Paris terror attacks an alarm bell for liberal, borderless Europe

The attack on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket last January proved that Islamic extremists regarded themselves as at war with France. It is now clear to everyone – including some French public figures who have resisted the idea – that, as President Hollande said on Saturday, France is now at war with Islamic extremists.

Because the enemy is already within – and the eight terrorists killed in the attacks in Paris are merely the tip of the iceberg – fighting this war will be unpleasant, difficult and controversial.

The website of Le Figaro, the conservative French newspaper, proclaimed that there was “war in the heart of Paris”. It is a mood widely shared by the French people, whose attitudes have themselves been radicalised by these terrible events...

... The political implications for France will be extensive. Next month the country has regional elections, which were already being regarded as a stiff and perhaps impossible test for the weak and unsuccessful socialist government of François Hollande.

The French press has for months been forecasting that Marine Le Pen’s Front National could win two or possibly even three of the 22 regions in metropolitan France, and warning that such a result would be an electoral earthquake for the country.

Although Mme Le Pen has cleaned up her party from the overtly racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic entity it was under her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen – from whom she is, as a result, estranged – she has been the only high-profile politician to warn consistently of the dangers of the large numbers of Muslims in France, and of their failure to integrate properly into French society.

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