By Jason Fields, The Week
Analysts all over the world woke up on Monday morning to mourn the fact that far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen wasn’t beaten soundly enough, even though she lost by more than 16 points to a man few people in France apparently love, the incumbent Emmanuel Macron.
Sixteen points? Sixteen points? In the United States, people who share many of Le Pen’s ideals — including opposition to immigration, Islam, and globalization — win office every election cycle.
What puts Le Pen and the National Rally Party in the far-right corner of politics, then? Like her near-fascist father before her, Le Pen isn’t fond of immigrants, and I mean really not fond. She wants them to assimilate to French culture to the point where they would be indistinguishable from France’s original immigrants (or rather, invaders), the Germanic Franks, who came for a visit to the Roman Empire in the 4th century and never went away. But even more than assimilating, Le Pen and her party would much rather immigrants just go back to where they came from.
That’s a point that resonates among many people in the United States.
