by Martin Armstrong, Armstrong Economics:
A new poll out of France should not be viewed as some sudden political awakening. It is confirmation that the nationalist trend we have been watching throughout Europe for years is continuing and becoming stronger. The poll places Marine Le Pen comfortably ahead in the first round of the 2027 presidential election, with roughly 36% support, far beyond any of the establishment candidates currently positioned against her. More importantly, the polling indicates that National Rally is no longer merely collecting an angry protest vote. Le Pen is increasingly competitive with, and in several scenarios ahead of, mainstream candidates in the second round where the French establishment historically united to prevent her from reaching the Élysée Palace.
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This is the continuation of a political trend, not the beginning of one. Brexit was part of it. Trump was part of it. Giorgia Meloni’s victory in Italy was part of it. The Freedom Party winning the largest share of the vote in Austria was part of it, as has been the extraordinary expansion of AfD in Germany. Reform UK has disrupted the old Conservative-Labour structure in Britain, while nationalist and sovereignty movements have advanced across the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, and elsewhere. Different countries have different grievances, but they are all reacting to the same fundamental problem: people are losing confidence in political establishments that transferred too much sovereignty away from the nation-state.
Le Pen fits directly into this trend because her opposition to Brussels has always been central to her political appeal. National Rally no longer advocates withdrawing France from the European Union or abandoning the euro, but Le Pen continues to argue that France must regain sovereignty from EU institutions. That is what terrifies the establishment far more than all the rhetoric about the “far right.” France is one of the pillars holding the European project together, and a French president willing to challenge the authority of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels would pose a threat to European centralization that Hungary or Slovakia simply cannot.
The EU was sold to Europeans as an economic union that would facilitate trade and prevent another European war. It has transformed itself into an enormous political bureaucracy regulating energy, agriculture, automobiles, immigration, environmental policy, trade, and increasingly defense and foreign affairs. The average French citizen cannot vote the European Commission out of office. Yet those bureaucrats can impose regulations that directly affect what car he drives, what his electricity costs, how farmers use their land, and what policies his national government is permitted to implement.
This is precisely why nationalism has continued gaining ground. The establishment insists that people voting for these parties have somehow become extremists, but perhaps they should look in the mirror. Trump did not create nationalism in America, Brexit did not create nationalism in Britain, and Le Pen did not create nationalism in France. These movements expanded because governments increasingly stopped representing the interests of the people who elected them.
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