France is on the brink of full-scale insurrection and bankruptcy after decades of selling out to immigrants and opening its borders to foreign trade, the leader of the French National Front has told The Times, warning that the country would be “put to the fire and the sword”.
Marine Le Pen, 45, said that it would only take a spark to tip Europe’s second economic power into virtual civil war — and that the trigger could be the violent anti-tax demonstrations taking place in Britanny over the past month.
The National Front is now polling as the most popular political group in France for the first time in its history.
Ms Le Pen criticises the chronic weakness of François Hollande, who is the most unpopular French President since Charles de Gaulle after only 18 months in office.
She said: “François Hollande is just a provincial sub-prefect who is well suited to his place in the European Union — the boss of a technocrat government who takes his marching orders from Brussels.
“The trouble is that France is going to be put to fire and the sword. I think we are in a time of revolt. The French have the feeling that François Hollande has no idea of where he is leading them. If Brittany rises up, watch out, it could spread like wildfire.”
This month, Ms Le Pen, who has voiced approval for David Cameron, co-founded a Continent-wide anti-EU movement, teaming up with Geert Wilders, the far-Right Dutch politician.
She says that France and the rest of the European Union was driven to bankruptcy by the creed of free trade, the euro, open frontiers and the ethnic melting pot.
"Now that the danger no longer stems from communism, the threat is coming from le ‘mondialisme’,” she says. “That means the sort of theory of the all-powerful market which will regulate itself. It’s a form of totalitarianism, a totalitarianism of all-out commerce. Immigration is the child of this globalism.”
This has nothing to do with racism, she insists.
Predictions of revolt have long been part of the National Front’s armoury, but a series of protests, strikes and racist incidents have lately reflected an ugly mood in France. The prefects — state officials who administer all the départements — have just reported to Paris: “Throughout the land . . . society is in the grip of tension, exasperation and anger.”
Read more of this report from The Times.