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Marine Le Pen is spoiling for a fight. The leader of France's Front National vows to smash the existing order of Europe and force the break-up of monetary union, if she wins the next election.

It is no longer an implausible prospect. "We cannot be seduced," she said, brimming with confidence after her party secured 46pc of the vote in a by-election earthquake a week ago. Her candidate trounced the ruling Socialists in their own bastion of Villeneuve-sur-Lot.

"The euro ceases to exist the moment that France leaves, and that is our incredible strength. What are they going to do, send in tanks?" she told the Daily Telegraph at the Front National's headquarters, an unmarked building tucked away in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Her office is small and workaday, almost austere.

"Europe is just a great bluff. One side there is the immense power of sovereign peoples, and on the other side are a few technocrats," she said.

For the first time, the Front National is running level with the two governing parties of post-War France, Socialists and Gaullistes. All are near 21pc in national polls, though the Front alone has the wind in its sails.

Yet it is the detail in the Villeneuve vote that has shocked the political class. The Front scored highest in the most Socialist cantons, a sign that it may be breaking out of its Right-wing enclaves to become the mass movement of the white working class.

UndercoverElephant wrote:UKIP can never appeal to the working class, and that's doubly true so long as the BNP exists.

JavaScriptDonkey wrote:

UndercoverElephant wrote:UKIP can never appeal to the working class, and that's doubly true so long as the BNP exists.

I think UKIP does appeal to the working classes.
BNP is a minority vote side issue for extremists.

Does anyone know whether the National Front in France is 'just' a French UKIP or is there more truth in the name?

However we once again see that all it takes to make people vote right is a taste of leftist policies.

UndercoverElephant wrote:Making bankers rich with public money is a leftist policy?

kenneal - lagger wrote:

UndercoverElephant wrote:Making bankers rich with public money is a leftist policy?

You'll have to ask Tony Bleh and Gordon Brown for the answer to that.....

woodburner wrote:Driving a country further into deficit by mechanisms such as PFI is hardly a laudable alternative. Left or right, the policies are always to increase debt, this is economic growth. How many times do you hear the expression ".....expand or die....."? It's just an excuse for BAU, which surprisingly suits the bankers, politicians et al.

kenneal - lagger wrote:

woodburner wrote:Driving a country further into deficit by mechanisms such as PFI is hardly a laudable alternative. Left or right, the policies are always to increase debt, this is economic growth. How many times do you hear the expression ".....expand or die....."? It's just an excuse for BAU, which surprisingly suits the bankers, politicians et al.

The increasing debt is a very temporary answer to the problem of wages decreasing in the west to keep up, or down, with low wage competition from the east and retain continuing growth at the same time. That debt has peaked and plateaued already which is one of the reasons that the UK economy has been bumping along the bottom for so long.

The problem for the west, and especially for the UK, is that we have high land and property values built up in a more prosperous past which can be treated as an asset and borrowed against but are ultimately not real values and will collapse. As incomes fall property values have to fall to become purchasable by the majority so the current situation is a bubble which is about to burst with a sudden price collapse unless something is done by government to manage the situation into a long term decline in value. Either way there is a problem for banks and building societies whose whole asset base value is based on the land value bubble.

kenneal - lagger wrote:That debt has peaked and plateaued already which is one of the reasons that the UK economy has been bumping along the bottom for so long.