NATIONAL AFFRONT: Le Pen, above, is polling around 30 percent, enough to make it to the second round of voting. Some worry she could become the next leader of France.
FROM TOP: ULIEN MATTIA/NURPHOTO/GETTY; EVAN VUCCI/AP
SIX DAYS after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, social media users in Britain awoke to a photograph of the president-elect standing beside another familiar face—Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP). The two men, who both pitch themselves as champions of ordinary men and women, stood beaming before a glittering, goldplated elevator door in Trump’s $100 million New York City penthouse. The image wasn’t just a sign of a budding bromance; it was evidence of a wider convergence. Like-minded figures from the populist hard right are looking across borders and celebrating one another’s successes. “They saw Brexit as an inspiration for their campaign,” a triumphant Farage tells Newsweek. “If you look at the last weeks of the Trump campaign, every single night at every single rally, he said this is going to be bigger than Brexit.”
Farage has traveled some way to reach the golden pinnacle of Trump Tower. It was only two and a half years ago that I waited in the freezing rain to watch him speak in a faded hall in the coastal city of Portsmouth on England’s southern edge. It was a spit-and-sawdust affair, with an eccentric merchandise stand selling comedy tea towels that described then–European Council President Herman Van Rompuy as a “damp rag.” Now Farage and other politicians in Europe with similar views think the movement has moved from the fringe to the center. In June, the British masses surprised the experts and voted to leave the European Union; then came Trump’s victory. As news of that sunk in, Florian Philippot, vice president of France’s hard-right National Front, tweeted his delight: “Their world is collapsing. Ours is being built.”