On Sunday, May 7, 2017 the French will be electing a new president whose term will run for five years.

It is almost certain that Emmanuel Macron (En Marche!) will win.

Marine Le Pen (Front National) is likely to pick up more votes than her father Jean-Marie has in past elections, but there is too much historical baggage attached to the FN to make her a winning proposition nationwide.

May 3 – debate

On Wednesday, May 3, TF1 hosted a televised debate of the two candidates, which was also shown on several other channels.

One of my favourite socio-political commentators, journalist, author and essayist Natacha Polony, appeared on RMC (talk radio) the next morning to say that the debate revealed one candidate who doesn’t understand the issues and one who is a perfect Énarque (graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration, where the top politicians come from). Macron is also a graduate of Sciences-Po, also very important to political life.

Polony says that the debates told the French public very little about how they would resolve current problems in their nation. A few ‘hollow’ soundbites and ‘vulgarity’, she says, do not constitute a policy position.

France24 reported similarly. The debate was:

loud, fast, personal, riven with inaccuracies and thin on substance …

The media and viewers thought that Macron won the debate hands down.

SkyNews has a good recap of the highlights:

In angry exchanges, Ms Le Pen played up Mr Macron’s background as a former banker and economy minister in the outgoing Socialist government.

Portraying him as Francois Hollande’s lapdog, she said he was the “candidate of globalisation gone wild”.

He tore into her flagship policy of abandoning the euro and accused her of failing to offer solutions to France’s economic problems such as high unemployment.

The attacks were often personal with Mr Macron calling Ms Le Pen a “parasite” and a liar.

Also:

Ms Le Pen accused Mr Macron of having no plan on security but being indulgent with Islamic extremism.

He told her that radicals would love her to become president because she would stoke conflict.

Alternative media’s Paul Joseph Watson, a frequent traveller to France, reacted from London:

For the FN, the debate was of historical importance:

The TV appearance was the first time a National Front candidate has appeared in a run-off debate – an indication of how far Le Pen has brought her party by softening its image and trying to separate it from past xenophobic associations.

Macron win baked in from the start

Emmanuel Macron was meant to win from late 2016.

The media are doing their job in carrying water for him. This week’s French magazine stand is incredible:

Macron, who served as François Hollande’s economics minister for two years, was his pet in many ways. His campaign was designed to beat that of the conservative François Fillon (LR) and the socialist former education minister Benoît Hamon (PS).

Manuel Valls

Those who know that former prime minister Manuel Valls was tipped to be the next PS candidate years ago might wonder what happened. This, too, was part of the plan.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A PS party leader warned Valls not to run and do something ‘irreversible’.

Shortly afterwards, Hollande told Valls in a one-on-one meeting in December that eventually his time would come.

Hollande, incidentally, kept Valls in the dark as to whether he would run for a second term. He didn’t.

Valls did not understand the message from his party. It was not Valls’s turn for a reason. The PS supported Macron, even though Macron created his own political movement.

Valls went ahead and ran for the PS primary earlier this year. He was a long-time favourite. Yet, the weak Benoît Hamon beat him. Behind the scenes, the PS machine made sure Valls did not win. Nothing personal, just politics.

Valls put his support behind Macron rather than Hamon before the first round of voting on Sunday, April 23. That was understandable as Hamon was polling only in the single digits and received only slightly over 6% of the vote that day.

François Fillon

François Fillon of Les Républicains, or LR, was my candidate. He served as prime minister under Nicolas Sarkozy between 2007 and 2012.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fillon has always been measured, reserved and statesman-like.

There was never a hint of scandal about him.

He won the LR primary decisively on November 27, 2016 with two-thirds of the vote. The turnout — non-LR members could pay €3 for a ballot — was immense. Many polling stations had long queues all day. Some ran out of ballots. Officials were surprised, to say the least.

The result took everyone aback. No one had written much about Fillon in the run-up to the primary. In fact, one newsweekly, Marianne, called him ‘Mr Nobody’.

In December, with a sound political manifesto, he was seen as the man to beat.

In the third week of January, two of Marianne‘s readers wrote letters to the editor, expressing fear about Fillon. In the magazine’s 20 – 26 January 2017, edition, one reader wrote about the disaster 2017 would turn out to be with ‘the arrival of Fillon at the Elysée’ (p. 50). The other reader’s letter bore the title ‘SOS Fillon’. It said what an ‘inhuman’ cruelty from an environmental perspective it would be for him to be ‘at the Elysée’ (p. 52).

The polls showed Fillon as the top candidate at that time.

On January 25, everything changed.

Mysterious charges came out of the blue, with an address book and a dossier given to Le Canard enchaîné. Allegations purported that Fillon’s Welsh wife Penelope had engaged in fictitious employment and had been paid hundreds of thousands of euros for work she had never done both for a literary magazine and as Fillon’s parliamentary assistant. This was strange, because the allegations stretched back to things that supposedly took place in the late 1990s, yet, they had never seen the light of day until now. Recall that Fillon — ‘Mr Nobody’ — was prime minister between 2007 and 2012.

A preliminary hearing began immediately, something that is unheard of in similar situations in France. It normally takes weeks, if not months, for the authorities to investigate.

Nearly every day for two months, either Le Canard enchaîné was receiving new information about other Fillon scandals or the authorities were questioning the couple and searching their properties.

As Eric Ciotti, the LR president of the council of Alpes-Maritimes, told RMC the other week, the last day Fillon had a proper campaign was on January 24.

Fillon had to be cleared out of the way for Macron. Believe me, Macron never would have stood a chance under normal circumstances.

Despite all of this, on April 23, Fillon received a respectable 20.0% of the votes in the first round. He came third, behind Le Pen. Le Pen garnered 21.3% and Macron 24.0%. Jean-Luc Mélenchon came fourth with 19.5%. Benoît Hamon, the PS candidate, got just over 6%.

Now that Fillon is out of the way, so is the drip-drip-drip of scandal.

You can read more about Valls and Fillon in an article I wrote recently for Orphans of Liberty, ‘Pauvre Fillon’. (Pauvre means ‘poor’, ‘pitiable’).

The Big Media narrative

Big Media have been busy for months saying that Macron is a centrist, anti-establishment and antisystème candidate.

If he espoused the latter two characteristics, Big Media would never have endorsed him. Big Media are part of the establishment and le système.

Marianne noted that all of these media outlets have made a big deal about everything Macron except his political platform (13 – 19 January 2017 issue, p. 11).

They have given Macron the celebrity treatment in the same way that the world media gave Obama in 2008. Marianne pointed out that l’Obs (Le Nouvel Observateur) put Macron on their cover six times in 2016 (p. 17).

At that stage, Marianne only had Macron on their cover twice: that particular January issue and in November 2015. Interestingly, the 2015 issue has ‘Moi, Président‘ next to his photo.

This week, Marianne fell in line with every other magazine and put him on the cover. Sad. The magazine that prides itself on independent (albeit left-wing) thinking howled about media intox — hype — then fell into the same trap.

Establishment help

Macron has benefited from Socialist help at home and abroad.

In France, Marianne says that Hollande’s ex-partner and mother of his children, Ségolène Royal — former minister of the environment — has been discreetly advising him behind the scenes since December (13 – 19 January 2017 issue, p. 12). Royal has long admired Macron. She appeared with him on the hustings this week.

In the United States, Obama — also a socialist — gave Macron a fulsome endorsement to the French electorate. Can you imagine the outcry if Trump had done something similar?

My guess is that he was in Tahiti for this very reason. If he had rung Macron from the US, the American intelligence community could have tracked his phone calls. Ironically, Obama put such an arrangement in place himself, whereby Americans corresponding with or talking to people overseas may become of interest to US intelligence.

Like Obama, Macron is another Manchurian Candidate. The two must have much in common.

This tweet bridges the discussion from Obama to the next two men mentioned below:

Besides socialists, there are the globalist economics experts and policy wonks around Macron, including Alain Minc and Jacques Attali.

I saw Alain Minc several years ago on a late-night French talk show, On n’est pas couché (‘We Haven’t Gone to Bed’). The subject was the disconnect between a candidate’s promises and the reality that follows an election. Minc told Natasha Polony, who was a regular panellist at the time, that even she had no place in voicing an opinion about policy-making. Minc said:

You get your say at the polls. At that point, your role ends. Afterwards, we take over.

Her jaw dropped.

In other words, leave it to the experts. The great unwashed have no voice. This guy is advising Macron. He also attended the same grandes écoles as the future French president.

Their already heated debate continued a little longer. Then, Minc dismissed her as being silly and told her to be quiet. If I remember rightly, the talk show host stepped in and changed the subject.

Jacques Attali, who is richer than Croesus, said in a print interview a couple of years ago that, even though he is in his 70s, he still works every day. He said he could not help but look down on retired people who wanted to relax and enjoy life. As a graduate of the same schools as Macron and Minc, Attali has never had to toil day after day in a manufacturing plant or drive a lorry or work in a slaughterhouse. If he had busied himself at any of those occupations for decades, he, too, would want to put his feet up.

Policy positions

Macron’s team have been busy this week tweeting, sometimes posting several every few minutes: a lot of empty words — or bla bla, as the French say — style over substance.

He doesn’t want people to know what he’s actually going to do.

Keebler AC reposted the following tweet on a thread at The Conservative Treehouse:

What follows are a few illustrated highlights from the debate that give you an idea of what Macron is about:

I’ll translate the dialogue below:

Juncker (?, on the left): The barbarians are at the gates. How can we guarantee a French victory?

Macron (lower right): Open wide the gates. There is no such thing as French culture.

Hollande (upper right): I told you so! The little one’s a genius!

All of this causes confusion. On March 31, an RMC panellist, a barrister, asked how Macron could be Hollande’s successor:

It’s inconceivable. He’s surrounded by people from the Right.

However, others do understand. Someone replied to that comment with this helpful illustration:

The influential imam from the Grande Mosque de Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, called on all French Muslims to vote for Macron in the second round.

And Les Républicains (LR), in order to continue to distance themselves from the FN, also urged their members and supporters to vote for Macron. Career politician Jean-François Copé rightly criticised Macron for his heavily publicised victory party after the first round, while Marine Le Pen left her supporters to party and made a quick exit after the results were announced.

Here’s Macron’s party at La Rotonde brasserie in Paris’s Montparnasse district. Copé said he was stunned:

Note that Copé also commented above that, as far as ensuring French security is concerned, Macron is ‘very weak’. As far as economic policies go, Macron is in ‘permanent flux’.

That said, Copé announced on the show:

With death in my soul, I said I will vote Macron.

Globalists v Nationalists

Ultimately, the battle for the Elysée is about globalists (Macron) versus nationalists (Le Pen).

This revolves around changes in those who embrace Marxism.

S. Armaticus, who authors the Catholic site, The Deus Ex Machina Blog, wrote an excellent analysis in the comments on The Conservative Treehouse‘s pre-election post:

The “Globalists” -read cultural Marxists in the US are endorsing the “globalists” – read cultural Marxists in France. Now the cultural Marxist’s enemy is the former economic Marxists- read post-Soviet countries. The reason that the cultural Marxists hate the former economic Marxists is that the later dumped their Marxism. The reason they dumped their Marxism is because it didn’t work. It left their countries ruined. So these former Marxists are trying to implement something that works to get them out of the mess that Marxism left. While the cultural Marxists never experienced Marxism first hand. So they are trying to implement Marxism.

And that is why us normal people like you, me and The POTUS, are caught up in this fratricidal war between the neo-Marxists (Obama/Macron/Trudeau) and the ex-Marxists (Putin).

We should know the results on Sunday night. Unfortunately, because the French don’t really have enough of an online presence to fight globalism.

As Marine Le Pen said, a woman will be leading France: either her or Angela Merkel.

No guesses as to who will be in charge come Monday morning.

Next week I will discuss Macron’s private life.