Liberty, Equality, Fraternity... and Violence
French voters reject Macron and the Eurocrats as the Republic falls to riots
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
~ Napoleon Bonaparte
Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World: Hanoi, Vietnam...
Tide comes in; tide goes out. Today, we wonder...
Does the European political pendulum, lately seen swinging to the right, portend anything for the rest of the western world?
The big story out of France over the weekend was that voters turned out in record numbers to support Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) Party, trouncing smug incumbent and Klaus Schwab’s favorite WEF plaything, Emmanuel Macron, and his globalist Together Party.
Ms. Le Pen’s RN party secured one-third (33 percent) of the first round vote, while the leftwing New Popular Front came in second with 28 percent, leaving Mr. Macron twisting in the wind, at just 20 percent. (Macron wanted us to mention that a good deal of his “impact neutral” campaign was actually wind powered. Ahem…)
The RN’s preliminary victory underscores a massive shift in voter sentiment over the past two years. In first round voting in 2022, Le Pen’s party secured just over 4 million votes; this past weekend, the RN garnered ~11 million. It was the first time in history RN had won over 20% of the vote. It likely won’t be the last.
“Democracy has spoken and the French have put the RN and its allies at the top, practically wiping out the Macron camp,” Ms. Le Pen told supporters after the polls closed.
Now, one might think that the highest voter participation in forty years would be a cause for celebration among diehard democracy fanatics, a reason to saber the champagne and party like it’s mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-dix-neuf.
Ah, but one would be wrong...
Wail, Whine and Wince
Pilloried by the mainstream media as “far right,” a “fascist,” and a “racist, hardline extremist (etc.),” Le Pen is considered by many in the enlightened chattering class to be, in that tawdry, hackneyed phrase du jour, a “threat to democracy.”
To be sure, we do not pretend any special knowledge about French politics or its party leaders. For all we know, Ms. Le Pen eats her entrecôte rare and drinks Pernod through a plastic straw, too!
Nor do we claim democracy itself – a kind of “advanced auction on stolen goods,” as H.L. Mencken had it – for our favorite toy.
We mean only to notice the swing and sway of the people, the movement of the masses, so despised by the political caste – and their lickspittles in the media – who seek to rule over them.
Following the “unsavory” election results, lapdog news outlets were quick to chorus all the pre-scripted headlines and vacuous epithets we’ve come to expect from them (and of which, apparently, voters are none too fond):
French face election in which center has ‘imploded,’ energizing the far right ~ wailed NBC
Rival French parties seek to build anti-far right Front ~ whined Reuters
Le Pen reinvented France's far right. Racism and antisemitism persist ~ winced The Washington Post
And here’s disgraced newswire, the Associated Press, which managed to hold off until the very first sentence of its “coverage” before evoking the (other) N-word...
PARIS (AP) — French voters face a decisive choice on July 7 in the runoff of snap parliamentary elections that could see the country’s first far-right government since the World War II Nazi occupation — or no majority emerging at all.
Votus Interruptus
Rival parties from the left and center were last seen desperately withdrawing flaccid third-placed candidates across the country in order to, in their own words, “prevent the worst from happening” by ensuring Le Pen’s popular RN does not win “one more vote.”
That French citizens should deign to vote for anyone but an unquestioning eurostooge, a plant to do Brussels’ bidding in France’s own parliament, to fall in line on everything from the EU’s Green New Deal to porous immigration policy to the possibility of sending French troops to the Ukrainian frontlines (something that Macron, notably, has not ruled out)...
...is simply unfathomable to the right-thinking (i.e. left leaning) managerial class.
Fortunately for French voters, who clearly don’t know what’s best for themselves and their families, #brave “defenders of democracy” were on hand to riot through their broad boulevards, set fire to cars and motorcycles, smash shopfronts, hoist foreign flags and denounce their host country as hateful and bigoted.
That’ll learn ‘em!
One assumes such wanton acts of violence and wide-scale destruction of private property will do wonders for the collectivist cause ahead of the next round of elections this coming weekend. Hmm…
And yet, it’s not only French voters who appear to have had enough of their quisling eurocrat overlords. In last month’s EU parliamentary elections, “far right” and conservative parties made sweeping gains in Germany... Austria... Hungary... The Netherlands... Belgium… Greece… Finland and Spain. Meanwhile, Italy’s “far right” Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, remains the most popular leader on the continent.
What to make of it all?
Lessons from Brexit
Readers will recall back in 2016, when waves of experts, pollsters and political insiders were stunned by the UK’s Brexit referendum.
There was no way, claimed those who “knew better,” that voters across the United Kingdom would ever decide to unlatch from the warm and generous teat of the European Union’s flabby bureaucracy. The “Remain” campaign had even gone to the trouble of denouncing all those who entertained the very thought as racists, bigots, xenophobes, fascists, etc., to ensure that lumpen proles across the country understood what was best for them.
Then, when for unknown-but-probably-racist reasons, British voters hit the Brexit button anyway, benevolent politicians even offered to hold a second referendum, a kind of do-over, which they attempted to flog to the unflinching public as “the people’s vote.” (Which only leaves us to wonder who they thought voted in the first one?)
True to form, jilted establishmentarians cried “mis- and dis-information,” claimed “Russian interference,” cited a gradual “shift in public opinion” and, when all that failed, redoubled attacks on citizens who voted the “wrong way” for being too dull and/or uneducated to understand the complexity of their bright and scholarly arguments.
Needless to say, their efforts did not fair well.
Across the Pond, meanwhile, keen onlookers in the US were paying attention to the prevailing winds. Hillary Rodham Clinton, bless her charcoal heart, was not among them. Doubling down on exactly the kind of snide derision that saw Britons rebuke their self-described political “elites,” HRC chose to court half the country by referring to them as a “basket of deplorables.”
Turns out, regular folk don’t respond well to being slandered into submission. They don’t appreciate being called “racists” and “deniers” and “bigots” by those seeking their support, either. Nor do they particularly enjoy being told that exercising their right to vote for a candidate of their choice is a “threat to democracy” or that, if they don’t vote for one or another party, they “ain’t black.”
The rise and rise of third party and independent candidates across the west attests to this reality. The fact that people are voting for these outsiders is not a threat to democracy...it is, rather, democracy in action.
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
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Headline from an op-ed piece in today's New York Times: "The First Amendment Is Out of Control." You see, free speech as enshrined in our Constitution is optional, depending upon what is "information" and "misinformation" as determined by the NYT and their minions.
"The fact that people are voting for these outsiders is not a threat to democracy...it is, rather, democracy in action." Beautifully said, thanks for the wonderful article.