Still, Hollande's Socialists are doing poorly, and ought to be concerned. I just think it's important to distinguish between the two issues here. I wouldn't rely on Telegraph reporting, even if it does somewhat correspond to the reality of its subject matter.
Joel
On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The stunning victory of France's National Front in a recent by-election in
> a traditional Socialist Party stronghold point to it becoming the party of
> the white working class. It was already tied in the opinion polls with the
> Socialists and the Gaullists, and could well form the next French
> government. If the NF gains power, it could spell the end of the eurozone.
> Front leader Marine Le Pen promises to call a referendum to unilaterally
> withdraw from the currency union if she is not able to persuade Germany and
> the other eurozone states to agree on an orderly breakup within a year of
> taking office.
>
> Le Pen projects a more sophisticated moderate image than her father, the
> former openly racist NF leader Jean Le Pen, and has shrewdly focused her
> attacks on the Hollande government's capitulation to French capitalist and
> EU demands for austerity. This has drawn white French workers, who are
> experiencing the pain of "internal devaluation" and feel threatened by
> immigration from Muslim and other countries, away from their traditional
> allegiance to the Communist Party and alternatives to it like Melanchon's
> Left Party. Her program, in fact, owes much to the work of Jacques Sapir
> and other left-wing economists who argue that France, Spain, Italy and the
> smaller debtor countries would do better by leaving the euro and returning
> to their former (devalued) currencies in order to restore their labour
> competitiveness other than by brutally crushing their working classes.
>
> The continuing financial and economic crisis, and corresponding rise of
> the European right-wing parties which have exploited it, have increased the
> pressure on the traditional governing parties to ease up on austerity, or
> to effect an even more complete Keynesian turn, to preempt their opponents
> on the right as well as Syriza in Greece, the sole left-wing party vying
> for power. Such pressure will likely intensify after the German election is
> out of the way in September, but it may already be too late to keep the
> euro bloc intact.
>
> * * *
>
> France's triumphant 'Joan of Arc' vows to bring back franc and destroy euro
> By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
> The Telegraph
> June 30 2013
>
> Marine Le Pen is spoiling for a fight. The leader of France's Front
> National vows to smash the existing order of Europe and force the break-up
> of monetary union, if she wins the next election.
>
> It is no longer an implausible prospect. "We cannot be seduced," she said,
> brimming with confidence after her party secured 46pc of the vote in a
> by-election earthquake a week ago. Her candidate trounced the ruling
> Socialists in their own bastion of Villeneuve-sur-Lot.
>
> "The euro ceases to exist the moment that France leaves, and that is our
> incredible strength. What are they going to do, send in tanks?" she told
> the Daily Telegraph at the Front National's headquarters, an unmarked
> building tucked away in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Her office is small
> and workaday, almost austere.
>
> "Europe is just a great bluff. One side there is the immense power of
> sovereign peoples, and on the other side are a few technocrats," she said.
>
> For the first time, the Front National is running level with the two
> governing parties of post-War France, Socialists and Gaullistes. All are
> near 21pc in national polls, though the Front alone has the wind in its
> sails.
>
> Yet it is the detail in the Villeneuve vote that has shocked the political
> class. The Front scored highest in the most Socialist cantons, a sign that
> it may be breaking out of its Right-wing enclaves to become the mass
> movement of the white working class.
>
> Commentators have begun to talk of "Left-LePenism" as she outflanks the
> Socialists with attacks on banks and cross-border capitalism. Anna
> Rosso-Roig, a candidate for the Communist Party in the 2012 elections, has
> just defected to the Le Pen camp.
>
> The Socialists had thought the rising star of Marine Le Pen would work to
> their advantage, splitting the Right. Now they discern a deadly threat.
> Industry minister Arnaud Montebourg lashed out last week, blaming Brussels
> for playing into the hands of the Front National by running roughshod over
> democracies and pushing austerity a l'outrance.
>
> Mrs Le Pen said her first order of business on setting foot in the Elysee
> Palace will be to announce a referendum on EU membership, "rendez vous" one
> year later. "I will negotiate over the points on which there can be no
> compromise. If the result is inadequate, I will call for withdrawal," she
> said.
>
> The four sticking points are the currency, border control, the primacy of
> French law, and what she calls "economic patriotism", the power for France
> to pursue "intelligent protectionism" and safeguard it social model. "I
> cannot imagine running economic policy without full control over our own
> money," she said.
>
> Asked if she intends to pull France of the euro immediately, she said:
> "Yes, because the euro blocks all economic decisions. France is not a
> country that can accept tutelage from Brussels," she said.
>
> Officials will be told to draw up plans for the restoration of the franc.
> Eurozone leaders will face a stark choice: either work with France for a
> "sortie concertee" or coordinated EMU break-up: or await their fate.
>
> Mrs Le Pen fears that other EMU states will resist and let "financial
> Armaggedon" run its course, but it is a risk that has be taken.
>
> Her plan is based on a study by economists from l'École des Hautes Études
> in Paris led by Professor Jacques Sapir. It concludes that France, Italy,
> and Spain would all benefit greatly from EMU-exit, restoring lost labour
> competitiveness at a stroke without years of depression.
>
> They say the eurozone's North-South imbalances have already gone beyond
> the point of no return. Attempts to reverse this by deflation and wage cuts
> must entail mass unemployment and loss of the industrial core. The current
> strategy of internal devaluation is self-defeating in any case, since
> recession causes debt ratios to climb faster.
>
> Prof Sapir said the gains are greatest in a coordinated break-up with
> capital controls where central bank intervention steers the new currencies
> to target levels. The model assumes that the D-Mark and Guilder is held to
> a 15pc rise against the old euro, while the Franc falls 20pc.
>
> The gains are less if EMU collapses in acrimony and currencies overshoot.
> This would inflict a violent deflation shock on Germany, but would still be
> strongly positive for the Latin bloc.
>
> "A lot of politicians have been coming to see me, both Gaullistes and
> Socialists. They agree, but don't want to come out publicly. They want
> somebody else to take the lead. If Marine Le Pen wishes to use my work, I
> have no problem," he said.
>
> Mrs Le Pen is a single mother of 44, more relaxed about gay rights and
> abortion than she lets on, closer in some ways to the assassinated Dutch
> populist Pim Fortuyn than to her cantankerous father Jean Le Pen, who
> stepped down as party leader two years ago. Mr Le Pen in turn deplores her
> eclectic modernism as an overlay of "petit bourgeois" views picked up in
> Paris schools.
>
> She has carried out a quiet purge of the Front, pushing known anti-semites
> to the sidelines. Vichy nostalgia is out. While her father called the
> Holocaust an historical "detail", she calls it the "pinnacle of human
> barbarism". She courts Jewish favour, aiming her fire at Jihadists instead.
> "Political parties are like people. There is adolescence when you do do
> crazy things, and then maturity. We are now ready for power," she said.
>
> This campaign of "dédiabolisation" or image detox seems to have worked.
> Only a minority of voters still thinks the Front is a "threat to
> democracy". Mrs Le Pen is winning over white working class women in droves.
> The feminized Front is no longer the party of the angry white male. The
> softer image is why finance minister Pierre Moscovici describes her as
> "more dangerous than her father".
>
> It is her defence of the French welfare model and her critique of
> capitalism that gives her a Leftist hue -- some call it 1930s national
> socialism -- so far in outlook from Britain's UKIP. She sounds like Occupy
> activists in her attacks on high finance and the way corporations profit
> from labour arbitrage, playing off wages in the West against cheap labour
> in Asia. "It is the law of the jungle," she said.
>
> Nor is she on the UKIP page with her broadsides against Washington and
> Nato, or her call for France to retake its place as "non-aligned" voice in
> a multipolar world. It is an anti-Atlanticist patriotism.
>
> She claims to be the true heir of General Charles de Gaulle, accusing the
> Gaulliste UMP party of selling its soul to Europe and the Anglo-Saxon
> order. "There was a de Gaulle of the Left, and a de Gaulle of the Right.
> There were two de Gaulles. We stand for both," she said.
>
> Mrs Le Pen said the Socialists are in melt-down, victim of their own
> subservience to EU economic doctrines, while their barrage of attacks on
> Germany's Angela Merkel smacks of a dependency syndrome. "They whine about
> Chancellor Merkel, the wicked enforcer who metes out punishment, but Merkel
> is merely defending the interests of Germany, which are not the same as
> ours."
>
> She said the EMU crisis is structural. North and South need different
> exchange rates. "The D-Mark would be rising if it were not for the euro,
> and that means Germany has a chronically undervalued currency. The euro is
> far too strong for France, and it is eating away our competitiveness," she
> said.
>
> It is hard know whether the French people would ever vote en masse for an
> all-out clash with Europe, let alone for her Jeanne d'Arc messianism. Yet
> the longer the economic slump goes on, the greater the risk for Brussels
> and Berlin that French patience will snap, setting off one of those
> eruptions that have punctuated French history through the ages.
>
> A recent Pew Foundation survey said French support for the EU Project has
> collapsed from 60pc to 40pc over the last year, and 77pc think economic
> integration has been damaging.
>
> President Francois Hollande says the EMU crisis is "finished" and recovery
> is at hand, though it is not clear what will break the vicious cycle as
> France carries out fiscal tightening of 1.8pc of GDP this yearand the
> deepest cuts in half a century. Monetary policy remains contractionary for
> most of Latin Europe.
>
> "If the government really tries to force the budget deficit down to 3pc of
> GDP, the economy will contract again next year by 0.5pc to 0.8pc," said
> Prof Sapir. "Unemployment will continue rising by 30,000 to 40,000 a month.
> There may be another 600,000 people without jobs by the end of 2014."
>
> France endured the same slow torture in the early 1930s under the Gold
> Standard, stoically accepting the "500 deflation decrees" of premier Pierre
> Laval. The dam broke in 1936 with the election of spurned outsiders, then
> the Leftist Front Populaire, with Communist support. The Gold Standard
> collapsed.
>
> The emergence of Marine Le Pen as a contender for office in Europe's
> pivotal power may prove the electric shock needed to force a radical shift
> in EMU crisis strategy, or at least to force France's Socialist Party to
> break with Germany and fight for a full reflation agenda, if only to avert
> its own ruin.
>
> "We have succumbed to a spirit of slavery in France. We have forgotten how
> to lead, and our voice is not heard any more," she said. It will be heard
> now.
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-- joel schalit skype: jschalit mobile: +49 160 98190521 email: jschalit at gmail.com web: www.joelschalit.com work: www.souciant.com