Tag Archives: French elections

France is divided, but the UK is even more so. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

The French election, won just now by Emmanuel Macron, put several segments of the French population opposite one another in a pretty fierce contest. And that contest will continue. Because Macron won’t be able to lift the French economy out of its doldrums any more than Le Pen could have, or than Trump can life the US, and the new president will have the honor of presiding over a further and deepening downturn. The French political dividing line was aptly described by Simon Kuper recently:

The ultra-nationalist writer Charles Maurras believed there were “two Frances”. The one he loved was the “pays réel”, the real country: a rural France of church clocks, traditions and native people fused with their ancestral soil. Maurras loathed the “pays légal”, the legal country: the secular republic, which he thought was run by functionaries conspiring for alien interests.

Maurras was born in 1868 and died in 1952. But if he returned on Sunday to witness the French presidential run-off, he would instantly recognise both candidates. He would cast Emmanuel Macron as the incarnation of the “legal France” and Marine Le Pen as embodying the “real” one.

Maurras may have been a questionable character, but that description is not half bad. Once enough people in the country understand the failure of ‘legal’ France, they will want ‘real’ France back. That will be true in countries all over Europe; to a large extent it already is. Marine Le Pen summed up the key issue really well a few days ago when she said of the country post election: “France will be led by a woman, me or Mrs. Merkel.”

There is only one reason the French people would ever tolerate Germany having an outsized influence in their politics and economics: that they feel they benefit from it financially. And yes, if you put it that way, it’s already quite something that they haven’t revolted more and earlier.

The generous unemployment benefits are undoubtedly part of that. But those can’t last. And since the Germans owe their influence in Paris to the EU, it’s obvious how the French will feel they can stop that influence. And then the EU will turn out to be not a peacemaker, but the opposite.

To continue reading: London Bridge is (Broken) Down

Charles Gave, a Frenchman, gives a trenchant analysis of the French election that runs counter to most of the mainstream punditry. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Venerable French investor Charles Gave has been managing money and researching markets for over 40 years; as such France’s elder statesman of asset allocation perhaps best captures the mood ahead of the most crucial Presidential election in a generation. In conversation with Dr. Pippa Malmgren, Charles breaks down national politics to understand why voters have rejected the establishment and the market impact of both outcomes, and what to expect from tomorrow’s election.

First, Gave, who says “I’m not so sure that Macron will win”, is asked by Malmgren to walk RealVision viewers through what Macron’s agenda would look like in case of a victory. Gave is unable to do so for several simple reasons:

Well, first, nobody knows. Because during the whole campaign, all these talks were on one hand, on the other. I’m in favor of apple pie, and motherhood, you see. Basically he has, to my knowledge, very little program. So he’s running. That is what Hollande said. That he was going to make some fundamental changes without hurting people. And so Macron is a big, empty suit. That’s what he is. You did the right curriculum vitae, he went to the right schools. And you have the feeling that the guy never had an original idea in his life. He was always a good student.

And moreover, there is a strong suspicion that he’s a kind of golem created by Hollande and all these guys. So since they knew they were going to lose the election, they created a guy in a hologram that would run for them and prevent them from losing power. So to a certain extent, the French political system has been captured by what you can call the Technocratic class. And whether from the left or the right, it didn’t make any difference. And this Technocratic class is presenting Macron as a brand new fellow. He is nothing brand new. These guys have been in power for 50 years for God’s sakes. So this is basically nothing.

Gave is then asked for his take on the market’s reaction, first to the outcome which now appears to be fully priced in, i.e., a Macron victory. The French investor’s response should be concerning to those who believe France is in for a period of calm and stability.

To continue reading: Why Charles Gave Expects “Total Mayhem” In France Even If Macron Is Elected

The French, and actually the entire European establishment, are determined to prevent a Marine Le Pen victory in France’s election. It might be the end of both. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

«Centrist» candidate Emmanuel Macron was no sooner announced winner in the first round of the French presidential election at the weekend, and with unseemly haste the political establishment rushed to close ranks against rival Marine Le Pen of the Front National.

Macron topped the poll in the first round winning 23.8 per cent of the vote. Le Pen came in second place with 21.5 per cent. Both candidates will now proceed to face off in the second round, to be held on May 7, with the other nine candidates having been eliminated.

The FN leader is entitled to call her electoral performance a «historic» achievement. It was the best result for the nationalist party in the French presidential elections since its foundation in 1972. But while her supporters were celebrating a landmark victory, the French establishment was desperately pulling up the drawbridge. Slings, arrows and boiling oil are being readied to make sure Le Pen is kept at bay from the seat of power.

Le Pen, who took over the party leadership in 2011 from her father Jean-Marie, has taken the FN from «fringe» status to now being a major mainstream political force, within a shot of winning the presidency of the French Republic.

But it is unlikely that Marine Le Pen will become Madame President – at least in the 2017 cycle. Her rival Macron is already receiving fulsome endorsements from the erstwhile two main parties, the center-right Republicans and the incumbent Socialists. Both parties suffered painful defeats at the weekend, the first time in 60 years than neither of them have a candidate going forward to the second round.

Republican candidate Francois Fillon, who won 19.9 per cent of the vote, immediately gave his endorsement to Macron, telling his supporters that Le Pen would be a «disaster» for the country. Socialist contender, Benoit Hamon, whose electoral performance crashed to scraping only 6.5 per cent of the vote, was even more vehement in endorsing Macron. In his defeat-acceptance speech, Hamon called on his supporters to get behind Macron because Le Pen was «an enemy of the state».

Just like with the US establishment and the US presidential election, the Franco-European establishment is claiming favorite son Emmanuel Macron is a sure thing to win the presidency in two weeks over Marine Le Pen. SLL thinks it will be a lot closer than most of the “experts” are projecting, just like in the US. From Patrick Buchanan at buchanan.org:

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.

To continue reading: Is Macron the EU’s Last Best Hope?

James Howard Kunstler talks about the coming debt crack-up, with which regular readers of SLL may already be acquainted. From Kunstler at kunstler.com:

As I write, the French stock market (the CAC 40), is doing a grand jeté (up 4.5 percent!) in celebration of Emmanuel Macron’s assumed slaying of the dragon Le Pen. But that was just the first round under the interesting French election system. Consider that two other candidates who were eliminated, Monsieurs Fillon and Mélenchon, got nearly 40 percent of the vote. Are we so sure about where their voters go in the second and final round two weeks from now?

I suspect that most Americans — even the ones who follow Rachel Maddow — are about as interested in French politics as differential calculus. Macron, 36, is a blank slate. He was finance minister under current president François Hollande, of the Socialist Party, but declared during the election campaign that he’s not a socialist, he only wanted to be of service to his country, and this time he ran under his own party, En Marche! He appears to represent the continuation of business-as-usual with the European Union, which seems to put him on the wrong side of history at this crucial moment — if you suppose, as I do, that the EU is so riddled with hopeless financial contradictions and centrifugal political tensions that it is unlikely to persist.

Yet, understandably, people are reluctant to change the system they’re living under. Le Pen wants to blow the EU up, especially the bureaucracy lodged in Brussels that has become a self-serving and self perpetuating monster. Blowing up the EU would necessarily, it seems, mean the end of the European Central Bank, and with it the scams and Ponzi schemes that have provided an appearance of normality, despite an official 10.5 percent unemployment rate in France and a constant chain of public massacres by resident Jihadistas of one sort or another, some of them perpetrated by radical refugees allowed in under EU policy.

To continue reading: Ready, Set, Splat.

Good article that lays out the basics of yesterday’s French election and French politics. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

It designed the rules to protect itself against an election like this.

According to preliminary results of the presidential election in France, the two candidates that came out on top during today’s first round and therefore made it into the second round, to be contested on May 7, are Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing anti-euro and anti-EU Front National, and Emmanuel Macron, leader of the centrist, pro-EU movement En Marche, which he founded just last year.

So congratulations to today’s winners.

This is the first time since the beginning of the Fifth Republic in 1958 that no candidate from the major establishment parties made it to the second round, and that neither of the two winning candidates are backed by parties that have ever held the presidency.

This is also the first time in the Fifth Republic that the winner’s party will have zero or practically zero power in Parliament.

According to preliminary results, Macron got 23.7% of the vote, Le Pen 21.9%, conservative François Fillon 19.9%, and far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon 19.2%.

As expected, the biggest loser was the political establishment and the entire “political class,” as it’s called in France. At least on the surface.

After François Hollande’s dismal performance as President over the past five years, his Socialists practically disappeared during the campaign and in the election got only 6.3% of the vote. This left as sole representative of the “political class” the conservative and scandal-plagued former Prime Minister Fillon, who now lost too.

Just how frustrated is the public with the political class? Le Pen at the far right and Mélenchon at the far left obtained together 41% of the vote. That’s huge. They campaigned on leaving the Eurozone (the monetary union of 19 member states) and the European Union (28 member states).

To continue reading: The French “Political Class” Gets Crushed – on the Surface