Marine Le Pen of the National Front almost certainly will not win the run-off election next month against Emmanuel Macron. Mr. Macron, of the centrist En Marche party, is headed to a coronation even though Ms. Le Pen came a close second in Sunday's first-round presidential vote.
But that's not to say she is finished – far from it. She will have earned record levels of support for the FN, which could do well in the National Assembly elections in June, allowing her and her party to emerge as the main opposition to Mr. Macron and his untested En Marche movement, which did not exist until a year ago. That means her messages will continue to shape debate, none more so than her attack of "savage globalization."
Her rants against globalization obviously hit home. The parts of France where unemployment is high and deindustrialization rife, notably the east and northeast, endorsed Ms. Le Pen in the first round. While her anti-immigration message is tired, her anti-globalization message resonates not just in the clapped-out regions of France, but elsewhere in Europe where industrial jobs are melting away. In the United States, Donald Trump's promise to bring back jobs to the deindustrialized auto and coal states helped swing the election in his favour.
Read more: The faceoff for Europe's future
"There is still a slow-burning fuse against liberalism and globalization," says Marshall Auerback, research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of New York's Bard College. "The cheerleaders of globalization have yet to develop adequate policy responses for the losers of globalization."
Her anti-globalization stance will keep Mr. Macron on the defensive and she had an unlikely ally in the form of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Communist Party-backed candidate whose views on globalization were broadly similar to Ms. Le Pen's. She and Mr. Mélenchon captured 41 per cent of the vote. While Mr. Macron endorses open trade, European Union integration and the euro, Ms. Le Pen stands for the opposite. In a 60 Minutes Interview with Anderson Cooper in March, she said "Globalization has become an ideology without constraints … Wild globalization has benefited some, but it's been a catastrophe for most."
Ms. Le Pen is playing a neat trick, in essence convincing her voters that deindustrialization and globalization are one and the same. They are not. Deindustrialization – the fall in the number of industrial jobs – has been happening for decades in the Western world. It is primarily the result in the growth of productivity, that is, more products being produced by fewer workers. Industrial output can actually go up even as industries lose vast numbers of jobs. If globalization did not exist, employment numbers in industry, resources (forestry, mining, oil and gas) and construction would still be going in one direction – down. Automation will speed up the job destruction.
But there is no doubt that globalization has accelerated the process as countries take advantage of tariff-free trade and open markets. Ms. Le Pen latched onto the "Whirlpool issue" and turned it into a rallying cry for Trump-style economic nationalists.
The Whirlpool factory in Amiens (which happens to be Mr. Macron's town, 120 kilometres north of Paris), is to close next year, eliminating almost 300 assembly jobs. The production lines are to be transferred to Poland, where wages are a third to a quarter of French levels. France and Poland are members of the EU. Nothing could be done to stop the factory's exodus from France. France also has lousy retraining programs for employees who lose their jobs, meaning the Whirlpool workers, mostly middle-aged men, are unlikely to find work again.
Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Mélenchon tapped into the failures of the mainstream centre-right and centre-left parties that ruled France for the last 60 years. The primary goal of those parties was to deliver jobs, and lots of them. They could be dubious jobs that involved padding the bureaucratic payrolls, industrial jobs or jobs at state-owned enterprises, such as the rail and nuclear-energy companies.
When the mainstream parties stopped delivering jobs, the populists on both the right (Ms. Le Pen) and the left (Mr. Mélenchon) gained momentum. Even Mr. Macron benefited. While he believes in an open France and free trade, he is not an established figure in an established party that had done nothing as unemployment rose to 10 per cent and youth unemployment to 25 per cent.
The "savage globalization" cry is not limited to France. In Italy, the polls are being led by a euro-skeptic party, the Five Star Movement, that wants to hold a referendum on the euro and accuses the ruling centre-left government of fiddling while the jobs market burns (Italian youth unemployment is 35 per cent). Mr. Trump is ripping up trade deals. Ms. Le Pen will not be the next president of France but she will keep the populist threat alive. Mr. Macron's neo-liberal agenda may suffer some blows.
Want to interact with other informed Canadians and Globe journalists? Join our exclusive Globe and Mail subscribers Facebook group
Eric Reguly