The always entertaining Nigel Farage was on fire again today in European Parliament. Farage correctly warned EP members about their desire for “more Europe” when citizens of nearly every country are fed up with the policy.

Partial Farage Transcript

I feel like I am attending a meeting of a religious sect here this morning. It’s as if the global revolution of 2016, Brexit, Trump, the Italian rejection of the referendum, has completely bypassed you.

You can’t face up to the fact that this bandwagon is going to roll across Europe in these elections in 2017. A lot of citizens now recognize this form of centralized government simply doesn’t work. … At the heart of it is a fundamental point: Mr. [name not recognized] this morning said, the people want more Europe.

They don’t. The people want less Europe. We see this again and again when people have referendums and they reject aspects of EU membership. But something more fundamental is going on out there. …. No doubt, many of you here will probably despise your own voters for what I am about to say because just last week, Chatham House, the reputable group, published a massive survey from 10 Europen states, and only 20% of people want immigration from Muslim countries to continue. Just 20%. … Which means your voters have a harder line position on this than Donald Trump, or myself, or frankly any party sitting in this Parliament. I simply cannot believe you are blind to the fact that even Mrs. Merkel has now made a u-turn and wants to send people back. Even Mr. Schulz thinks it is a good idea.

And the fact is, the Europen Union has no future at all in its current form. And I suspect you are in for as big a shock in 2017 as you were in 2016.

Analyzing Le Pen’s Chances Once Again

Le Pen supporters are from the same socioeconomic class as Trump supporters and Brexit supporters. Eurointelligence offers this view of the situation.

Elites vs underdogs – French edition

If you look at the voters of Emmanuel Macron, you might wonder what his chances are to win against Marine Le Pen. Ifop looked at the profile of those who intend to vote for him. One of the striking statistics was that Macron only gets 14% from workers, the same as Jean-Luc Mélenchon! In this class, Marine Le Pen reigns with 37% support, while Benoit Hamon does slightly better than the others with 18%. The most telling feature, in our view, is that the more educated people are more likely to vote for Macron and the less educated go for Marine Le Pen.

Education has been one of the dividing lines also in the Brexit vote and the American elections, and we all know what happened there. Add to this that Macron is the urban favorite, but not in the outskirts, the infamous banlieues, and you end with a candidate of the elites against a candidate of the underdogs. And it is not that immigrants living in those banlieus are against Le Pen, as one might expect. Many of them have been there for some time now and the last thing they want is more immigration.

So if Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron end up in the second round, will we see another stand-off between the elite candidate and the underdog star? They effectively stand for two different world views. Le Pen divides the world into globalists and patriots, Macron into progressives and conservatives, notes Journal du Dimanche. In the US, Chris Arnade saw Trump’s victory as a result of the social isolation of the uneducated whites. Could this also happen in France?

People are fed up. This is precisely why the odds of a Marine le Pen victory in France are widely underestimated.

Mike “Mish” Shedlock