What a Le Pen win would mean for Brussels

A Marine Le Pen victory in a year’s time can no longer be ruled out. Other than opinion polls regularly pointing to her place in the second round as a certainty, a few, such as Harris Interactive on 7 March, put her on the cusp of winning the second round with 47 per cent to Macron’s 53 per cent — a dramatic improvement on her 2017 score of 34 to Macron’s 66. 

The traditional republican front against the radical right is crumbling and the stigma of voting Le Pen is diminishing. More of the electorate are coming round to the Rassemblement National’s views on national sovereignty, immigration, crime and security, and — with Brussels’s shambolic management of the pandemic — on the EU itself. Whether Marine wins in 2022 or not, the world’s leading powers will, or should, be gaming the scenarios. And the international organisation with the most to lose is the EU. The RN abandoned Frexit after the last presidential race but the party remains deeply Eurosceptic.