Last minute thoughts on Marine Le Pen, from Claire Berlinski. She hoped, as she was writing, that it would all turn out to be irrelevant. As we now know, that hope was forlorn.
It's a long piece, about – among much else – France's history in the Second World War, and Le Pen's unwillingness to accept any French complicity in such horrors as the Vel d’Hiv Roundup. Also, her support of, and support from, Putin. And her extraordinary and dysfunctional relation with Le Pen père.
Her conclusion:
She is no amalgam of Joan of Arc and Winston Churchill; she is not what a demoralized France so needs. She is a cut-rate Eva Peron surrounded by honest-to-god Vichy-apologists and neo-Nazis nuts, and not insignificantly, a neurotic, a hysteric, one in the grip of such powerful family demons, that she can neither control herself nor exorcise them. This is hardly the woman we need in this role when the world is already busily spinning off its axis, is it?
Mick Hartley 
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