Posted on 04/25/2017 6:08:33 AM PDT by Kaslin
For the French establishment, Sunday's presidential election came close to a near-death experience. As the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, it was a "damn near-run thing."
Neither candidate of the two major parties that have ruled France since Charles De Gaulle even made it into the runoff, an astonishing repudiation of France's national elite.
Marine Le Pen of the National Front ran second with 21.5 percent of the vote. Emmanuel Macron of the new party En Marche! won 23.8 percent.
Macron is a heavy favorite on May 7. The Republicans' Francois Fillon, who got 20 percent, and the Socialists' Benoit Hamon, who got less than 7 percent, both have urged their supporters to save France by backing Macron.
Ominously for U.S. ties, 61 percent of French voters chose Le Pen, Fillon or radical Socialist Jean-Luc Melenchon. All favor looser ties to America and repairing relations with Vladimir Putin's Russia.
Le Pen has a mountain to climb to win, but she is clearly the favorite of the president of Russia, and perhaps of the president of the United States. Last week, Donald Trump volunteered:
"She's the strongest on borders, and she's the strongest on what's been going on in France. ... Whoever is the toughest on radical Islamic terrorism, and whoever is the toughest at the borders, will do well in the election."
As an indicator of historic trends in France, Le Pen seems likely to win twice the 18 percent her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, won in 2002, when he lost in the runoff to Jacques Chirac.
The campaign between now and May 7, however, could make the Trump-Clinton race look like an altarpiece of democratic decorum.
Not only are the differences between the candidates stark, Le Pen has every incentive to attack to solidify her base and lay down a predicate for the future failure of a Macron government.
And Macron is vulnerable. He won because he is fresh, young, 39, and appealed to French youth as the anti-Le Pen. A personification of Robert Redford in "The Candidate."
But he has no established party behind him to take over the government, and he is an ex-Rothschild banker in a populist environment where bankers are as welcome as hedge-fund managers at a Bernie Sanders rally.
He is a pro-EU, open-borders transnationalist who welcomes new immigrants and suggests that acts of Islamist terrorism may be the price France must pay for a multiethnic and multicultural society.
Macron was for a year economic minister to President Francois Hollande who has presided over a 10 percent unemployment rate and a growth rate that is among the most anemic in the entire European Union.
He is offering corporate tax cuts and a reduction in the size of a government that consumes 56 percent of GDP, and presents himself as the "president of patriots to face the threat of nationalists."
His campaign is as much "us vs. them" as Le Pen's.
And elite enthusiasm for Macron seems less rooted in any anticipation of future greatness than in the desperate hope he can save the French establishment from the dreaded prospect of Marine.
But if Macron is the present, who owns the future?
Across Europe, as in France, center-left and center-right parties that have been on the scene since World War II appear to be emptying out like dying churches. The enthusiasm and energy seem to be in the new parties of left and right, of secessionism and nationalism.
The problem for those who believe the populist movements of Europe have passed their apogee, with losses in Holland, Austria and, soon, France, that the fever has broken, is that the causes of the discontent that spawned these parties are growing stronger.
What are those causes?
A growing desire by peoples everywhere to reclaim their national sovereignty and identity, and remain who they are. And the threats to ethnic and national identity are not receding, but growing.
The tide of refugees from the Middle East and Africa has not abated. Weekly, we read of hundreds drowning in sunken boats that tried to reach Europe. Thousands make it. But the assimilation of Third World peoples in Europe is not proceeding. It seems to have halted.
Second-generation Muslims who have lived all their lives in Europe are turning up among the suicide bombers and terrorists.
Fifteen years ago, al-Qaida seemed confined to Afghanistan. Now it is all over the Middle East, as is ISIS, and calls for Islamists in Europe to murder Europeans inundate social media.
As the numbers of native-born Europeans begin to fall, with their anemic fertility rates, will the aging Europeans become more magnanimous toward destitute newcomers who do not speak the national language or assimilate into the national culture, but consume its benefits?
If a referendum were held across Europe today, asking whether the mass migrations from the former colonies of Africa and the Middle East have on balance made Europe a happier and better place to live in in recent decades, what would that secret ballot reveal?
Does Macron really represent the future of France, or is he perhaps one of the last men of yesterday?
I think it’s a safe bet that if Le Pen wins then she will start France’s withdrawal from the EU. I don’t see the EU surviving the loss of two of its biggest economies.
most likely
Socialism works only as long as they have access to other people's money.
He’s not weird, loads of people marry their high school sweetheart!
He’s not weird, loads of people marry their high school sweetheart!
While few if any of Melenchon's Hard Left voters will vote for LePen, I don't see many of them backing Macron either, since Melenchon also ran on an anti-globalization platform, albeit for different reasons.
In short, LePen may very well get an upset victory like Trump last November.
Similarly, economic globalism only works while there is a pool of cheap labor available, either to import or to outsource to. Just as socialism drains money from the middle class to pay for social programs for the indigent, globalism functions either by draining investment capital from developed countries and funneling them to the Third World, or by dumping the surplus population of the Third World into the developed world.
Consequently, globalism will collapse for the same reasons that Socialism has collapsed.
I doubt that collapse will be anywhere near as smooth.
Macron is a Socialist EU g!oval puppet with Mommy issues. He’s 39 and married to his former theatrical teacher age 64.
How could Macron be France’s Last Great Hope if he is just a repackaged re-branded Socialist with all of the same ideas and goals of his predecessors? If you put lipstick on a Pig .... It’s still a Pig.
You either didn't read or didn't understand the article. Macron is being propped up the France's establishment parties and by the EUcrats in order to subvert French national sovereignty and prop up the power of the EU. He's the Great Hope of the ideologues at Davos and an enemy of France, as internationalists are the enemies of all sovereign nations.
I don’t pretend to know how this election will turn out over the next couple of weeks...French politics is, I’m sure, hard enough for those live there to understand.
But I do think one thing of great import has happened. The establishment parties see that they are being tossed aside as failures...so they are repackaging with marketing in order to retain their grasp on power for a little longer. Macron is their new packaging (so like Hillary) along with being a feint (so like Bernie), recognizing that politics there is rapidly changing against the establishment.
LePen will at the worst be the powerful opposition force - always nipping now at the establishment heels. And because the establishment can do nothing but continue on their current path on immigration and EU submission, all the failures, the violence, the economic upheaval, the terrorism and the isolation of the working and middle classes, will be laid firmly at their doorstep with a powerful opposition pointing this out at every turn. Even if LePen doesn’t win, the establishment will need to try to address her issues...or she will annihilate them in succeeding elections.
What recent elections in the US and Europe are showing is that people are waking up to the fact that Globalism is yet another ideological god that failed. It promised people prosperity and security. It delivered those in megadoses to the ruling elites, while everyone else was given declining standards of living, lack of job security and social stability, economic/social/cultural displacement of society through mass immigration, and a growing terrorist threat.
Let's hope that Macron and the globalists who backed him will come to the same humiliating political end as Hillary.
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