French Presidential Election May Reconfigure Europe

Socialist party leader François Hollande is the new president of France, replacing conservative Nicolas Sarkozy. This election may well have significant repercussions not only for the future of France, but also for the future of Europe.

Newly elected French President François Hollande is promising a major change in France’s response to the economic crisis. Outgoing President Nicolas Sarkozy had worked closely with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to put Europe’s fiscal house in order through drastic reductions in deficit spending and moving toward balancing national budgets as means of obtaining International Monetary Fund and European Union bailouts.

These measures, known in Europe as the “austerity” approach, have been painful to national economies and workforces that have depended for many years on massive budget deficits. In other words, many European nations have been living largely on credit, borrowing money to support gigantic government sectors (state jobs, entitlement and welfare programs).

The bill is coming due, and many feel the price is too high. They are flocking to politicians who tell them “someone else should pay.”

A wave of anti-austerity

Mr. Hollande ran on an “anti-austerity” platform, claiming that the emphasis needed to be placed on “growth” (read: more deficit spending). He used the vocabulary of class warfare, claiming famously at a Socialist party rally that the problem was not massive state overspending but the financial industry: “My true enemy has no name, no face, no party. He will never stand for election and will never be elected. Despite all this, he is in charge. My enemy is the world of finance.”

The election revealed an ominously fractured French society. In the first round of elections (France has two rounds of elections for president; the first round is used to reduce the field to two candidates) both extreme left and extreme right parties garnered large percentages.

The Communist party and left-wing radicals took 11 percent of the vote. The extreme right National Front party won 18 percent, a record for the far right in a presidential election. These results represent a rise in local and nationalistic demands.

The election results in France, and a similar rejection of “austerity” parties in Greece, call into question the future of the current European Union. Europeans were promised peace, stability and prosperity in exchange for melding their various nations into the larger union.

Now the stability and the prosperity are proving to be a chimera for many, at least for the foreseeable future. Many voters are turning away from the lofty ideals of a European superstate and demanding leaders to “make the pain stop now!”

The European ideal may well have to be reconfigured.

Europe in Bible prophecy

Bible prophecy predicts a world-dominating political and economic union to exist just before the return of Jesus Christ. This union will be an avatar of the Roman Empire that dominated Europe for centuries.

The imagery of Daniel chapter 7 speaks of four great successive empires. The last and most powerful of them is Rome. The Western Roman Empire fell in A.D. 476, though it was resurrected a number of times in the form of the Holy Roman Empire—a union of European kings and the Catholic Church.

Interestingly, Daniel 7:21-27 shows this fourth empire will be active at the time of the return of Christ. There will be a resurrection of this politico-religious union in Europe prior to the establishment of the Kingdom of God on the earth.

Parts of Revelation 17 mirror the prophecy of Daniel 7, showing a city built on seven hills that “reigns over the kings of the earth” (verses 9, 18), which will produce a great king who will attempt to make war on Jesus Christ at His return (verses 13-18).

A number of cities in the world claim to be built on seven hills, but few can claim to reign over “the kings of the earth” and none in the manner of Rome.

How do we get from here to there?

Since the near destruction of Europe in World War II, there has been a consistent and growing effort to unify Europe, and certain world trends have opened the way. The cold war partition of Europe, a great obstacle to European union, ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. A dedicated bureaucracy of European technocrats, often unelected and unaccountable to the voting public, continually push in the direction of a United States of Europe.

It is likely that the kind of union mentioned in Revelation 17 will not ultimately come about in stable, peaceful times but will be forged in a time of crisis that would force normally democratic Europeans to voluntarily give their allegiance to autocratic leaders. In that context, it is interesting to consider the rise of the extreme right in Europe.

Still, the end-time union will be fragile. Daniel 2:43 says of the end-time European Union that the parts “will not adhere to one another, just as iron does not mix with clay.”

Fleeing toward a strong union

A number of these elements are at work today: a chaotic world scene, especially the world economy, is forcing Europeans to “flee forward” toward stronger union. But nationalistic elements are also tugging strongly in the other direction. Iron and clay don’t easily coexist.

Our world is unlikely to grow quiet and stable in the years ahead. The rise of radical Islam antagonistic toward the Western world, the increasing spread of technologies of weapons of mass destruction, the potential for world health emergencies, the chaos of a highly integrated world economy that no one fully understands or controls—all contribute to the likelihood of world crises the likes of which the world has never yet seen.

These will force European nations together in their culminating union. And this, in turn, will be a clear sign that the establishment of the Kingdom of God is very near.

Joel Meeker is the regional director for French-language areas for the Church of God, a Worldwide Association. He and his wife lived in France for nine years.

For more on what’s ahead for Europe in Bible prophecy, see:

• Greece: The Burning Question
• Coming: A United States of Europe!
• Is a “New Europe” on the Horizon?