There is a fundamental MISUNDERSTANDING about French nationalism. 🇫🇷 The French are not turning to Marine Le Pen because they want to end immigration. It's something else: they believe that the money saved by restricting immigration will be enough to preserve their increasingly unaffordable, statist, socialist system. They don't want to change the system. They want to find a way to keep financing it. In other words, they want to treat the symptom while preserving the cause. And, of course, it won't work. The French have spent decades demanding more from the state while refusing to confront the economic consequences. They want generous pensions, extensive public services, massive social spending, strong purchasing power, early retirement, and the protection of almost every acquired privilege. But they do not want to pay the full price. Marine Le Pen offers them an attractive political proposition: the welfare state can be preserved without fundamental reform, provided that its benefits are redistributed in favour of French citizens and immigration is restricted. The difficulty is that France's fiscal problems extend far beyond immigration. Its pension commitments, public expenditure, debt servicing, administrative costs, and weak economic growth cannot simply be resolved by reducing immigration-related spending. The underlying contradiction remains untouched: the French want a state that promises more than the economy can sustainably finance.