In a by-election runoff on February 8, 2015 in the district of Le Doubs in Eastern France, the Socialist candidate won with 51.4% of the vote. The disquieting element of the vote was that the candidate of the National Front (FN) got only 800 votes less than the winner. Almost certainly, this near success resulted from support for the FN platform slogan of “Islamist peril.” That peril had recently been made plain by the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo journal headquarters on January 9, 2015 and on the kosher supermarket on January 11 when four Jews were killed. The election result showed the growing strength of the FN, which already had done well in the European Union election in 2014, and the increasing prominence of its leader Marine Le Pen, now considered a viable candidate for the presidential election in 2017. That strength largely stems from the FN’s strong opposition to immigration, in reality Muslim immigration, into...(Read Full Article)