The child of immigrant parents - his father a Magyar aristocrat and his mother a Greek - , Sarko is taking over the French identity themes of Marine Le Pen's National Front.
The reason he's doing it?
The National Front is now the most popular party in France and the presidentials are due in six months.
The common theme uniting Trumpists, the Brexit supporters, and the ethnonationalists of the continent is the marrying of ethnic majority fears and resentments to existing, not very literally nation-states, and opposition to immigration by persons seen as not sharing their ethnic identities.
Most of the leaders of these parties and movements want also to marry them to unraveling the welfare state and abandoning social democracy, but the nationalist masses are a lot less interested in that sort of thing than the leadership.
This is by no means the first time the leadership of a movement and the masses who make it up have had significantly different agendas.
Think of the anti-war movement of the sixties and seventies in the US.
The leaders wanted to use opposition to the Vietnam War to bring about revolution in America.
The masses wanted no part of the revolution and didn't even necessarily oppose the war.
It's just that, like Dick Cheney, they had other priorities and didn't want to be drafted to fight in Southeast Asia.
Hence mass participation in the anti-war movement tapered off to nothing after Nixon stopped sending draftees to fight in Vietnam.
As for the new wave of ethnonationalism in Europe, it undermines and even revolts against not only the EU which it expressly attacks but also the UK, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and most states on the Balkan Peninsula, all of which are multi-national states that it implicitly and in some cases explicitly undermines.
In the US, multi-ethnic from the first day and never to be otherwise, white nationalism, like black nationalism, rejects the inevitable multi-ethnic reality of America and nearly every state in the Western Hemisphere, strengthens hostility and mistrust among diverse groups, and contributes mightily to instability.
Even when they advertise deathless loyalty to their own quasi-nation-states, by their campaigns of bitter divisiveness and resentment these ethnonationalists destabilize and weaken those same states.
All the same and despite the truth that white identity extremists (up to and including those who fantasize global extermination of all others), neo-nazis, and neo-fascists do tend to support them, these mass movements are in no way either fascist or nazi, nor even white supremacist, sensu strictu.
And they are generally most emphatically not anti-democratic.
Just being honest, here.
Update, 10/23/2016.
But consider the attitude of Trump and the Buchananites, including PB himself, toward the elections of 2016.
As they have come to realize they are likely to be crushed in the popular vote as well as the electoral college they have denounced the election as "rigged" in advance.
And they have begun to legitimate rejection of the results.
Not all votes, and not all voters, are equal or equally legitimate, for these folks.
And "diversity, democracy, and equality" are not among their basic political values.
Update, 10/23/2016.
But consider the attitude of Trump and the Buchananites, including PB himself, toward the elections of 2016.
As they have come to realize they are likely to be crushed in the popular vote as well as the electoral college they have denounced the election as "rigged" in advance.
And they have begun to legitimate rejection of the results.
Not all votes, and not all voters, are equal or equally legitimate, for these folks.
And "diversity, democracy, and equality" are not among their basic political values.
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