Marine Le Pen to Defeat Lacklustre Macron in French Presidential Election
Expect trouble and defeat for Emmanuel Macron as his challenger Marine Le Pen has a strong chance of defeating him and becoming Frances first woman President. Frances last statesman President Charles De Gaulle as he is seen by most French people would not be at all happy with what he would see as the wimpish globalist and EU puppet Macron’s policies and he would be most likely to endorse Le Pen for president of France as I suspect would a lot more French people than the carefully crafted polls give precedence to.
Le Pen’s French Presidential victory on April 24 would undoubtedly herald disastrous implications for the present direction of the European Union. It would be shakeup or breakup time.
A Moderate Extremist?
Le Pen’s campaign is carefully and successfully based on the claim that she is a moderate patriot with a goal to shift economic power away from the elite and toward ordinary people. Her economic program is indeed interventionist and somewhat left leaning however she remains as nationalist as ever. That of course to the ‘woke’ establishment media is an extremely dangerous rightwing position.
An Independent Nationalist Radical
While Le Pen says she does not intend to leave the EU, much of her economic program, and both her social policy and her stance on migration fly in the face of EU laws. She does not say this openly as she plans to force concessions from Brussels and she is strong enough to succeed in a steadily weakening Europe. Macron is busily shooting himself in the foot. His campaign and the mainstream media pundits are claiming that she is banking on the widespread ignorance of France’s voters on the workings of the EU. That’s a big mistake and an insult to the intelligence of the French voters.
- They have failed to take into account or are ignoring the fact or are simply ignoring it that there has been years of rioting against Macrons globalist and pro elitist policies.
- The sophisticated French electorate are not as ignorant as Macrons campaign and his media supporters would like to think.
- For a large section of the electorate this election is payback time.
Marine Le Pen is saying she will remain in the EU fold but she will push for major changes and she will have strong backing for this from Poland, Hungary and other right leaning states. Le Pen would seek to reverse the EU’s positive discriminate policy favouring migrant and foreign residents in terms of welfare, housing and jobs. She plans to withhold payments of €5 billion per year to the EU budget, and would give preferential treatment to French businesses on all national and local government contracts. She would give additional subsidies to French farmers. She says she would re-impose France’s borders check points with Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy and Spain. While Brussels and the media feigns at being aghast by this, such border checkpoints are maintained between many eastern EU countries such as between Slovenia and Croatia without a whimper from Brussels.
Macrons Scaremongering Tactics
The Macron campaign claims that these policies would be in breach of EU laws and would threaten the single market. They would certainly precipitate legal action and attempts at financial retaliation from Brussels and cause possibly the greatest crisis in EU history since Brexit. France under Le Pen’s answer to Macrons scaremongering is that she could become the leader of a growing group of dissident nations and bring some healthy balance back into Europe. With Le Pen some ten points behind Macron in the polls it is hard to understand the panic in the Macron campaign unless of course those carefully crafted media polls are just that, carefully crafted media polls that don’t reflect the reality on the ground. The pollsters and the media are very likely to end up with egg all over their faces like their American counterparts were following Trumps victory in the US 2016 election.
The False Fallback Position
The fallback position of the Le Pen detractors is that should she win, her ambitions could still be frustrated, as they claim that she is unlikely to win a National Assembly parliamentary majority in the June elections. That is wishful thinking because Frances electorate has never failed to give a working majority to a recently elected president. She would most likely be able to successfully put together a working majority for some if not all of her proposals. She could also invoke emergency powers to override Parliament with the Fifth Republic constitution giving her substantial direct powers over European, international and defence policies.
French Russian Alliance
While Le Pen has distanced herself from Putin since his invasion of Ukraine the politically experienced and pragmatic Le Pen says that Moscow should be an ally rather than an enemy, when the war is over. She wants to stop shipments of arms to Ukraine and reduce sanctions on Russia which cause domestic pain in France. As Frances President she could make it difficult or impossible to implement EU-wide bans on Russian oil and gas.
Le Pen’s France would reduce its “dependency” on Germany and the United States. In relation to NATO, she would pull France out of NATO’s integrated military structure, which it rejoined 13 years ago, while remaining a member. This would contradict her desire to make Putin a French ally.
Standoff Between Paris and Brussels
Le Pen would seek to revise France’s outward-looking, tolerant, pro-European, post-war consensus. This could lead to a five-year paralysing standoff between Paris and Brussels. Brussels cant afford to push back two hard because that could precipitate the tearing apart the EU from within the loss of France a key nation, a nuclear power, a G7 member and a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
Frexit by Stealth
Is Le Pen’s engineering a campaign to bring about a ‘Frexit’ by stealth as Macrons scare mongering campaign claims or at the very least would the strong, tough, nationally minded pragmatic Le Pen mimic Hungary’s effective policy of disruption and disobedience. Budapest who has no tolerance for what it sees as creeping Sovietisation of the EU is an excellent model for Le Pen. Budapest counteracts excessive Brussels intrusion by systematically sidelining or breaking encroaching EU law in its national interest and is increasingly seen as a dangerous challenge to Brussels. For France, a founding EU member and its second largest economy, to do likewise would make the EU as it now exists unworkable. It would either have to accommodate France and Budapest as well as a growing number of countries who have had enough of Brussels creeping interference in national affairs or worse or face the prospect of its collapse. Le Pen’s influence on Europe’s future direction if she is elected as President of France will at the very least shatter its present cosy globalist consensus.
Le Pen can Win
After weeks of a lacklustre campaign from Macron and the establishment media, Le Pen’s European and foreign policies will now be subjected to an intense attack as the campaign comes to a conclusion with Le pen too close for comfort. The French media are just short of a “Russiagate” smear campaign to try to discredit Le pen. They see Le Pen’s policies as presenting a far greater threat to the EU and to its liberal, Western status quo than Brexit ever did. Le Pen can stir up the stench of the European political swamp like no other. That’s something that everybody in Europe and especially the French voters need to understand. Unless there is a US style gerrymander of the election Marine Le Pen will become the next and the first woman president of France. There are interesting times ahead.