Populist challenge brings Europe to crossroads

A passionate European and Christian Democrat, mindful of the horrors of her country’s Nazi and Cold War past, Ms Merkel is increasingly viewed as the continent’s number one defender of liberal values. Barack Obama pointedly chose to visit her in Berlin on his last official trip abroad before handing over the presidency to Donald Trump.

Ms Le Pen, on the other hand, is the poster child of Europe’s new wave of populism. She demands what she described to me in an interview as a “new world order”. A new France, a new Europe, free, she says, of the “prison” of the European Union and the “artificial” joining of European nations.

She laughed at those wringing their hands on both sides of the Atlantic over the Trump Presidency.

Brexit, Trump and Europe’s new “patriotic leaders” in Ms Le Pen’s words, are merely the end of one world and the start of a new one where, in her opinion, the people and the nation state are strong and don’t answer to what she called “Globalisationists”.