Nigel Farage has claimed that the economic policies of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) would be a “disaster” if enacted in France. Speaking exclusively to UnHerd yesterday after a Reform UK rally in Birmingham reportedly attended by 4,500 people, the party leader said that the RN will be “even worse for the economy than the current lot”. His comments were made ahead of results yesterday evening from the first round of France’s snap parliamentary elections, which projected a significant victory for the RN.
Farage has previously expressed support for Le Pen, writing that, while her “party’s roots were deep in Vichy” and “antisemitism was embedded in its DNA”, she is a “sincere Eurosceptic”. He added in the 2017 piece that Le Pen “would make a good leader of France”.
Earlier this week, the Bank of England warned in its June Financial Stability Report that an RN election victory would threaten global financial stability and have a damaging effect on the British economy. This followed fears among economists that Le Pen’s policy proposals, including low taxation and extensive spending, would significantly worsen France’s ongoing debt crisis. The country’s current Finance Minister, Bruno Le Maire, suggested that France could face a “Liz Truss-style scenario” if the RN were to reach power, while economists have argued that the European Central Bank would be unlikely to intervene in the event of a full-blown French financial crisis.
