On the elections – Rachel Donadio in NYT:

‘In fact, 15 years after her father’s last run for president, Ms. Le Pen has not significantly diverged from his views on immigration even though she renamed the party, in what has been seen as an attempt to distance herself from him and broaden the base. She wants asylum seekers to be processed abroad and has said her first act as president will be to propose a referendum on immigration.
In La Roche-en-Brenil, a town of almost 900 people, I spoke to a 34-year-old mother of five, Chloé Odermatt, who was pushing a stroller with her 3-month-old baby. She said she’d vote for Ms. Le Pen and liked that she proposed stricter controls on giving immigrants access to state services. “A lot of them take advantage of the system and aren’t integrated in France,” she told me.
This election has further scrambled the traditional divide between left and right in France. Ms. Le Pen has managed to widen her consensus by combining far-right positions on immigration with a left-leaning defense of public spending and social welfare. Her message resonates, even with younger voters like Ms. Bernard — she has promised to eliminate income tax for people under 30 — and her once extreme positions appear less so now that the center right has also adopted much of the same rhetoric, especially on national-identity issues. Help came as well from Éric Zemmour, whose firebrand declarations made her seem more moderate.’

Read the article here.

This sums it up.

Zemmour made Le Pen look moderate.

The unholy combination of xenophobia, nationalism and some progressive economic policy (remember National Socialism) is still extremely potent.

And Macron might win, I’m rooting for him, but Putin’s ambassador in France, Le Pen, already changed the political landscape in France, and the likes of Le Pen did it in other countries in the West.