted for it. They were sort of dragged into it, like a buffer zone. Eventually over the years the E.U. created more problems than it solved. There was an inherent problem nobody ever saw. Most European nations are unwilling, to say the least, to cooperate with each other. I mean they flattened their own soil twice. Once foolish , twice stupid. Currently the E.U. comprises 28 member countries minus the U.K. , that number will go down to 27. First of all you can't force any adult, much less an entire country to do anything unless you have financial or political leverage over it. If the British want to leave they are free to do so. As usual the U.S. will pick up the tab.
The second point Le Pen makes is that "realities create mentalities" . True. 7.5 billion people all over the earth can't be run like one giant corporation. It simply isn't feasible. It has been tried in the past and failed on a much lesser scale. What will happen in the future remains to be seen but regardless of what happens with today's data Le Pen is spot on. Although Germany won't very much like what she said.