This Is Not France

French President Emmanuel Macron won re-election, largely because while many people were disappointed with him, many of them would have rather eaten raw snails than vote for right-winger Marine Le Pen.  Especially when a Le Pen presidency would have resulted in France's withdrawal from NATO and the coalition against Ukraine.

So Joe Biden, or another Democrat to be determined if Biden does not run for another term, could still win the 2024 presidential election over Donald Trump or a pro-Trump Republican, right?

Wrong.  Why? Because this is not France.

The French people voted with their heads to keep a dangerous chick like Marine Le Pen out of office.  Americans vote with their guts, which is how right-wingers get elected.  Also, because she's French, Le Pen is not a sore loser who would claim that the election was stolen - and there is no such thing as a French electoral college that awards electoral votes from each of the country's 94 departments and can circumvent the will of the people.  And you know that "liberty, equality, fraternity" thing?  The French may not always live up to that standard, but they do take seriously the right to vote.  For one thing, they don't pass laws to restrict the vote.

Another thing is, they vote on Sundays.  Not Tuesdays.    

The Ukraine war is more of a factor in the French presidential election than it is likely to be here in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election because, well, Kiev is about 1,470 miles from Paris, which is shorter than the distance between New York and Denver, and there's no ocean between the two countries either.  If a Republican administration that takes office in 2025, should the war in Ukraine still be going on by then, pulls out of NATO, that move will be met by the American people with more by a shrug than a shudder.  That's what my gut tells me.  (My head? No, I'm an American.)   

Also, the French have a lot of amenities and programs that we Americans lack.  Despite inflation ravaging the French economy, it's not ravaging it as much as it's ravaging our own, and the French of course have guaranteed health care.  Not to mention more nice things to cushion an inflationary economy.   

Remember, once again - this is not France.

Okay, is there any other business? 

Le Poison Le Pen

This wasn't supposed to happen.

French President Emmanuel Macron was seen as a shoo-in for re-election because of his ability to stand up to Vladimir Putin in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.   But, as in America, inflation, immigration, and intolerance have contaminated the electorate in France  to the point where right-wing populism has not only become acceptable, it's become, like an Ungaro outfit, fashionable.  And the far right's best known spokesperson, Marine Le Pen (below) could possibly be elected president of France on April 24. 

With her plain-speaking campaign style and her resemblance to a kindly but strong matriarch in an André Téchiné movie, Le Pen seems harmless enough.  Until you remember she's the leader of the ultra-nationalist National Rally (formerly National Front) party, and her campaign platform includes restricting immigration from Third World countries, forcing Muslim women to stop wearing headscarves, ending free trade, privatizing public broadcasting stopping subsidies for renewable energy, and pulling her country out of NATO.  Sound familiar?

Le Pen blames the stagnating economy and rising energy prices in France on the centrist Macron government, and she's even taken to speaking out against what we Americans call "wokeism" to incite fear and envy among the French working class that she claims the elites have forgotten.   Le Pen, 53, isn't trying to copy Trump.  She, like her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been spewing this right-wing populist rhetoric since before Trump got into American politics.

If there's anything positive to say about Le Pen (and I'm stretching it here), it's that she's not as extreme on social issues as she used to be.  She's more accepting of abortion and same-sex marriages and she no longer calls for the reinstatement of the death penalty, which France abolished in 1981.  Trump Republicans aren't yet where she is on those issues now.  None of this, however, should obscure the fact that, if elected, she'd be the most reactionary French leader since Pétain.

Like voters in the United States who are ticked off at President Biden, voters in France are fed up with COVID restrictions, inflation, and economic malaise.  They look to be ready to punish Macron and replace him with an ogress who would terrorize liberals, minorities, and intellectuals with her raw-meat fascism.   Here's what I don't get.  Americans have a lot to be mad about, because we haven't been able to have nice things for at least forty years.  The French, on the other hand, have the highest-ranking health-care delivery system in the world, high-quality public transportation (including the intercity bullet trains), a first-rate school system, and paid maternity leave.  What the hell do they have to be upset about?

You know, I sort of hope Marin Le Pen wins on April 24.  We Americans had to live for four years and suffer under his policies while our country became the skunk of the world. I'd like to see French spend the next five years learning how that feels!  Maybe a President Le Pen will abolish and repeal some of those nice things we Yanks still lack.  How did Joni Mitchell put it?  "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til its gone."

(And, maybe she'll demonize anyone opposed to her to the point where they get guys with tiki torches marching through Cherbourg and chanting anti-Semitic slogans.  In France they hate on Main Street.)  

Le President Macron

Hail to le chef!

Emmanuel Macron, the former centrist economy minister of France, was elected the twenty-fifth president of France.  He defeated right-wing harridan Marine Le Pen by twenty percentage points.

Macron has vowed to combat terrorism, keep France as a strong and active player in the European Union and work to gain the trust of France's disaffected blue-collar workers, and he is expected to have France take the lead on climate change from us stupid and ignorant Americans - and invite American scientists to come to France to work on the problem.  

Hey, Monsieur le Président élu, want to invite some American bloggers? 

Macron is not only the youngest man elected president of France (he's 39), he's the first French president of En Marche!, a party Macron, a former Socialist, formed in April 2016 - which, as of this writing, was thirteen months ago.

Democrats, take note - you could be replaced by a new party that could form any day now (Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley, I hope you're reading this!).  We could have a new left-of-center party like En Marche! - complete with an exclamation point in its name - by 2020, whereas you, Democrats, could be une marche futile.       

Once again, the French have saved Western civilization.  Nationalist thugs similar to Le Pen have also foundered in Austria and the Netherlands, which also benefits Western civilization.  And America, as another French leader, World War I-era Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, once said, continues to go from barbarism to degeneration without the necessary interval of civilization.  

And Macron's win has made things so much easier for the International Olympic Committee.  Had Le Pen won the French presidency, the members of IOC, faced with holding the 2024 Olympics in either Paris, a capital of a country run by a right-wing moron in skirts, or in Los Angeles, the second largest city of a country run by a right-wing moron with long ties, would have tossed a coin.  Now Paris should definitely get the Olympics for 2024, especially when it hasn't hosted the Games since 1924.  Everyone involved with the LA Olympic bid committee should just turn out the lights and go home.  

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a passport to renew.            

Sacre Bleu!

Marine Le Pen survived the first round of the French presidential election, finishing second in a field of eleven candidates just behind Emmanuel Macron, who has promised to keep France in the European Union, keep France in NATO, and keep France sane.   Le Poison Pen would ask France to withdraw from both groups and go off on its own, and proceed to regain the greatness of its imperial age.  Ah yes, the one that ended with the Germans at the gates of Paris, Louis Napoleon surrendering Alsace, Lorraine and his throne, a group of Communists controlling the capital, and the country on such an edge of desperation that it could only be saved by . . . an Irishman!

Be that as it may, Macron's narrow lead in the first round of the election has given observers some hope that the French will not make the same sort of mistake that British made when they voted to get out of the European Union or a mistake like the one the Americans made when, despite Hillary Clinton's popular-vote win, they elected Donald Trump President (which could have been avoided had the Democrats nominated someone else - an Irishman!).

Maybe Macron's call for patriotism over nationalism and his confidence and youth (he's 39)  will win out over Le Pen in the end.  I hope so.  Because, after seeing Great Britain and the United States screw up, it would be pretty scary to see the land of fine wines, Truffaut, Pierre Renoir, Jean Renoir, the City of Light, the Riviera, croissants, Berlioz, the Enlightenment, Henri-Pierre Roche, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Adjani, Sophie Marceau, a whole slew of other great actresses with supermodel looks, Balzac, Impressionism, Cezanne, Charles Aznavour, Jacques Cousteau, and all sorts of other groovy contributions to Western civilization go . . . completely off its rocker.

Oh yeah, speaking of rockers, France gave us Johnny Hallyday too. 

Come on, frogs - do the right thing and put Emanuel Macron in the Elysian Palace!     

French Twist

The French political world in chaos.  While conservative presidential candidate François Fillon is dealing with charges that he gave his wife a sham job to pay her a generous salary, France's former conservative president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is going to be tried for the charges of illegally financing his failed 2012 campaign for re-election and surpassing the legal campaign-spending limit in France (yes, the French have campaign-spending limits, unlike These States).  Sarkozy is alleged to have attempted to hide the excess spending - $20 million, according to one source - by having a public relations firm bill the party instead of the campaign. 

And to think . . . all that spending, and he didn't even win.

The Socialists in France, after five years of President François Hollande, have been discredited by mismanaging the economy.  François Fillon looked to be the next president for his impeccable credentials and his clean image, now sullied by his own scandal.  He vigorously defended himself earlier this week in an attempt to salvage his own campaign in advance of the spring presidential election, but if the French press is anything like the American press, he's not going to convince anyone of his innocence that easily.  

It seems to me that the conservative party in France - called the Republicans, by the way - is in danger of forfeiting its moral leadership in a country looking for a president with strong principles, which could add to the already unraveling political situation there . . . in favor of National Front presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.  A Le Pen victory in the presidential election would be an even bigger earthquake than Trump's election to the U.S. Presidency, because it would call France's reputation for equality and fraternity and for upholding the values of European republicanism completely into question.

Not that the center-right haven't done a good job in doing much of that already . . ..