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No such thing as bad publicity for Marine Le Pen in Lebanon

The EU is enormously grateful to Lebanon as it gets a great deal here.

It's quite extraordinary how tiny Lebanon gets used and abused by new and old Europe, taken for a ride like the office bike and then cast aside when it suits. Just a few weeks ago the EU's foreign policy chief jetted into the Lebanese capital to hold talks with the president to assure him of the EU's support for the new government and all that it endeavours to do. Apart from a copied and pasted press release republished by one English language outlet, usually Federica Mogherini doesn't "do media" when she comes to Lebanon. I know this as, in 2015, she also did a flying visit and these were the exact words which her press officer used when she bellowed down the phone at me, when I asked if I could do a short interview with the former Italian foreign minister.
The EU is enormously grateful to Lebanon as it gets a great deal here. For a piddling $220 million of aid, Lebanon doesn't send 1.8 million refugees over the border back into Syria. Or worse, onto Europe. And the real sweetener for Brussels is that, like so many poor countries which benefit from EU aid, Lebanon also performs its duties of giving the EU press machine the 'grip-n-grin' statutory picture for hand-out fodder to the Brussels press pack. This is a huge part of EU aid: the be part of the propaganda machine which gives the EU the publicity it craves.
But does this great relationship extend beyond the EU and also include its former colonial master, France? Can Paris get a piece of the action as well?
It was hardly an auspicious event. But briefly, Beirut stirred briefly this week with the arrival of French far-right leader and presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen who on Monday met for the first time with a foreign head of state - Lebanese President Michel Aoun.
Le Pen is trying to establish international credentials as part of her current bid for the Elysée Palace, to become France's first woman president who's is really rather keen to take the country out of the EU through a swift 'Frexit'. If she succeeds, then Brussels knows that the entire EU project will collapse faster than you can say "Edith Piaf on a moped"
And so, Le Pen needs the press coverage as well and needs to tick the box 'foreign heads of state'. And Lebanon was delighted to oblige given that Michel Aoun is a francophone who lived in Paris for a number of years during his dark days in exile from troubled Lebanon buckling under a Syrian occupation. According to the press garb, she "was also meeting business and religious leaders during the two-day visit to the Middle Eastern nation".
"We discussed the long and fruitful friendship between our two countries," the National Front (FN) leader said after meeting Aoun at the presidential palace in the hilltop suburb of Baabda.
Does someone need to tell her that the friendship with France is waning and that Lebanon is hardly considered a francophone country any more with the language confined to the old and a tiny part of society (largly christian)? The world has changed. English is spoken much more and the special relationship with Paris is largly a myth which makes good press release fodder but couldn't even extend to France cutting Lebanon some slack over a three billion dollar arms deal - to help fight Daesh on the border with Syria.
I read on Twitter that left wing brats are planning to hold a demonstration against her but can't quite establish what the theme might be. They don't seem to understand that political animals like Le Pen follow the adage 'no such thing as bad publicity'. I hate to think who is coming next from Europe to save their political career as Lebanon becomes a destination for political tourism although news from Brussels that Jean-Claude Junker, the President of the European Commission, is quitting his job in March is good news.
Martin Jay recently won the U.N.'s prestigious Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize (UNCA) in New York, for his journalism work in the Middle East. He is based in Beirut and can be followed at @MartinRJay