Macron vs Le Pen

Discussion in 'Western Europe' started by TheEternalOne, Apr 5, 2017.

  1. Space_Time

    Space_Time Well-Known Member

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    Here's more:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/opinion/sunday/is-there-a-case-for-le-pen.html?_r=0

    Is There a Case for Le Pen?
    Ross Douthat
    Ross Douthat APRIL 29, 2017
    Supporters pasted a poster of Marine Le Pen, France’s National Front leader, on a wall before a political rally for local elections in Frejus, France, in 2014. Credit Eric Gaillard/Reuters
    EVERY surge of right-wing populism confronts voters with a different dilemma. In the Brexit referendum, the risk was the policy, not the politicians. Voting to leave the European Union was not a vote to make Nigel Farage prime minister; it was a vote for a leap into the unknown, but one supervised by mainstream Tory leaders.

    In the case of Donald Trump, there was risk in the policy, but the central question was always about the candidate himself: about his fitness for the office, his ability to execute its basic duties, the effect that his demagogy and self-dealing would have on civic norms.

    In the case of Marine Le Pen — presently facing off against Emmanuel Macron, the John Lindsay of the Eurocrats, for the presidency of France — the main risk is her party. To elevate her to the presidency is to empower the National Front, an organization that despite years of renovation and attempted purges — extending to Le Pen’s own father, Jean-Marie — still includes figures like her successor (briefly; he just resigned) as its leader, who appears to have done the “I’m just asking questions” thing about the gas chambers.

    Parties matter, their histories and undercurrents matter, and the Front’s Vichy taint is a good reason to prefer a world where a Le Pen never occupies the Élysée Palace.


    To begin with, nobody seriously doubts Le Pen’s competence, her command of policy, her ability to serve as president without turning the office into a reality-TV thunderdome. Trump’s inability to master his own turbulent emotions is not an issue with his Gallic counterpart.

    Nor is there much evidence that Le Pen herself draws any personal inspiration from the Vichy right. However incomplete the project, she is the reason that her party has ejected Vichyites and disavowed anti-Semitism and moved toward the French mainstream on many issues.

    This has been done, of course, in the hopes of gaining power. But that is how the purging of poisons always happens, and being disowned by one’s father is a quite costly and dramatic act of political purgation.

    Some argue that Le Pen has simply replaced anti-Semitism with Islamophobia. But her attacks on Islamic fundamentalism and her defense of a strict public secularism have been echoed by many mainstream French politicians. An argument for quarantining her perspective would apply to Nicolas Sarkozy or François Fillon, not just her.

    Over all, the politician that Le Pen has obviously strained to imitate is not her father or Marshal Pétain, but Charles de Gaulle — the de Gaulle who fiercely opposed European political integration, who granted Algeria its independence in part because he doubted France could absorb millions of Muslim immigrants, whose “France First” worldview consistently gave other Western leaders fits.

    Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

    Even the most controversial utterance of Le Pen’s campaign, a denial of widespread French complicity in the deportation of French Jews, was deeply Gaullist: An insistence that the true France existed with de Gaulle’s government-in-exile, not Pétain’s regime.

    This is comforting myth, of course, and perhaps de Gaulle’s style of nationalism is too chauvinist and mystical for our era.

    But on the other hand, our era’s “enlightened” governance has produced an out-of-touch eurozone elite lashed to a destructive common currency, and an experiment in mass immigration that has changed French society faster than integration can do its necessary work.

    These are the same sort of issues that helped Trump win the presidency, but in the European context the challenges are more severe and the populist critique more compelling.

    There is no American equivalent to the epic disaster of the euro, a form of German imperialism with the struggling parts of Europe as its subjects. There is no American equivalent to the challenge of immigrant-assimilation now facing France — no equivalent of the domestic terror threat, the rise of Islamist anti-Semitism, the immigrant enclaves as worlds unto themselves.

    Which means that while much of Trump’s notional agenda was an overreaction to the country’s problems, some of Le Pen’s controversial positions are straightforwardly correct.

    She is right that France as a whole, recent immigrants as well as natives, would benefit from a sustained mass-immigration halt.

    She is right that the European Union has given too much unaccountable power to Brussels and Berlin and favored financial interests over ordinary citizens.

    And while many of her economic prescriptions are half-baked, her overarching critique of the euro is correct: Her country and her continent would be better off without it.

    The French will presumably vote against her nonetheless. They will choose Macron, a callow creature of a failed consensus, over the possibility that the repulsive party’s standard-bearer might be right.

    That decision will be understandable. But it’s the kind of choice that has a way of getting offered again and again, until the public finally makes a different one.

    I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@DouthatNYT).
     
  2. Baff

    Baff Well-Known Member

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    Great thought provoking and perceptive opening paragraph, rapidly descending into bog standard Trump bashing.

    In the UK, to UKIP's detractors, Farage was the issue. Not his policy. UKIP were considered racists and pursued and hounded as such and indeed still are. Farage is hated by the left. They didn't play the policies, because their own policies were so deeply unpopular. They played the man.

    Double mistake. Like Trump, he's a charismatic and they aren't.
    Playing the man when you are a social drongo yourself? Fail.
    Playing the policies when yours are intensely disliked? Fail.




    The American equivalent to the Epic disaster of the Euro was it's dogmatic adoption and continuation of the Gold Standard.
    The Great Depression they called it.

    The economic debate at the time pretty much exactly mirrors the Euro debate today. Same policies, same political ambition, same result.
     
    Last edited: May 1, 2017
  3. Space_Time

    Space_Time Well-Known Member

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    Here's more:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph...nted-all-because-shes-older-than-her-husband/

    WorldViews

    France’s incoming first lady is being taunted — all because she’s older than her husband

    By Amy B Wang
    May 13, 2017 at 3:48 PM


    Emmanuel Macron, left, waves while standing with his wife, Brigitte, in front of the Louvre Pyramid in Paris on Sunday. (Christophe Morin/Bloomberg News)
    It's been a week since 39-year-old political outsider Emmanuel Macron won the French presidential election.

    But his wife, 64-year-old Brigitte Macron, has continued to face a litany of misogynistic comments similar to ones that plagued her throughout the campaign, most centering on the couple's 24-year age difference.

    The satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Tuesday published a cover with caricatures of the incoming French president and his wife, along with the caption: "He is going to work miracles!"

    The text was a reference to Macron's optimistic campaign messaging in a divisive election. But given the illustration — of the president-elect placing his hand on his "pregnant" wife's belly — it also was a clear jab at the incoming first couple's age gap.


    On social media, many slammed the magazine's cover as "sexist" and "ageist."


    By now, the backstory of how Macron and his wife got together is well known in France and elsewhere: He was 15 when they met; she was his high school drama teacher. At the time, she was married with three children.

    Two years later, he reportedly declared his love for her. Despite the age difference and the societal conventions, she eventually left her husband for him. “Love took everything in its path and led me to divorce. It was impossible to resist him," Macron told Paris Match magazine last year, according to the New York Times. She divorced her husband in 2006 and married Macron in 2007.

    Related: Macron won from a precarious place: The middle. Governing from there could be even harder.

    Their romance captured tabloid headlines during the French presidential campaign but was not an obstacle to Emmanuel Macron decisively winning over far-right opponent Marine Le Pen last week.


    For many French female voters, at least, the age difference was a non-issue, The Washington Post's Mary Jordan reported.

    “It’s normal to see men with younger women,” Martine Bergossi, a shop owner in Paris, told Jordan before the election. “So it’s rather great to see the opposite.”

    Macron's win hasn't stopped some from attacking his wife on social media, calling her a "pedophile," among other insults. Those attacks, as well as the Charlie Hebdo cover, prompted many to stand up for Madame Macron — including her daughter from her first marriage, 32-year-old Tiphaine Auzière, who said it was "jealousy" that was fueling such hate toward her mother.

    Related: Just how unusual is Macron’s 24-year age gap with his wife anyway?

    "I think we cannot remain indifferent to this, and now I do not want to give any importance to people who convey this kind of stuff, because I find it totally outrageous in France in the 21st century to make such attacks," Auzière told French CNN affiliate BFMTV. "These are attacks that we wouldn't direct at male politicians or at a man who would accompany a female politician. So I think there's a lot of jealousy, and that this is very inappropriate."

    Even those who were not fans of the president-elect rushed to his wife's defense.

    "I won't spend 5 years defending [Emmanuel] Macron," one Twitter user wrote. "However I will spend 5 years defending Brigitte Macron against any misogynistic and ageist remarks."

    French television presenter Cécile de Ménibus tweeted that she found the incoming first lady "much more elegant than all those critics that I read... and anyway, what's the point!?"



    Valérie Pécresse, the Republican president of the Ile-de-France regional council, tweeted that Macron was the victim of sexist and misogynistic comments.

    "Frankly... [it's] a shame!" she added.


    May-December romances between politicians and their partners are nothing new, as The Post's Adam Taylor reported in a breakdown of age gaps between world leaders and their partners.

    In this case, it's simply that the woman happens to be older than the man. Case in point: The 24-year age difference between the Macrons is the same as the one between President Trump and his wife, Melania, but the latter hasn't invited as much scrutiny.


    The future French leader, for one, seems tired of talking about it.

    "If I had been 20 years older than my wife, nobody would have thought for a single second that I couldn’t be," he told the French newspaper Le Parisien this week. “It’s because she is 20 years older than me that a lot of people say, 'This relationship can’t be.' "


    Centrist Emmanuel Macron has won the French presidency. He defeated Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right National Front, a strongly anti-immigrant populist party. Macron, 39, will now become France's youngest head of state since Napoleon Bonaparte. (Adam Taylor,Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)


    Amy B Wang is a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post.
     
  4. Ole Ole

    Ole Ole Banned

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    New president will choosen Communism for now ??
     

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