The Kremlin couldn't ask for a better ally than Marine Le Pen

It started out as your average tragicomic week in the France of May 2014. 

The armed forces' chief of staff, backed by his generals in charge of the army, navy and air force, threatened to quit over planned cuts in military budgets. A government agency, debunking a presidential promise to reverse the country's jobless trend, said unemployment would rise this year and next. And the national railroad acknowledged that 2,000 new trains it had ordered for $20.5 billion were too wide to fit into about 1,600 stations.

The inured and sarcastically inclined could go on whistling Phil Collins's "Another Day in Paradise." But on Sunday France embraced ignominy. The supposedly detoxified extreme right-wing National Front party, led by the supposedly non-noxious Marine Le Pen, running on an anti-European-Union, anti-immigrant platform, handily defeated both the governing Socialists and opposition Gaullists in an election for the European Parliament.

On the grid of French history—from its central role in the Enlightenment, to its Nazi collaborators in World War II (whose apologists figured among the National Front's founders), to its ambitions to make a united Europe a world-player and decision maker—the election result stands as a shameful entry.
It came unopposed by outrage. Compared with the democratic legitimacy sought, and reinforced, the same day in Ukraine's presidential election, and the milder populist advances elsewhere in the European vote, France produced a spectacle of nihilism that damages the West and delights Vladimir Putin.
When Prime Minister Manuel Valls called at the campaign's end for a "democratic insurrection'' against what he said was a choice for hatred and division, his appeal was ignored. A majority of registered voters stayed home.

The Germans, who polls say consider the French their best friend, and who fear their neighbor becoming an angry, hard-to-manage political cripple, are taking the point. Martin Schulz, the European Parliament's current president, had a circumscribed view: "It is a bad day for the European Union when a party with such a racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic program gets 25 percent of the vote in France." The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in its report from Paris, nailed the broader picture: "France's governability is in play now—with the country's reputation in Europe and the world.''

So who, really, is Marine Le Pen? And what bodes the legitimization of a politician able to remarkably exploit a Socialist government's aloofness, economic dysfunction and incapacity to calm the alienation felt by working-class voters in relation to France's large Muslim-immigrant community? 

In terms of France's role as an international player, Ms. Le Pen's party has called for the creation of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis. She describes Mr. Putin as "a patriot"—and generally sounds, after a pre-election trip to Moscow, as intent as the Russian president to neuter the EU as a Western political force.

Mr. Putin couldn't have a more comfortably avowed ally. "He's aware we are defending common values,'' she said of the Kremlin ruler. Which ones? Ms. Le Pen's response: "The Christian heritage of European civilization.''

As for a softer, gentler National Front, Ms. Le Pen assigned the task of attacking Muslims to her father, who worked her rallies as an opening-act rabble-rouser. Example: In Marseille last week, warning of immigrant hordes about to descend on Europe from Africa, Jean-Marie Le Pen came up with the idea that the fatal Ebola virus "could take care of that in three months.'' The next day, of course, he explained that he couldn't wish for a surge in the disease.

Asked Sunday night about whether the party would accept an offer of an alliance with Greece's neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party and explain its own relations to anti-Semitism, National Front Vice President Florian Philippot fled anything resembling an intelligible reply. 

The immediate question for a France bearing the Le Pen stain is how much trust it can garner internationally and whether it has the resilience to continue challenging the toughness of Barack Obama on his wavering Iran and Syria positions. The government has no reason now to tone down its basic opposition to a trans-Atlantic free-trade pact. Mostly absent from engagement on Ukraine, and tracking Germany's hesitations, it has already shown little interest in substantively challenging Russia's threat of further aggrandizement in Eastern Europe.

Rather the opposite. Look at France's continued insistence on delivering the two helicopter-carrying Mistral attack vessels it sold to Russia for probable deployment on the Black Sea.

In the process, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius issued a startling assessment this month on the way of the world at the Brookings Institution in Washington. According to Associated Press, he spoke of the West's need not to alienate countries like Russia and China. "They consider that the international order is biased in favor of the West," the AP quoted him. "We might disagree but we have to take into account this perception."

How about repelling it?

In a new world where the National Front is the biggest French vote-getter, and where it may lead an official European Parliament political faction grandly subsidized with taxpayers' money, Mr. Putin can count at the least on Marine Le Pen as being appeasement's loudest cheerleader. 

By John Vinocur

Mr. Vinocur is former executive editor of the International Herald Tribune.

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