In response to a perceived debt crisis in Spain, the European Union has imposed harsh austerity policies that have thrown the Spanish economy into a tailspin. Unemployment levels are the highest in Europe: 24.4% over-all and 50% for those under age 25. As unemployment grows, consumer demand falls, causing more businesses to fail, leading to further layoffs. Bankruptcies, evictions, and capital flight have reached record levels. Young people with skills are fleeing the country—350,000 in the past four years. And increasingly, senior citizens share their social security and pensions, however meager, with their children and grandchildren. The Spanish people are "paying for dishes they didn't break"—a refrain commonly heard in the streets and printed on protest signs.

It was May 1, 1988 in Paris, and I watched as Jean-Marie Le Pen, a young girl dressed as Joan d'Arc, a line of sash-wearing dignitaries, and 40,000 Front National supporters marched through the streets in a May Day parade. It was the moment that the Front National's racist nationalism broke into the middle of French politics, after years (decades) on the margins. Le Pen won 4.4 million votes, about 14.7% of the total, in the first round of the presidential elections that year. At the time, I was used to monitoring Klan rallies in the American South, which never approximated the size and power of the rally that day. The Front National's fortunes have waxed and waned over the next two-plus decades since. Now, with a stunning six million votes (17.9% of the total) in the in the first round of the French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen has re-established the Front National as a leading voice for racist, anti-immigrant politics in Continental Europe.