As expected, in the France election no candidate achieved 50% of the vote. That sets up a runoff election fifteen days from now to determine who will be the next president. Reuters Article Here – Guardian/MSM Article Here
In the primary race the final results are not yet announced; however, current President Emmanuel Macron has approximately 28% of the vote, and challenger Marine Le Pen has around 24% of the vote. No other candidate was close enough to change the top two outcome.
In the head-to-head matchup, the race is essentially tied, well within the margin of polling error (as above). Interestingly, Le Pen has flipped the 18-to-34-year age bracket and now holds majority support in the younger voting bloc. Perhaps, due to young French citizens feeling the outcomes of the professional political left thirsting for unilateral power during COVID.
There was around a 65% voter turnout according to most early analysts. The general election is essentially a coin toss based on the current polling. The final vote to determine the winner will take place April 24th. It will be a very closely watched event by leaders around the world. A Le Pen victory would be seismic in the world of politics, akin to Trump’s victory in 2016, and that outcome is a strong possibility.
The professional political left are apoplectic.
(BBC Opinion) – Estimations from round one show how tactical voting rewrote the electoral map.
Voters gathered into three broad camps: Macron, the far-right and the far-left. In the last days of campaigning, many people who were considering other candidates finally decided that they would rather back a frontrunner.
There was thus a big transfer of votes from Éric Zemmour – the hard-right nationalist pundit – to the camp of Marine Le Pen. Some right-wingers in the conservative Republicans party may have done the same.
On the left, voters decided that neither the Socialist Anne Hidalgo nor the Green Yannick Jadot could ever make it into round two. So they shifted massively to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, simply to keep a leftist in the race. This despite many Socialists and Greens actively disliking the man.
And in the centre, many who would normally have chosen the Republicans’ Valérie Pécresse will have plumped instead for the incumbent. Why? Because they were genuinely afraid that Le Pen and/or Mélenchon were coming up too strong from behind.
The result means two things.
One is the utter devastation facing France’s two traditional parties of government since 1958 – the conservative right, and the socialist left. This was a process started by Macron five years ago, but now comprehensively complete.
Both parties’ candidates – and certainly the Socialists’ Anne Hidalgo – may have failed to reach the 5% threshold, which allows them to claim back election costs. The price tag will be millions of euros, but worse is the ignominy. We can expect serious internal ructions.
Macron has so engineered it that the divide in French politics is now definitively the one that he sought: between his own “realistic centrism” and “openness to the world” and the “extremism” of his opponents. The “nationalist extremism” of Le Pen and the “utopian extremism” of Mélenchon. (read more)
Nationalism -vs- Globalism
During his pandemic response, Macron went totally overboard. He was the first one to announce (July 2021) that a vaccine passport would be needed in order to shop, drink, eat at restaurants, travel or worship. Many other western, fascist totalitarian dictators, the new democracy leaders, followed soon thereafter. Macron’s ideological fiats may come back to haunt him. We can hope. The French people were not happy with this unilateral decision, and it showed people how quickly some leaders will become dictators.
President Macron took that dictatorship even one step further in January of this year, and this is likely the biggest problem for him right now. In January he announced that any unvaccinated person was “irresponsible” and therefore “no longer a citizen.”
Macron told Le Parisien that he had decided to act against the non-vaccinated, by “limiting as much as possible their access to social life activity”. “The unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And so we will continue to do so, to the bitter end. That’s the strategy,” the head of state said. “When my freedom comes to threaten that of other people, I become irresponsible. An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen.”
“I am not going to put them in prison, I am not going to forcibly vaccinate them,” Macron went on. “Therefore you have to say to them: from January 15 you can no longer go to a restaurant, you can no longer go for a drink, you can no longer go for a coffee, you can no longer go to the theatre, you can no longer go to the cinema,” the president said. (read more)
That extremist approach is the opening Marine Le Pen now has in front of her – to expose Emmanuel Macron as the installed, WEF approved, multicultural economic globalist everyone knows him to be.