French Political Landscape Rocked by Election Results

May 27, 2014 Share Print 0

The headlines scream: “Political tsunami,” “earthquake” and “big bang.”
European elections may have taken place in 28 different countries, but the results in just one of them proved the big story of the night. Who and what are we talking about? Marine Le Pen’s Front National extreme-right party came top in France’s European elections, with 25.41% of the vote. This is a historic achievement for the 46-year-old daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party’s founder.

And if the newspaper headlines are to be believed, the consequences of that particular vote are going to be felt for a very long time, both nationally and internationally.

Listening to French radio and television through the night, there was no doubt that France’s whole political class and commentators had never thought such thing possible, at least not on that scale. Some even succumbed to slight hysteria, live on French airwaves, including Laurent Wauquiez, France’s former minister for European affairs, who advocated, quite simply, a return to the EU made only of its founding member states — France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium — plus Spain. From a Union of 28 countries back to a “hardcore” of seven.

via CNN

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Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse

Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.