Liberté, egalité, hypocrisie by Sabine Fischer
There is a peculiar skill the French political elite seems to have mastered over the decades. Not in diplomacy, not in reform, not even in winning wars. No, it is in the art of snatching defeat from the jaws of moral high ground, and worse handing it over, on a silver Marianne-plated platter, to the very figures democracy should resist. In the case of Marine Le Pen, French justice was right, politics were wrong and voilà! The blueprint for making a modern martyr was printed, bound, and shelved in the Louvre of political self-sabotage. Now, let’s not romanticize. Marine Le Pen is not Joan of Arc, though both heard voices, Joan’s from angels, Marine’s from the ghost of Vichy. And yet, through an astounding combination of legal correctness and political cluelessness, the French establishment managed to lift her from a figure of divisive nationalism to a symbol, however manufactured, of resistance against the 'élites'. Le Pen’s recent legal saga over the disseminat...
