The Sovereigntist Movement Is Not Going Anywhere
WAYNE MADSEN
It almost appears oxymoronic that national sovereignty movements are now global in nature. And to the dismay of globalists who gather at annual elitist and secretive meetings sponsored by the Bilderberg Group, the World Economic Forum, the Ambrosetti Forum, and the Bohemian Club to bemoan the growth of populist political parties, national sovereignty movements are here to stay.
After the historic strong second-place finish of French National Front leader Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election, the surprising referendum victory of the English and Welsh sovereigntist BREXIT forces in deciding to that the United Kingdom should leave the EU, the demise of the pro-EU Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, the presidential win of Donald Trump in the United States, and a consolidation in power of nationalist political parties in other countries, traditional political parties have taken note of the fact that the forces of anti-globalism and workers’ rights must be reckoned with and not in a negative sense. For that reason, the pro-EU and left-of-center Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) has stricken from its political rule book a restriction barring forming any national governing coalitions with the right-wing and anti-EU Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). In fact the SPÖ and FPÖ have been jointly governing the province of Burgenland since 2015.
Burgenland’s SPÖ governor, Hans Niessl, has little choice but to align with the right-wing party. Burgenland, which lies on the Hungarian border, was feeling the brunt of the migrant invasion of Europe. Niessl is but one of a growing number of European politicians considered to be left-of-center and moderate who have decided that cooperating with the far right is in the interests of national sovereignty. Niessl’s socialists and the FPÖ coalition have capped social benefits to newly-arrived immigrants and beefed up security on Burgenland’s border with Hungary.
The current Austrian coalition government of SPÖ Chancellor Christian Kern, who governs Austria in concert with the traditional conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), has been pushed to adopt sovereigntist policies, as the result of the popularity of the FPÖ, a party once disparaged as a fringe neo-Nazi group. The FPÖ has been hovering between 30 to 33 percent popularity in Austrian opinion polls. The next parliamentary election is scheduled for 2018 but may be held earlier.
Although the FPÖ’s candidate for president, Norbert Hofer, narrowly lost to Green Party-linked Alexander Van Der Bellen in two successive elections for Austrian president, the party’s candidate for Chancellor, Heinz-Christian Strache (pictured), has been polling ahead of both the SPÖ and ÖVP.
The public speeches and statements of ÖVP foreign minister Sebastian Kurz and ÖVP Interior Minister Wolfgang Slobotka have become almost indistinguishable from that of the FPÖ. Kurz and Slobotka routinely accuse the EU of «weakness» in such issues as border security, the EU’s accommodation of migrants from mainly Muslim countries, and burdensome regulations routinely issued by «Eurocrats» in Brussels.
The corporate media, taking direction from their globalist masters in the elite power centers of Washington, London, New York, Frankfurt, and Brussels, have worked overtime in painting sovereigntist political parties in the worst light possible. On the eve of the French election, European integrationists and Atlanticists sounded the warning klaxon about the dangers posed to them by the «far right», Brexit, and conservative nationalist anti-EU political leaders like Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, and, of course, Le Pen in France. However, there are also anti-globalist political leaders on the left, including leaders of Communist and left-wing socialist parties in Greece, France, Germany, and Italy.
French left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who campaigned on a platform of the EU fundamentally reforming or face a French exit – «FREXIT» finished fourth in the French first-round presidential election. That means that the anti-EU votes of second-place finisher Le Pen and Mélenchon (both pictured) accounted for some 42 percent of the vote. Moreover, the candidates of the traditional center-right and center-left parties, Francois Fillon of the Republicans and Benoît Hamon of the Socialist, respectively, did not make it into the final round. Hamon led the Socialists to an inglorious fifth place finish with a mere 6 percent of the vote.
Le Pen scored her greatest victories – with over 25 percent of the vote – in northeastern France in Ardennes, Meuse, Haute-Marne, Vosges, Haut-Saône, Territoire-de-Belfort, Haut-Rhin, and Meurthe-et-Moselle; the island of Corsica; Alpes-Maritime, Gard, and Vaucluse in southeastern France; Eure, Eure-et-Loire, Loir-et-Cher, Aube, and Yonne in north-central France; Lot-et-Garonne, Tarn-et-Garonne, and Pyrénées-Orientales in southwestern France; Pas-de-Calais, Nord, Aisne, Pas-de-Calais, Seine-Maritime, Oise, and Somme in northwestern France; and Ain in eastern France. Le Pen saw a 5 percent or higher increase in support in several departments since her third-place finish in the first round of the 2012 presidential election. Le Pen scored her greatest gains in Ardennes, Meuse, Haute-Marne, and Haut Saône in northeastern France; Aude and Pyrénées-Orientales and Hérault in the Pyrenees region; Seine-Maritime, Oise, Somme, and Eure and Nord in northwestern France; and Nièvre in central France.
The EU leadership, in a vainglorious attempt to claim the sovereignty and national pride agenda for themselves, have stated that European nations cannot be «sovereign» without the EU. Of course, this policy ignores the existence of separate nation-states on the European continent.
After the Malta EU Summit in March, EU Council President Donald Tusk (pictured) tried to claim that the EU and national sovereignty movements are compatible: «There is no contradiction between an integrated Europe and the independent of our nations; indeed, the more united Europe is the more capable it is of protecting national and sovereign interests.» Tusk’s comments across Europe were laughed off as a pathetic attempt by Brussels to co-opt the national sovereignty parties and movements in Europe. In fact, the EU is anathema to national interests within Europe as witnessed by its complete disregard for European religion and culture in promoting the mass migration of Muslims from war-ravaged regions, all at the expense of the safety of European women and children, social service programs, and overall national security.
Even though the mainline pro-EU French conservatives and socialists failed to make it into the second round, EU federalist pests like German Social Democratic candidate for chancellor and former president of the European Parliament Martin Schulz congratulated Macron, a former banker, and urged French voters «to unite so the nationalist does not become president.» EU integration fanatics like Schulz, Tusk, and others should be careful about what they wish for.
Brussels-nurtured political creatures and bureaucratic leeches like Schulz, Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured) are a main part of the reason there is a nationalist and sovereigntist rejection of the EU and globalism throughout Europe. Europeans have tired of the arrogance and elitism, sometimes punctuated by the drunken outbursts of Juncker, of the EU oligarchs.
In the 2002 second round presidential election between Jacques Chirac of the traditional conservatives and Jean-Marie Le Pen – the National Front candidate and father of Marine Le Pen, several of those who voted for the Communist candidate in the first round, mostly workers upset about imported labor grabbing their jobs for less wages in and around the Marseille and northern border regions, opted to vote for Le Pen. In the May 2017 second-round, Macron, the favored Euro-politician, cannot take the leftist vote for granted. The real left in France – not the bourgeoisie intellectuals who produce nothing but hot air, but the workers in Marseille, Nice, Calais, and other cities that have borne the brunt of the migrant invasion – will see Le Pen as preferable to the banker Macron. Many from the working class in Nice voted for Le Pen because they or someone they knew lost one or more relatives in the July 14, 2016 truck attack massacre by a crazed jihadist declaring his loyalty to the Islamic State.
Many French citizens will see Macron, who would rather want France to forget about the Bastille Day massacre, as a modern version of the disinterested French monarch tossed out of power by Bastille-emboldened revolutionaries. Le Pen, on the other hand, will be seen by many French citizens as someone who will not take orders from a domineering, albeit secular version of the Holy Roman Empire in Brussels.
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About the author
Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. He is also a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club