This Is Marine Le Pen's Moment

Le Pen’s popularity, and her share of votes, has only increased, and she has managed to present her agenda—anti-European Union, anti-immigrant, anti-euro—as approaching the mainstream, even as she cherishes her status as an outsider, untainted by the past twenty years of deepening French political crisis. In the immediate aftermath of the attack on Wednesday, as traffic surged on her Facebook page and she picked up thousands of new followers, she did nothing special to insert herself into the story or to exploit the fears that the Front has long fed on. She reiterated her longstanding call for France to withdraw, unilaterally and at once, from the Schengen Agreement, which allows for open borders within the extended European community, but that was hardly newsworthy.