The French Establishment Has Cause To Be Anxious [VIDEO]

ER Editor: The Duran‘s excellent analyst, Alexander Mercouris gives us a 30-minute breakdown of how he views the 2nd round of the French presidential elections a week on Sunday. Our notes are below.

A note on the first round of the elections this past Sunday: it was both appalling and shocking how, on various TV channels, the PROJECTED vote of both Macron and Le Pen were being displayed, with Macron as the winner. It was as if they had decided the vote ahead of time and were presenting it as a fait accompli. Many picked up on this. Media treatment of the election was truly shocking, and wasn’t what you would expect in terms of seeing results come in and feeling SOME element of surprise as the evening would unfold. However, as Mercouris explains below, Le Pen stands her best chance yet; if she were to win, it wouldn’t be the first time that French politics has been upset in such as a way.

Here are a few tweets showing various reactions after Sunday’s first round.

For the first two, people are not happy with the choice on offer.

Translation: Protests against Macron and Le Pen this evening in Rennes following the announcement of the first round results. Protesters put up barricades in the city centre.

Translation: A protest against Macron and Le Pen flares up this evening in the streets of Lyon. Confrontations blow up between protestors and police.

Translation: It’s McKinsey who’s doing the counting at the Ministry of the Interior? I ask the question because once the voting results are received at the Ministry of Interior, there is no control!

Translation: How much does the Dominion software cost? 1% (of the vote) is missing for Melenchon. That deserves an investigation? 1 million proxy votes ? 230,000 voter write-offs (not clear …)

Translation 1: I have seen in several stories the use of this machine for voting. Share en masse because if it is true they come from dominion voting. The same ones that rigged and stole the American presidential election.

Translation 2: Maria Zakharova, the spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, states that the French election is completely rigged, it’s worse than in the U.S.

Translation: A guy who’s hated by his people, who enjoys making masonic symbols in front of the cameras and who represents himself by saying that the 4th (vaccine) dose is coming

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VIDEO NOTES

The results of the first round of the French presidential election held on Sunday, April 10 are:

Emmanuel Macron 27.6% (ER: globalist, former Rothschild banker, ‘centre’)

Marine Le Pen 23.41%  (ER: actually left in terms of policies these days but demonized in the media as ‘far right’)

Jean-Luc Melenchon 21.95%  (ER: hard left, a known freemason)

Eric Zemmour 7.05%  (ER: new candidate, hard on immigration, funded at arm’s length by the Rothschilds, probably put forward by these forces to divert support away from Le Pen)

Valerie Pecresse 4.79%  (ER: untalented, centre-right Les Republicains but globalist; has called on supporters to vote for Macron in 2nd round)

Anne Hidalgo 1.74% (ER: socialist, globalist mayor of Paris in the process of implementing Agenda 21 in the city). Mercouris: This result signals the implosion of Left and Socialists, making them a marginal force in French life. They’ve polled below Fabian Roussel (2.31%) of the Communists. Electorally, the Communist Party are very marginal. The French Left is reviving somewhat, but it’s concentrating around Jean-Luc Melenchon (Les Insoumis).

So the 2nd round is a straight contest between Le Pen and Macron.

First, it seemed that the attempt to sideline Marine Le Pen, who gets relentlessly labelled as extreme right, a racist, a fascist, etc., has clearly failed. This requires discussion. A few months ago, it seemed that Le Pen was at risk of being sidelined by Eric Zemmour as the leader of the ‘far right’. Zemmour may have been genuine (ER: we don’t believe so but Mercouris is similarly sceptical), but he’s known for his journalism and his sharp and incisive appearances on TV political discussion panels. He’s always been an unlikely candidate, and his entry into politics was being facilitated to a great degree by powerful French media groups who gave him a lot of attention and built him up as a credible alternative to the historic leader of the French hard right, traditionally Le Pen. The real purpose of launching Zemmour was likely to divide the hard right and facilitate Macron’s eventual victory, making it possible for Pecresse as leader of the centre right to storm through and face Macron in the 2nd round (ER: this would have been globalist against globalist). If that was the plan, then it has largely failed – ‘largely’ because Le Pen’s 23.41% with Zemmour’s 7.05%, mathematically Le Pen would have won more than 31% of the vote making her the winner of the first round, surpassing Macron at 27.6%. This is all hypothetical, of course. Certainly, if Zemmour had not run, then it would have been easier to label Le Pen as ‘far right’ making it harder for her overall. The soft right voters may have avoided her, favouring Macron or Pecresse.

Nonetheless, the fact that Le Pen and Zemmour’s combined vote exceeds Macron’s ought to be a cause for concern on Macron’s side. The overall, final result in the first round, despite the heavy spinning that’s been going on in the MSM commentariat, should provoke unease among the French establishment. 27.6% for Macron is actually on the low side given that he’s the incumbent seeking re-election. A lot will depend on Melenchon, the undisputed leader of the French left and where his vote will go, as other left parties head toward oblivion. The mixture of left and Republicain voters who will opt for Macron in the 2nd round won’t actually add much to his total, which would leave him below where he needs to be in order to beat Le Pen in the 2nd round. It’s going to be a tough 2nd round, in which Melenchon’s 22%, which is far above what people expected him to get, will matter. If there’s a massive abstention among his voters, which is what he was advising his voters to do (and to especially NOT vote for Le Pen), it’s difficult to see how Macron will win. But if this Melenchon vote does split, it will still be difficult for Macron.

It’s hard to see how Melenchon’s voters and the Communists, who’ve all been fed a steady diet in France of how ‘far right’ Le Pen is, will vote for her. Le Pen has consistently faced this difficulty: in terms of economics, she’s very close to Melenchon’s views; in terms of foreign policy, she’s also close to Melenchon, being sceptical of the EU and NATO. You would think that people from the Left could transfer their vote to her and not Macron. But in France it’s not straightforward. In France, the politics tend to be dominated by the two long shadows of the French Revolution (up to the 2nd World War) and WWII itself. Those 2 events make it difficult for the Left to swing over to people who have been labelled as ‘far right’. However, in Le Pen’s case, her politics resemble far more those of Charle de Gaulle – she’s sceptical of immigration as he was, sceptical of European integration, and prefers a state-controlled economy (dirigiste). She’s also hostile to NATO. She’s shown a willingness to work with the Russians and is sceptical of the United States. De Gaulle could get away with that and overcome divisions with these policies, but it’s far more difficult for Le Pen.

If Le Pen could break through, however, she’s closer to doing it this time around. First, there’s a massive groundswell of unease at the way France has been bundled onto the train of anti-Russian sanctions as has happened over the last few months. Macron has supported every conceivable move by NATO. Given French history, this doesn’t go down well. On top of that is the cost of living crisis, which is actually less severe in France because it gets a lot of its power from local nuclear sources. So inflation is lower in France (5-6%) than it is in other EU countries, which has gone up to 12% in the Netherlands. Macron is aloof, conceited and arrogant (or the cleverest boy in the class!) but he’s inept and this is grating more on the French. Which explains his relatively low vote for an incumbent seeking re-election at the first term. And if you supported the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), his heavy-handedness with them and his handling of the virus crisis doesn’t go down well, nor his neo-liberalism. Both Melenchon and Le Pen seek to repudiate his neoliberal policies.

(ER: Mercouris doesn’t mention that the vaccine issue and vaccine pass/QR code is still causing massive problems and is seen as a threat the population, and that Macron is promising to further enforce them if he gets back into power. There are still thousands of unemployed people unable to get financial help because of his hardline vaccine policies. It is noteworthy that Le Pen has promised to re-instate people kicked out of their jobs for refusing them.)

A Macron win is still possible but the polls are probably correct which show him to have a fight on his hands. Mercouris doesn’t expect Le Pen to win as the structural problems of division within the country are too great. But then Mitterrand’s unexpected victory in 1981 showed that it was possible to overcome a similar set of structural problems. So Le Pen is still in with a chance. It depends how she conducts herself in the next few days and how Melenchon’s supporters vote.

If Le Pen does become president, it would be an election that bookends a period in French politics. The era of cynical French politics embodied by Francois Mitterrand would be over.

Source

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