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Prediction: Marine Le Pen will win the French Presidency

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I know most of my fellow progressives won't like to hear this, but I predict Marine Le Pen will win the French election for president in just 10 days, and I'm not the only one. See conservative commentator Bill Still's short video on recent polling here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkRekgA_4nA

Now, I haven't been following the French elections as closely as I did the American elections when I correctly predicted a Trump victory in the primaries in August, 2015 on Opednews, and polls are not as trustworthy as they used to be for a variety of reasons, but those reasons generally favor populists like Le Pen anyway:

- A lot of people, even in France, have abandoned traditional land lines in favor of cell phones, making it harder to conduct fair polls, particularly among...

- The young, the working class (who can't afford both and would rather have a phone to them then to their house), including...

- People who don't like to respond to pollsters, which includes those who feel disenfranchised, who are generally...

Le Pen supporters. And this is before factoring in the increasingly bought-and-paid-for results of biased polling by the corporatist media. The media's mantra branding of Le Pen as "far-right" or "ultra-right" has become background noise and isn't even really supported by her policies towards French-borns, at least. She is pro-worker rights, pro-French privileges and policies...while denying them to immigrants. Macron, on the other hand, says corporations cannot be prohibited from firing people...which is hardly a Leftist answer to the threats to the working and middle classes.

Emmanuel Macron, though young, has old, stale, ideas. He's easily branded as part of the failed globalist elites who want to subjugate French citizens under a combination of banker and foreign rule. Bankers, writ large, are part of the global elites, accountable to no one, especially in the E.U. The mass media, also funded by that same elite class, underestimates the resentment of the common folk against this cabal, and the enthusiasm for change and restoration of real or imagined French sovereignty and prosperity. In some ways, Le Pen is more qualified to come off as a real populist than Trump, because she doesn't carry the excess baggage of being a member of billionaire .01% herself and she can campaign as an outsider.

Macron doesn't do well in debates and he's easily ambushed, as happened a few days ago when he confronted a union rally after meeting behind closed doors with union leaders at a Whirlpool factory where they were striking: https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-04-26/le-pen-ambushes-macron-with-french-plant-trip-to-attack-on-trade

and this was in his home town!

What about the obvious, Le Pen's party ties to racists and even Nazis? Well, she has made some purges of the most extreme members and even booted her own father out. In a time when there is a very real Muslim refugee integration problem - even if the cause is correctly identified by Macron as being from Western-led Middle East wars (will he change France's participation in them? That's unclear...) - what are the Centerists, like Macron, answers to this? The competition, and sheer fear, experienced by the French man or woman on the street cannot be over-emphasized, even if it is statistically an exaggeration, or even more the result of the gender and age demographic of the refugees rather than their religion. Young men everywhere are more responsible for social upheaval, good or bad, than any other group, and this is the most dominant demographic of the migration, and particularly obvious in EU countries like France, which otherwise skew old and white. Even if Muslims comprise only 7.5% of the French population (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/19/5-facts-about-the-muslim-population-in-europe/), they are easily recognizable by their offsetting style of dress - which has been the target of French laws recently (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/french-police-make-woman-remove-burkini-on-nice-beach) - and easily blamed for whatever ails France, a more complex issue than recent refugee influxes, but not unrelated either.

But French voters aren't much concerned with nuances, though not as oblivious as American voters, who can isolate themselves from most of the world behind two oceans and relatively friendly north and south neighbors, while still imagining the worst of foreign peoples. They see their country slipping both at home and internationally, and see Le Pen offering...something, while Macron is branded as failed president Hollande, part deux. His endorsement of Macron will only hurt the candidate.

American President Trump has been officially neutral on the French elections, which is smart politics since in France he is widely disrespected. But that doesn't mean his commonality with Le Pen on issues of nationality and historic culture don't resonate as much, or even more, in Europe, where identity is defined much more by culture than geography. The globalists have no coherent answer to this.

So, what will a Le Pen victory mean for the E.U?

Bill Still predicts withdrawal from the E.U., which Le Pen supports, and even a subjugation of France's central bank to the Treasury, which is less obviously supported by Le Pen, though there are some recent statements in that direction. The first measure - a Frexit - will probably mean the end of the E.U., or at the very least, the rebranding of it as a Germany-dominant organization. If two of the largest economies in Europe - Britain and France - choose to withdraw at the same time, it's hard to see how the E.U. can survive in any recognizable form, let alone stop a tide of copycats abandoning a sinking ship. And the retributions of the E.U., such as trying to impose unpayable debts on departing members, will only make it clearer who's really in charge there. This could get ugly, and faster than most people expect. I don't predict economic disengagement could lead to war between nations - there is too much anti-war feeling in the sources of both World Wars for that - but it can't be ruled out either.

One thing is clear, two weeks from now, a potential President Le Pen will have her hands full. Viva La France...but it won't be easy.

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Scott Baker Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter Page       Linked In Page       Instagram Page

Scott Baker is a Managing Editor & The Economics Editor at Opednews, and a former blogger for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Global Economic Intersection.

His anthology of updated Opednews articles "America is Not Broke" was published by Tayen Lane Publishing (March, 2015) and may be found here:
http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/

Scott is a former and current President of Common Ground-NY (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist activist group. He has written dozens of (more...)
 

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