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Your friends (sad to say) are right. Le Pen will win in France. But you don’t appear to have considered a far worse scenario – Merkel losing in Germany. The far-right is resurgent in Austria – it won’t take much (just the right kind of leader) to unseat Mutti on the other side of the ‘border’.
If you think 2016 has been bad for liberalism, you will hate 2017. Not least because that is when Trump gains real power and starts to establish his dynasty (farewell to the republic – the USA is now heading for autocracy) and his international legacy. Expect to see him actively campaigning for outsiders in other national elections (despite protocol telling him not to intervene).
All the nice certainties and established ways of behaving are dead and gone. Politics has been remade – and the new form is ugly, tribal and lacking any restraint. This is how the decline and fall of Rome started.
I was all for remaining in the EU. But now we must hope to get out before it collapses around us. The next 20-30 years are going to be grim – I pity the younger generations who will have to clear up this mess created by their parents.