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French Presidential Elections: Marine Le Pen vs Emmanuel Macron
The French will go to the polls this year to pick their new president, and the world will be watching to see just how far the “populist wave” has travelled in Europe. There is no clear winner at this stage – political scandals, distrust towards the polls, and the recent shock Brexit result in Britain and Donald Trump’s victory in the United States mean that all bets off.
Candidates are pitted against each other twice – the first round of the vote takes place on April 23rd. Then, the two top candidates face each other in a second run-off, on May 7th.
The top four candidates in 2017’s French election are, in alphabetical order: Francois Fillon (Les Republicains), Benoit Hamon (Socialists), Marine Le Pen (Front National) and Emmanual Macron (Independent).
The Les Republicain’s Francois Fillon is smarting from alleged claims he paid his wife thousands of euros to do a fictitious job, and he is running third in the polls. He is now under investigation by the French authorities, who recently raided the lower house of parliament in connection with the probe.
Benoit Hamon in last place has little or no chance under a current wave of resentment from the populace. Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party is in tatters after a disastrous term that has made him one of the least popular presidents in the country’s history.
This now appears a two horse race between Marine Le Pen and Emmanual Macron. More than that – it is a clash of nationalism against globalism, as Macron is indeed the new candidate for the international financial cartel – having replaced the long-time French globalist poster-boy Fillon.
The French Presidential Systemhttp://www.francethisway.com/images/places/versailles.jpg
France in its modern history has worn out five monarchies, five republics and 16 constitutions. Its people are still more ready than most to go into the streets. It was, and is, a country in which rhetoric and visions play a prominent part in politics. The party structure, always weak in France, has struggled to produce agreed strategies or new generations of politicians and funding problems have provided endless financial scandals, in which Sarkozy is now again entangled.
This is because France fluctuates between short spasms of change and longer periods of immobility. It has developed institutional barriers and tacit compromises to hold the boat steady – but the boat is slowly sinking from political and economic volatility. Its current Fifth Republic is a ‘republican monarchy’, with parliament downgraded and a powerful president supposed to unite the nation — a task sadly beyond most politicians. The current election therefore will decide what direction France takes with regard to the EU, NATO and other political and trade policies currently aligned with the western powers.
The two-round ballot, designed in the 1820’s to prevent hotheads from winning elections – gives voters and politicians a second chance, not so much to reconsider their own choices as to react against the choices of others. In the first round you vote for the person you want; in the second you vote against the person you fear.
This evolved historically into what was called ‘republican discipline’. In the first round there could be a range of competing candidates of all shades, but in the second round all loyal republicans, from the mildest liberal to the reddest communist, would vote for the candidate best placed to beat the enemy of the republic — usually a royalist or a nationalist.
The apparition of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in the 1970’s, combining traditionalist conservatives, embittered nationalists and nostalgic fascists, met the same response. When Le Pen shocked France by getting through to the second round of the 2002 presidential election, he was crushed in that round by Jacques Chirac, who got 82% of the vote. Republicans rallied, including those on the far left – ‘Better a crook than a fascist’ said one slogan. The crucial question in this election is whether the republican reflex still operates. If not, Marine Le Pen could win.
Consider the long-term consequences of the two-round voting system. Margaret Thatcher or David Cameron could never have been elected in a French-style second round. The British system not only can – but regularly does – give power to a united minority over a divided majority. In a French-style system, Thatcher and Cameron and their parliamentary supporters would inevitably have been defeated in second-round ballots by a combination of Labour and the Liberals.
In short, precisely because of its turbulent political history, France has developed a series of barriers against radical change. A leading sociologist, Michel Crozier, described it in 1970 as a ‘société bloquée’ — a ‘stalemate society’. Of course, much in France does change but the price of political stability is that certain fundamental rights and privileges remain untouched.
Advantageous retirement rights and pensions. Certain influential professions. Farmers, sheltered by the Common Agricultural Policy. People in permanent employment, protected by laws penalising redundancy and limiting hours of work. The public sector — in French ‘le service public’, significantly in the singular — is the core of this system: schools, public hospitals, railways, universities, local government, the post office. The politics of its workforce, combining a real sense of public service with a jealous defence of rights and privileges, explains why France is the most anti-capitalist country in Europe.
However one does not need very right-wing views to see the accumulating disadvantages of its deficit-spending economic policies. The highest taxes in the developed world, especially on businesses. Chronic unemployment, worst among the young and ethnic minorities. Slow growth, including among small companies afraid of the burden of regulation incurred by getting too big. Crumbling infrastructure. Overstressed banks and a dangerous public budget deficit have made the current economic system unworkable and possibly at a point of unavoidable reform.
On top of this chronic malaise has come the tension between republican secularism and Islam, a fraught mixture of cultural difference, social incompatibility and justified mistrust – hugely inflamed by a series of terrorist attacks, refugees, open borders and crimes that the police and military are unable to cope with.
The problem with the French system is when a tipping point is reached the effects are usually extreme – for it is only an extreme set of circumstances that can drive change to the political and economic status-quo that we see today.
The Fifth Republic
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZFcfrxdyyxk/UfOP0RFuwzI/AAAAAAABSA8/QUNMcwpna38/s1600/4.jpg
France is a representative democracy or a republic. Public officials in the legislative and executive branches are either elected by the citizens (directly or indirectly) or appointed by elected officials. Referendums may also be called to consult the French citizenry directly on a particular question, especially one which concerns amendment to the Constitution.
France elects on its national level a head of state – the president – and a legislature.
The President is elected for a five-year term (previously, seven years), directly by the citizens (see Election of the President of the French Republic). As per The Constitutional Law on the Modernisation of the Institutions of the Fifth Republic (2008) a president cannot serve more than two consecutive terms. François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac are the only Presidents to date who have served a full two terms (14 years for the former, 12 years for the latter).
The Parliament (Parlement) has two chambers.
The National Assembly (Assemblée Nationale) has 577 members, elected for a five-year term in single seat-constituencies directly by the citizens.
The Senate (Sénat) has 348 members, elected for six-year terms. 328 members are elected by an electoral college consisting of elected representatives from each of 96 departments in metropolitan France, 8 of which are elected from other dependencies, and 12 of which are elected by the French Assembly of French Citizens Abroad (Assemblée des Français de l’étranger) which has replaced the High Council of French Citizens Abroad (Conseil Supérieur des Français de l’Étranger) a 155-member assembly elected by citizens living abroad.
A word on polls.
Broadly, the polls claim that Marine Le Pen will be the victor in the first round, with 29% or so of the vote. But in the second and decisive round, she will be defeated, either by Macron with 66% of the vote. All the polls say the NF will not gain the presidency.
However, it’s a serious question to ask if these polls are credible.
The American pollsters lied outrageously during the 2016 campaign. In hindsight, we can see this was an organised attempt to create an electoral reality with the use of well-coordinated lying. This stunt was also international and crossed continents.
Three weeks before the elections, Paddy Power, an Irish betting firm, “called the election” for Clinton and paid off all the bets on her, saying there was no point in waiting. They paid out a few million needlessly. One can only speculate how Paddy Power was reimbursed, in cash or in more favourable treatment of internet betting. So the manipulation of perceptions is not just a theory, it’s a fact.
Campaigns
Increasing support by French nationalists (or ‘dissidents’) has raised the possibility that Marine Le Pen could ride to the Elysée palace on a wave of populism. Only one FN presidential candidate has made it to the second round – her father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002. Marine is virtually assured of doing so, current polls suggest, but her chance of winning the run-off remains uncertain. Once a neo-liberal club for churlish business owners, Le Pen has turned the FN into a strong movement for the populist platform.
http://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/78/590x/secondary/Marine-826248.jpg
Her campaign of “de-démonisation” since clawing the leadership from her father in 2011 sought to soften the party’s then-toxic image, and she is now being widely touted as a strong contender in her own right. If elected, she plans to call a referendum on EU membership within six months. She also predicted other European members will join her. Along with leaving the EU, Le Pen would withdraw France from NATO’s integrated command, crack down on illegal immigration and reduce regular immigration to 10,000 people a year from current EU countries.
Le Pen reiterated some of the 144 “commitments” she has pledged to fulfill, if elected. It is a nationalist agenda laying out plans for France to leave the European Union, control its borders and readopt the old French franc as the national currency. Running under the slogan, “In the Name of the People,” her platform also would create popular referendums on any issue that gathered at least 500,000 signatures. And it would put French people first, with “national preference” enshrined in the Constitution.
The National Front candidate is for “massive” rearmament of law enforcement as well as a plan to recruit an extra 15,000 police and military police. She also wants to loosen the rules about when officers can use their arms. Despite her previous claim to want to re-establish the death penalty, Le Pen doesn’t mention this in the promises, instead vowing to introduce “real” life sentences of up to 30 years in prison.
Le Pen plans to step up France’s laïcité (a French concept of strict secularism), extending the 2004 ban on wearing the Muslim veil (and other religious symbols) in schools and public buildings to all public places. This idea has drawn much ridicule and anger from opponents, who believe it will simply be impossible for the already stretched police forces to enforce and will alienate France’s Muslim community.
Much of Le Pen’s economic pledges centre around protecting French businesses and French farmers and fisherman from foreign competition, including barring any foreign goods that don’t meet the required French standards.
In a bid to woo older voters she wants to cut the retirement age to 60 and cut inheritance tax.
The FN is deeply divided: many put up with Le Pen’s strategy (led by her almost universally despised adviser Florian Philippot) only on the condition that she delivers on the presidency. If she doesn’t, borderline far-right voters may not mobilise for the parliamentary elections in June. In that case, her own leadership position would be in jeopardy.
Le Pen, in other words, may really only have one shot: she either shatters the 50% barrier on the first round or she possibly loses a lot more than the presidency.
A casual observer might think the French and global oligarchs would be happy with François Fillon, a regular politician from the party now known as Les Républicains. Fillon was Prime Minister in the right-wing and very pro-American Sarkozy government (2007-2012) and was a safe bet (if the polls can be believed), and they showed him winning the second round of elections, the ‘knock-out’ round to become the new President.
http://img2.thejournal.ie/inline/3230971/original/?width=630&version=3230971
On January 25th, the French election campaign was thrown into turmoil when the oligarchs made it known that they had switched support to another candidate than the usual right-winger. Their tricks are quite visible. Fillon’s campaign had been progressing smoothly until it was rocked by scandal. The torrent of bad press includes allegations that his wife Penelope was employed in a “fake job” as parliamentary assistant for which she was paid up to €800,000 over 15 years.
Media investigations probing the possible misuse of public funds – labelled ‘Penelopegate’ – were unable to find any evidence that Penelope did any official work with Fillon himself categorically denying the allegations – but the damage has been done.
This comes as shock to people and especially to those outside France. Fillon was the surprise choice by his party late last year after he beat tough competition that included an unsuccessful return bid by Sarkozy when he was still the globalists’ choice – for the moment. A list of Fallon’s globalist “sins” reveal a stubborn French patriot who defends Christians and family values, who wants French-Russian friendship, and who is not a dyed-in-the-wool Europhile. Fillon wants to end the sanctions and he’s also calling for an EU-Russian conference to work out new security arrangements.
Many of Fillion’s recent policies were seen as reflecting the growing influence of Le Pen’s National Front on French politics. Among the policies that saw Fillon win his party primary were promises to cut 500,000 public sector jobs and to reduce immigration to a “strict minimum”. He also proposed to link development aid in Africa to commitments by countries to take back illegal immigrants
Fillion is also supportive of Syrian Christians, who have been a main target of the terrorists. In 2015, he spoke at a meeting of 1600 supporters of this endangered minority while Christian churches have been silent about state-sponsored attacks on their coreligionists. Fillon has gone out on a limb in opposing the genocide of Christians because the US, France, Saudi Arabia and Israel are up to their eyeb~~~~ in supporting the ‘moderate rebels’.
This ordinary right-wing politician didn’t support the Maastrich Treaty which is a foundational document of the EU back in 1992.
Although not the ideal candidate, he apparently rebuilt bridges with the Europhile elite – or so people thought.
In hindsight it is apparent his backers decided to build a brand-new and more reliable candidate to oppose Fillon, but the trigger for the change may have been an interview which Fillon gave to both Le Monde and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – (published January 22nd) three days before the Chained Duck quacked the bombshell allegation on corruption.
In view of subsequent events it became undeniable that Emmanual Macron was the globalists’ Chosen One, but the process to create Macron the Candidate started two years ago in 2014.
http://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/78/590x/secondary/macron-793898.jpg
Who is Emmanual Macron? He was educated mostly at the La Providence lycée in Amiens before his parents sent him to finish his last year of school at the élite high school Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. Until he resigned on August 30, 2016, he was the ‘Ministère de l’Économie et des Finances’ in Holland’s government – a second-tier post where he was at the forefront of pushing through business-friendly reforms. In February 2015, he pledged that government would force through reforms despite opposition from the parliament.
He is best known for the ‘Macron Law’ – which cuts salaries, allows employers to demand work on Sunday, and the usual right-wing stuff, but beneath this façade his real importance is his de-industrialization of the French workforce to meet EU deficit spending quotas. Macron supports the open-door policy toward immigrants and refugees pursued by Angela Merkel in Germany and has expressed confidence in France’s ability to absorb more immigrants and welcomes their arrival into Europe, asserting that the influx will have a positive economic impact.
In June 2015, Emmanual Macron and his German counterpart Sigmar Gabriel published a platform advocating a continuation of European integration. They advocate the continuation “of structural reforms (like the labour market), institutional reforms (including the area of economic governance)” and also a reconciliation of ‘tax and social systems’. He also advocates the creation of a post of the EU Commissioner that would be responsible for the Eurozone and Eurozone’s Parliament and a common budget. In other words – a New World Economic and Political Order without sovereign nations.
Prior to his political career Macron also spent years as a Director at Banque Rothschild – where one deal alone made him a millionaire. It would be critical to know what kind of a man would leave a firm like Rothschilds for public service – unless there are very good reasons to do so.
The last time the Rothschilds put a puppet into the French presidential office, it was to overthrow President Charles De Gaulle, who was an anti-imperialist. At the time, the Lügenpresse stated without details that De Gaulle kicked NATO out of France. In reality, De Gaulle’s offenses were far greater. Few know that he used the prestige of his office to oppose the US wars in Southeast Asia. His speech in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (Sept. 1, 1966) is breathtaking in its deep and eloquent denunciation of the American Empire and his fear for democracy in the years ahead.
The most important offense is that De Gaulle, as a French patriot, was not interested in a European Union where France would lose her sovereignty, and in his time De Gaulle had managed to Make France Great Again with a strong economy based on industrial competitiveness. The elites decided De Gaulle had to go. The chosen tool was Georges Pompidou. Like Macron, Pompidou was a relative nobody, but he was a former Director-General of Banque Rothschild.
Once Pompidou became President, he gave La Banque de France over to private bankers in early 1973. From 1936-1973, the sovereign French government ran its Bank of France to serve the public. The government borrowed money for public works at little or no interest. Bank policies were designed to grow the economy. It was the key to creating “The Glorious Thirty” -the 30 years of postwar economic growth and prosperity (1945-1975). Stripping France of its national bank killed off that prosperity in a few short years. Dissidents scathingly call the legislation ‘ Loi Pompidou, Giscard, Rothschild’ as destroying the Bank of France was considered a huge treason.
Pompideou stands as a great warning. When a Rothschild pawn is running for high office, the people should be very concerned about what comes next. Unfortunately, the French Lügenpresse swept all that under the rug and turned De Gaulle into first a bogeyman, and later a remote icon of history. The only people who bring to light how this is relevant today, and how France today desperately needs another De Gaulle – are the dissidents in Le Pen’s corner.
The French public know two big bad things about Emmanual Macron : Alstom and the Macron Law which attacks labour. The third – the Rothschild connection – lies hidden in plain view. Because the Macron Law it affects all working people in France, the polemics around it have attracted widespread attention. It allows top-down changes to labour contracts with the consent of whichever trade union represents 50% of the workers. It abolished the restrictions on Sunday work, an important item and a serious blow to family life – a strategic goal of anti-humanist liberals, since strong families are a basic protection against predatory capitalism. It ends the 35 hour work week and allows companies to demand 46 hours work for up to 12 weeks a year.
Macron wrote this law, but in an endless string of frauds, the French media call it la Loi El Khomri even though El Khomri, the Labor Minister, didn’t help write it and seems to have opposed it. Macron says long and loud that he would have gone much further in this law, if political realities hadn’t restrained him.
Alstom was one of France’s few remaining high-tech dynamos, a key to French prosperity in the 21st Century. Nuclear reactors, high speed trains, electricity transmission, etc. GE has a similar set of industries, so the American giant offered to buy the nuclear power and electrical transmission part of Alstom for €12.35 billion, but not the train business. That was a paltry sum for businesses with an annual turnover of over €14 billion. Any businessman would understand GE’s initial offer as a fire sale price – but Alstom was not in distress.
Even worse, after all the flim-flam such as a US Department Of “Justice” fine ($970 million) for bribing Indonesian officials, French share-holders ended up with less than €3.7 billion. French people made a public outcry and an effort to prevent losing this jewel, but to no avail. Macron should have prevented this catastrophe, and he did nothing.The American website, Counterpunch, ran a detailed story on Alstom two months ago.
In the last two years, the oligarchic press, the French Lügenpresse, has been trying to turn the nobody Macron into a major candidate, creating a big PR campaign. Polling data from before this campaign started, in late 2014, shows only 6% of the public considered Macron as a serious candidate.
Macron’s ties to Rothschild are in the French media if you know to search it out, but the ties don’t get the prominence and the analysis that it should. The Lügenpresse describes Macron as an “independent centrist.” He is “independent” of everything – except the oligarchs. “Centrist”? Really ? No, this label is as meaningless in France as anywhere. There’s only one polite label for Macron; he is a neoliberal. That means fundamentalist capitalism where, without exaggeration, nothing matters except the accumulation of capital.
If ever the French oligarchs needed to suppress the dissidents, it’s now. The arguments of the dissidents are strong, but their biggest obstacle has been the passivity of the French people. Passivity is ending in France as it is elsewhere. So the elite decided – it was time to call in the police.
The French police have been trying to arrest Alain Soral since Thursday, Feb. 2nd. Alain Soral is an influential French-Swiss thinker, author, and filmmaker and a leader of the dissident faction. The police haven’t stated why they want to arrest him, but the leaders of the “Socialist” government have said in so many words, that they want to ‘permanently’ silence him and Dieudonné M’bala M’bala (another noted dissident). Read that as you will.
Unlike the US (even now with all the suppression) – France does not have free speech. Some topics can’t be discussed openly without fear of arrest. Comments which can be interpreted as racist, as “hate speech”, or as “supporting terrorism”, or merely as revisions of details from the official history of the Holocaust, or simply annoying a few well-connected Jews, are all prosecutable under French law.
Soral says the globalists are very concerned after Trump’s election and “the loss of America”. They believe they have no choice but to hold on to France ‘à tout prix’ (at any cost).
France is indeed at a political crossroad – the choice of candidate at this election will either take the French towards a nationalist agenda enabling social redemption or alternatively implementing the globalists’ solutions and the inevitable economic ruin to the ordinary citizen.
More than that – this election will set the tone for the other coming revolutions within the European Union and beyond – and a chance of a possible stay in the globalist agenda.
It may be true that the French – wittingly or otherwise – decide the fate of European democracy into the 21st century.
http://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/139/590x/secondary/MAP-581492.jpg
Citations
Prof, Robert Tombs at http://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast
http://thesaker.is/french-elite-chose-their-new-pawn-emmanuel-macron-former-director-of-banque-rothschild/
http://www.electionresources.org/fr/
http://www.charles-de-gaulle.org/pages/l-homme/accueil/discours/le-president-de-la-cinquieme-republique-1958-1969/discours-de-phnom-penh-1er-septembre-1966.php in French
https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/02/macron-economics/515919/
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