Ever since the sitting French President François Hollande announced he had no intention of running for office ever again due to the failed policies of this so-called Monsieur Malbrough, the French political scene has been dominated by all sorts of supposedly aspiring politicians and various scandals being fabricated and provoked by behind-the-scenes interests.
According to various analysts, an ever increasing number of French voters are taking the side of the leader of the National Front. Marine Le Pen happily ridicules their haplessness and vows to make France fearless and fearsome – just like her.
It should be noted that US President Donald Trump employed the same tactics in his struggle for the White House. But where Mr. Trump was chaotic, Marine Le Pen is an articulate and wily debater who makes mincemeat of flailing interviewers overwhelmed by her rapid fire of alternative facts. Experts argue that this makes her strangely seductive even to voters uncomfortable with her fear-mongering and scapegoating of immigrants. Therefore, every other poll shows the narrowing gap between this determined politician and any of her likely rivals on the final presidential ballot.
Today, the French electorate is showing clear signs of its dull fatigue produced by the traditional practices observed over the last decade, and want decisive change to take place. This, along with the toothless aspiration to please Washington that local socialists have been pursing lately, forgetting about the national pride, makes the support enjoyed by the leader of the National Front always universal, which leads to the further polarization of French politics.
The ruling French political elites are desperately searching for a champion they could put in the way of Marine Le Pen in the final bid to stop her before she becomes the next head of the Fifth Republic. The campaign against the leader of the National Front is being headed by the representatives of the sitting government, with PM Bernard Cazeneuve at its helm.
Yet, French voters remain cynical about those in power now-a-days in Paris. Last summer, a survey by Harris Interactive for the French office of Transparency International found that 54% of the French believe their country’s elite to be corrupt, for the most part. That share goes up to about three-quarters for local and European legislators, the president, and the national government.
The final round of the French presidential election is just two months away, and the struggle is going to be much dirtier than the backstabbing craze we’ve witnessed last year in the United States. It’s curious that all three front-runners – independent center-left politician Emmanuel Macron, center-right candidate Francois Fillon and nationalist populist Marine Le Pen – have faced accusations of financial wrongdoing already…
So far, Fillon has suffered the most from these revelations, probably because of the virtuous image he had tried to cultivate before the payments to his family came to light. Yet, for the local elites it seemed that Fillon was the champion they had been looking for, until it became apparent that he was no match for the leader of the National Front.
Emmanuel Macron has shot himself in the foot by calling France’s colonization of Algeria “a crime against humanity, a real barbarity.” Not even French politicians on the radical left typically go that far in their remarks, which forced Macron, who had been the go-to favorite among local media sources to spend days on the defensive,
Everyone knows that Macron is a puppet of the French financial elites, who are clearly convinced that they can pull his strings if ever he occupies Elysee Palace one day. But in spite of this support, as well as the readiness of his wife to provide protection for him, Macron fails to obtain the support of the better part of the population, since he has no clear vision for a nation that craves for the national self-respect to be brought back to the forefront of French politics.
In a bid to improve his odds to ever get elected, Macron has gone as far as to claim that mysterious “Russian hacker” are rooting against him, even though he borrowed this idea from Washington. Yet, this desperate trick was unintentionally torpedoed by his press secretary Laurence Haïm, who pointed out that Makron’s site En Marche! Has suffered over 4,000 hacker attacks in a month that were launched by “some people in Ukraine.”
It’s curious that Makron’s allegations that Russia is trying to steal the presidential race have been answered by both the French Le Monde and WikiLeaks, that back in 2012 the CIA heavily influenced the French presidential election campaign, and it continues doing so now not only in France but in other European countries.
That’s why it is highly unlikely that the Russophobic remarks made by Makron will improve the chances of a candidate directly supported by the Rothschilds.
As it’s been noted by Francois Fillon, the French government allows a quasi civil war situation to dominate the French political agenda, so none of the candidates have a chance to run a comprehensive pre-election campaign.
It’s highly likely that the candidates will be showered with more mud in the remaining time before the vote. But it’s imperative these dirty PR tricks don’t prevent the French people from electing a candidate that will stay true to the immortal spirit of de Gaulle who was capable of pursuing independent policies in the best interests of the people that showed their support to him.
Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”