There’s nothing like actually being there — in Paris on the day of this month’s presidential election — to understand that what’s happening on the streets and what’s happening in the mainstream media just don’t jive.
In the U.S., Macron’s “victory” was reported as a black-white win, clear evidence of a Europe wedded to a liberal world order and a stinging rebuke to “hate and intolerance.”
Wrong.
{mosads}First of all, there were no newspapers published in Paris (despite revelations of 9GB of leaks on Macron) or anywhere else in France on election day itself — no televised or live-streamed, real-time, district-by district updates, colored maps, or talking heads propelled by the hyper-fuel of history-in-the-making.
“The time to talk about the election,” I was told, “is after it’s over.”
The streets were empty, anticipatory crowds non-existent (exception: an assembly of Macron about-to-be celebrants, mostly Millennials, getting into wardrobe near the Louvre for their brief moment in the media limelight). Your-man-in-the-street, wary even by European standards, had his or her head way, way down.
Loose lips sink ships in places where the population is more used to taking beatings than throwing punches, and in this case, the boat everyone knew must be kept afloat was another establishment government devoted to existing EU monetary and trade policies, rules that allowed, said my unafraid (but unnamed) Algerian guide to French politics, “all the rich guys who went to the same schools, who work in the same companies, who circulate in the same social circles” to tamp down any news of the election-in-process, to gag the press (owned by the same cadre of BFF’s), to invent legitimate electoral processes allowing for a “ballot blanc” to siphon off socialist or conservative support for Le Pen, and to make Emmanuel Macron’s win á fait accompli.
The apathy was palpable. Astonishing.
Fact: When the final count of votes (excluding blank votes) came in, Macron pulled 65.5 percent — Le Pen 34.5 percent.
But it ain’t what it looks like.
Voter turnout, usually among the highest across Europe, was the lowest, 65 percent, in recent history.
More than half of registered voters in France never even bothered to cast a ballot — no-shows.
According to the most reliable polling firm in France, half the voters who did cast ballots for Macron said their votes were “anti-Le Pen, not pro-Macron” — meaning, according to French commentary, that only 36 percent of citizens who voted for Macron are actually behind his program.
Finally, roughly 30 percent of all ballots cast, according to the same polling firm, were those crafty “ballot blancs,” handed out at polling places to voters who declined to check any name at all, defaced the ballot, or merely left the whole thing blank, a move many angry and idealistic French voters were convinced would translate into an ideological blow as opposed to ideological run-off which, in the end, would mean nothing. The blanc vote has not been as high since 1959 — and as one French political commentator remarked “That’s a message.”
For Le Pen, who’s clearly playing the long game, the news was not bad.
She garnered more than twice (nearly 11 million) the votes in 2017 that her father, the notorious Jean Le Pen, managed to dredge up in his last bid for president — even during a campaign in which pater (“the last Samurai”) himself openly criticized his daughter.
Le Pen also triumphed in 9 out of the 10 French districts with the highest unemployment rates.
And if Le Pen, with roughly 11 million votes (33 percent) to Macron’s 64 percent (that would give Macron about — 20 to 23 million?), subtracts the one-third of Macron votes French pollsters chalk up as “anti- Le Pen ballots,” another 7 million maybe, then we’re talking about La Pen at 11 or so million and Macron at anywhere between 13 and 15 million.
The race narrows.
Viewed in this context, Le Pen’s numbers do indeed invest her with the legitimate trappings of France’s “opposition party” and constitute heavy-weight KO’s to both the center-left and the center-right as well as the socialists (who are chasing Macron even as we speak for MP slots Melanchon’s people believe they deserve in return for all those quid-pro-quo “ballot blancs.”)
Le Pen, with one-third of fellow Frenchmen brave enough to vote against the soft totalitarianism of globalism behind her, is now changing the name of her National Front party and adjusting its platform to reflect a political agenda more specifically targeted toward challenges France confronts in 2017: illegal, criminal immigration; terrorism, joblessness, economic stagnation and an accelerating rate of income disparity triggered by the exponential benefits globalism lobs across 99 percent of the world to the one-percenters at the top.
This last advantage is the glue that has prevented any political rift between pro-establishment outgoing President Hollande and pro-establishment Macron, the darling of well-heeled utopians who celebrate his Tony Blair-like mien, his avant-garde move in marrying a lovely, older woman whom the politically incorrect Sigmund Freud may no longer, in this purer, more honest age, disparage, and his very, very vague plans to “reform the French government.”
At least Angela Merkel is pleased: The minute Macron’s win was announced she bounced him a warm note expressing her pleasure at the continuance of their “Franco-German alliance.”
Given that Merkel is up again soon for re-election and her approval ratings are beginning to collide with grumbles about “all the people she’s let into the county, and not all of them good,” things could change.
What won’t change is this: Macron. The “En March” (which isn’t officially even a party, just a movement) champion needs an absolute majority in the parliament to govern — roughly 289 out of some 577 members.
The day after the election, he had two guys in place.
Without this majority — parliamentary elections are in June — Macron is just another pretty face, the face, as one BBC broadcaster put it, “of optimism and hope in France.”
That’s something, especially in a leader of a nation so dour it should have a big yellow frowny face on its national flag. But without a parliamentary majority, real plans and specific policies, and more money, money, money to get the job (whatever that turns out to be) done, Macron stays a boy-toy — Merkel’s, I mean.
As delighted as Angela, the calm and well-loved “savior of the EU” may be, it’s Wolfgang Schäuble, her finance minister and his intransigent, real-politik focus on “not spending one penny of German taxpayer monies” to bail out any other EU member, that Macron, with all his talk about banking union and integrative fiscal policies, is faced with sorting out.
And Wolfgang Schäuble, mes amis, would rather spit snails.
Kathleen Millar is a founding member of DHS, a senior writer focusing on immigration and trafficking issues. She has also worked as a senior writer for the Director General of the UN in Vienna, Office on Drugs and Crime; for former Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME); for the Reagan, Bush and Clinton Administrations, and as a writer for Foreign Policy blogs, where her beat has been global organized crime.
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