Marine Le Pen makes Time Magazine's Top 100

Reaching the top 100 of the world's influential people in TIME is a major step for the leader of the French party of the right, which has suggested it may offer French voters an In/Out referendum on EU membership, after next year's Presidential election. Given the economic chaos now spreading across the EU, President Sarkozy looks certain to lose that vote, even if selected by his party, and the French Socialists seem to lack candidates of stature. Read here.

This news is particularly ironic given the recent debate on the UK Conservative Home web site, linked here, which seems to have concluded that in the UK the debate on the rapidly crumbling and near bankrupt EU will remain of zero concern or interest to UK voters. As Britain is squeezed until the pips squeak by the increasingly frantic Eurogroup, any who believe that UKIP cannot continue to climb in the polls until the main parties are quivering in their boots is day dreaming.

The big question in UK politics, will very soon become, which of the three main parties will be first to crack and offer UK voters an In/Out EU  referendum, UKIP will then only begin to fall back if the voters are stupid enough to be so duped in yet another General Election.

Threat to Sarkozy's re-election repeated in new French Opinion Poll

France24 has the report linked here, in English. A quote confirming what this blog has been publicising for some time:

The poll, conducted by the French polling agency Harris Interactive, spells bad news for Sarkozy. The president would only advance to the second round if the candidate representing the main opposition Socialist Party were Segolene Royal, a former presidential candidate.

The famed “April 21” date still haunts many in France. It was on that day in 2002, that the National Front’s firebrand leader Jean-Marie Le Pen knocked out the Socialist candidate from the presidential race, setting up a runoff against former president Jacques Chirac.