[Peace-discuss] [sf-core] Europeans Have Had Enough

[Morton K. Brussel]

Strange Cockburn didn't mention Marine Le Pen's opposition to France's/NATO's foreign adventures …
--mkb


On Apr 27, 2012, at 11:13 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> Watch Europe tip left and right as voters rise in fury against the  
> austerity menu that’s been bringing them to utter ruin. In Holland,  
> the right-wing Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders brought down the  
> governing coalition on Monday bellowing his defiance for the “Diktats  
> from Brussels”, and asserting that “We must be master of our own  
> house.” Labour and Christian Democrats, Holland’s major parties, are  
> crumbling.
> 
> Almost certainly doomed is France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, with François  
> Hollande poised to win in the second round, but Marine Le Pen’s fiery,  
> anti-banker populism has reaped her deserved rewards. As Ambrose Evans  
> Pritchard writes in the Daily Telegraph:
> 
> “Elected governments have already been swept away – or replaced by EU  
> technocrats without a vote, indeed to prevent a vote – in every  
> eurozone state where unemployment has reached double-digits: Spain  
> (23.6 per cent), Greece (21 per cent), Portugal (15 per cent), Ireland  
> (14.7 per cent) and Slovakia (14 per cent).The political carnage has  
> been striking. Ireland’s Fianna Fail, creator of the Irish free state,  
> has lost every seat in Dublin. Greece’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement  
> (PASOK) – torch-bearers of Greek democracy since the Colonels – has  
> fallen to 14 per cent in the polls and faces ruin next month.
> 
> “The results are in: the hard-Left and hard-Right are on the rampage  
> across Euroland…. France’s Marine Le Pen presents herself as a  
> latterday Jeanne d’Arc, openly comparing France’s pro-EU camp with the  
> Burgundians who plotted ‘English Annexation’ in the 1430s – or indeed  
> ‘Les Collabos’ who bought peace after 1940. ‘Let us break the chains  
> of the French people. Bring on the French Spring,’ she tells Front  
> National rallies.
> 
> “The mood feels different from past episodes of irritation with EU  
> aggrandisement, whether the ‘No’ votes against the European  
> Constitution in 2005 or the Irish ‘No’ to Lisbon and Nice, or the  
> Scandinavian ‘Nej’ votes against the euro. Mme Le Pen has gone to the  
> heart of the matter, asserting that monetary union cannot be fudged,  
> that it is incompatible with the French nation state. She has won 18  
> per cent of the vote campaigning to pull France out of the euro and  
> smash the whole project. Unlike her father – who never seriously  
> expected to be president – she has a realistic chance of peeling off  
> enough Gaulliste votes to emerge as paramount leader of the French  
> Right.”
> 
> What will Chancellor Angela Merkel do as the pan-European mutiny  
> against austerity rises? With her ally Sarkozy in all likelihood soon  
> gone, it’s Germany that’s looking isolated. Will François Hollande be  
> up to the task of forcing a change of step for Europe, and Keynesian  
> reflation? I wish I had confidence in the man, but I don’t. Another  
> limp social democrat with the muscle of a three-day old hake...
> 
> --Alexander Cockburn
> 
> ------------------------------------
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