The French aren’t that interested in Europe to begin with, and these days care less and less about it. Even so, they managed to morph the recent European parliamentary elections into a time bomb and plant it under their country’s own future, writes Françoise Fressoz in The New York Times.
The French political puzzle has been flipped upside down by the May 25 vote, with Marine Le Pen, flag bearer of the far-right National Front, left fiddling with the pieces. With its stunning score of nearly 25 percent of the European vote in France and utter crushing of all other political camps, the National Front not only flexed its muscles but upended its two traditional opponents, the governing Socialists and the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (U.M.P.).
This wouldn’t seem so earth-shaking if it didn’t come just three years before France’s next presidential election, in 2017, because the French are now asking the unthinkable: Can the National Front rise to the top of the national ladder?
Manuel Valls, named prime minister just over two months ago to rescue François Hollande’s flailing presidency, didn’t hesitate an instant to call the European election results an “earthquake.” He might have done better to keep quiet, all the more that the next day the president went on prime-time TV to share his view of the disaster — only without the least hint of what he could do about it.
Just like that, French politics veered into tragicomedy. While the Socialists run around shouting “Every man for himself,” the U.M.P., the party that propelled Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency in 2007, promptly burst into flames whipped up by the so-called Bygmalion affair. The scandal, which had been smoldering for weeks, swirls around more than 10 million euros in “fake invoices” intended to hide overspending by Mr. Sarkozy’s 2012 re-election campaign.
The fakes were issued by the Bygmalion communications firm under pressure from the U.M.P., which wanted them passed off as bills for party meetings and not Sarkozy campaign events. Evidence uncovered by the newsweekly Le Point and the daily Libération newspaper had already convinced everyone that the fire would reach the party’s president, Jean-François Copé.
Read more of this article in The New York Times.