As the darkness of night encroached and the votes of the French people began to be counted one thing became clear. Marine Le Pen had changed not only the party that she had wrested from the tight grasp of her father, but also her country, and perhaps even the world.
Establishment politicians and journalists across the world are currently writing opinion piece after opinion piece reassuring each other that the shocking success of Mme Le Pen will end in a fortnight.
After all, the technocratic ex-banker Macron who Le Pen will face in the run off election on May 7th has been backed by everyone from the Trotskyites to the Conservatives. The powers that be have moved to block her from all sides and it is unlikely that anyone could overcome such odds.
Already I have read online dissidents of varying stripes wailing in dismay that Le Pen did not even manage to beat a pro-Europe, pro-immigration, pro-multiculturalism candidate in a first round election held mere days after a well publicised terror attack on the Champs Elysee.
How short the memories of these people are.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that while I’m no old man I’m still older than the average member of the wider dissident right. Most of the millennial activists of the meme generation would have no memory at all of the time fifteen years ago when Marine Le Pen’s father also made the second round of voting in a French Presidential election. Neither would such relative young ‘uns recall the hilarious spectacle of fanatical Communists out on the streets urging a vote for Jacques Chirac.
With such a huge influx of people over the last few years into the more heretical sections of the right, it appears to me many don’t seem to see how long this has been coming, how fast the tide is rising even when compared to five let alone ten or fifteen years ago.
When Jean Marie Le Pen managed all those years ago to scrape only eighteen per cent of the vote in a two horse race his very existence in the second round could be written off as a fluke.
In those days the Euro had begun to bring the ever expanding, ever more intrusive EU seemingly ever more unstoppably together. The left was relentlessly optimistic and the forces on the right seemed entirely populated by tired old men still repeating tired old arguments, totally irrelevant to the future.
The change from today could hardly be starker.
Marine Le Pen will probably lose to Emmanuel Macron who will then become the youngest President in French history, but she won’t be scraping by with under twenty per cent. In the last decade the same ideas that were once outside the pale of polite discussion are now not just looming over France, or Europe, but the world.
When the Left and Right united to crush Le Pen’s father it reeked of virtue signalling; the pose affected on both sides was of crushing an annoying and distasteful bug almost unworthy of notice.
This time the vibe is so different as to stun a long time observer such as myself.
The migrant crisis, the terror attacks, Brexit, the economic trials of the Eurozone and even the election of Trump has put an unfamiliar air to the familiar establishment denunciations of heresy and wrong-think.
The certainties of the world they grew up in, the philosophies and ideologies they were educated in and the societies that they believed they had built are crumbling before their very eyes and all they can do in response is oscillate between denial and horror.
And this is why those of any stripe on the dissident right whom I see currently preaching the dull sermon of pessimism should take this first round victory for what it truly is.
The people who have done so much to wreck the West are scared, beneath their frenzied screeching is now a new tone of terror. They know that even if their good looking puppet wins the run off election in two weeks time the momentum is all in one direction and it isn’t theirs.
Marine Le Pen making the second round has caused the chill sweat of a worrying dread to crawl down the spine of some of the worst people on Earth. If that isn’t a reason to be cheerful I don’t know what is.
Photo by Abode of Chaos 