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I Kinda Wanna See Le Pen Win. Is That Bad?
I’ve been interested in the French presidential election since at least January of this year. I think it’s because it has the potential for upset that our presidential election displayed. For even this casual observer of national French politics this election is unique and exciting, relative to recent elections.
I’m not a fan of Le Pen’s politics but it seems to me that her campaign is becoming a symbol for challenging the conventional wisdom. We’re supposed to believe that everyone is in love with a One Europe concept when people actually do have interests closer to home that are often in conflict with that vision. Le Pen shouldn’t be where she is if it’s true that she’s such an extremist. When you’re the second most popular candidate for President you are not, by definition, extreme.
I get a kick out of seeing insubordinate voters not complying with the agenda that certain people think they have a right to decide for us. We certainly saw that with our presidential election and I see a similar dynamic with the French election. That’s the parallel I see, more so than protectionism or immigration. I look forward to the prospect of seeing pundits on TV stammer their way through the aftermath of another upset election. It just makes me giggle.
It reminds us that the people do have the final say and they don’t like it when they’re told the correct result in advance. I think that’s a difference between left and right. We believe it’s the process that confers legitimacy to the result, not the other way around.
So, while I think there are better advocates than Le Pen, a part of me does want to see her win–for that reason alone. Is that wrong?
Published in Elections
Totally with you. It would be a gas. Heck, I’m still a-gigglin’ from ours.
I want her to win, too.
It would certainly upset the apple cart, which would be no bad thing.
If one wanted to take a cautious glass half full look at it a person could say to themselves, “Perhaps Le Pen is not the leader we hope for and imagine, say all her critics are correct and she truly holds terrible views. If so, so what? How much damage can one woman do when FN has all of two people in Parliament and it is all but guaranteed that every other party will unite against her. Stalemate, but we still sent those bastards a message.”
I want her to win too!
If she doesn’t win does that mean that the people didn’t have the final say?
I think you present a false choice.
It is kinda like going to disaster movies. Am I a bad person for wanting to watch NYC get leveled by a flood, LA decimated by an earthquake, DC vaporized by aliens? Watching Europe going crazy is kinda fun after hearing those folks sneer at the US for decades.
Bereket,
Just because Macron is a banal boy-toy who’s motor-mouthed whine is now accompanied by a completely phony lawsuit. Just because Macron would be the tool of Juncker/Merkel/Soros and continue to drive Europe into the illiberal clutches of the EU.
Please Bereket, you must have a good reason to back Le Pen. You can’t just do it because you kinda wanna.
Regards,
Jim
I want her to win too.
I think the answer is obviously, “no.” I didn’t think I was presenting a choice at all, much less a false one. You’ll have to clarify what you mean for me.
Maybe I can clarify my point by saying that the election is the opportunity for the voters to chime in and make their voices heard. It’s how they participate, and contribute, to this process. But that’s entirely different from a process in which they perceive that they’re not a part of that process. Whichever way they decide, they at least had the chance to decide.
I think you can say that Le Pen shows there’s more than one approach to a unified Europe of some kind. It doesn’t have to be just this EU Constitution or nothing else. That would be a false choice ;-)
I think our real problem here is that if we were French, we would be deciding between two really horrible alternatives. Macron continues the status quo, and the impacts of Islamic immigration into the country have been dreadful. Le Pen fixes that but has a totally deranged socialistic program and Fascist links. If my memory serves, Macron’s economic program was just as awful as Le Pen’s.
Claire Berlinski, who I deeply respect, says we should loathe Le Pen because she made some statements about the Vichy government’s role in the holocaust that are, in her view, inexcusable. I know the Vichy Government’s role in the holocaust is in fact inexcusable, but Le Pen’s remarks did not say that. She believes the current government should not be viewed as a responsible direct descendant of Vichy. Since this has been mainstream opinion until very recently, I have a tough time considering it any kind of smoking gun.
So I don’t know. If I were in France I think I would have done a lot more research, but tentatively I think the two candidates are almost equally terrible, and sentimentally I might prefer the more anti-establishment one – Le Pen – to win.
We can certainly empathize with them!
I don’t think that a Le Pen win demonstrates insubordinate voters any more than a Macron win would. I think we’re reading our own prejudices into the situation.
Le Pen’s party contains disreputable people with ridiculous ideas.
So has every political party ever organized. Anywhere. Anytime.
Macron’s party scarcely exists. Neither does Le Pen’s.
Le Pen wants to pull out of the EU. I’m not a big fan of the EU; everything about it that works was accomplished about forty years ago. Since then, they’ve been slathering on extra layers of unaccountable bureaucracy and wondering why the
peasantscitizens don’t love them for it. Still, that would require a referendum. I don’t think it will happen.Macron loves the EU. He is a centrist, which is French for “nearly as Socialist as the Socialists.” He has said that he is going to be more friendly to business. He has the endorsement of a jug-earred knucklehead whose support in other elections in other lands hasn’t been worth a bucket of warm spit. (Just ask anybody in the Herzog administration.) Macron has been making an effort to attract scientists and engineers working on environmental issues to come to France. That’s fine by me. They are an enormous money-suck over here. Put all the bad eggs in one basket and ship the basket to France.
Neither one of them is likely to be able to accomplish their stated goals. If Le Pen wins, there will still be terrorist attacks. If Macron wins, the French economy will continue to run like a three-legged pig on a frozen pond.
So, all things considered, I’ll go with whomever Putin wants least. Macron.
To be fair, Le Pen is a socialist too.
Well, yeah … if France were ever to produce a politician as far right as Scoop Jackson, AFP would plotz.
I think it does, but that’s not the point I tried to make. I was referring to her support thus far. It doesn’t seem likely she’ll win but I can’t imagine voters aren’t aware that some kind of effort in opposition to the EU is a possibility with Le Pen. It’s just one element of her base of support, not everything, of course.
I believe you are correct in regards to her extremism: Certainly if she wins, then by definition she is not an extremist. At least not in France. In California, sure. But she isn’t in California.
It seems a truism to me that governments govern only by the consent of the governed: It is true in North Korea, Syria the USA, and France. The people ALWAYS have the final say. Their final say in France will be interesting.
There are certainly many of us feeling similarly conflicted.
The French are in an interesting position. If one took the best of Le Pen and Macron, one could assemble, I think, a pretty decent candidate.
That wasn’t true in our election, I don’t think: I’d have taken nothing from Clinton, dropped quite a bit from Trump, and then — poof — turned him into a conservative. Of course, that wasn’t an option. But, still, we had better options than our European friends.
From my standpoint, a Le Pen victory will not be without its associated guilty pleasures.
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But let me emphasize the guilty part. Anti-semitism is very near the top of my short list of detested things, and I don’t want the National Front leading France.
Marine Le Pen definitely has her flaws- way too close to Putin, her fascist roots, her love of certain parts of socialism, etc.
However, Macron is not the safe bet he appears. He has been groomed by the Rothschild banking, where he formally was an executive for this role, . At Rothschild, Macron grew to be quite adept at dealmaking marrying his past government contacts and the interests of the Rothchilds.
The Banking mess is even worse in Europe. Electing Macron may be a total disaster. Just look what the bankers did to Cyprus. They schemed to get Cyprus in way over their heads and then looted the country of it’s most precious assets when the country defaulted. At least, Marine Le Pen has shown interest in restraint.
If Le Pen deports refugees, cracks down on Islam, and destroys the EU, the rest will have been worth it. It will also have the distinct advantage of making the people who run this site heads explode.
The wonderful maniacs on Reddit’s The Donald totally want to see Le Pen win.
so you’re confessing to the Macron hacks?
She’s a nationalistic socialist. If it’s wrong to want her to win, which of those two components makes it wrong?
A thought. Even if Le Pen is everything her critics claim, and there is good reason to believe they are correct, voting in Macron over her could still easily be the worst possible outcome. She is representative of an angry voice, furious with the very real failures of French policy and the EU. A voice for those furious at the direction the nation has been traveling. What is Macron? Absolutely more of the same, in some ways worse. He is a doubling down on the status quo, “there is not a French culture, there is a culture in France and it is diverse“.
Good God what imbecile tone deafness, what is there that the French take more pride in than their culture? Hell, there is a ministry dedicated purely to that purpose. Le Pen is almost certain to lose but that should provide little comfort to those who detest her as what follows her is almost certain to be much worse.
Yeah it’s bad. Now go to your room and let the grown-ups sort it out.
Them: Le Pen is a fascist!
Me: Yeah whateves. You said Romney is a fascist to.
Check out her website.
Me: Holy crap! They arent lying this time! She is an actual fascist!
So yeah, as much as I want the EU to blow up, I dont want to her win.
I liked her line in the debate… Something like “After this election a woman will run France… If I win, I will run France, if he wins Angela Merkel will run France” …
Plus the email dump, and the tax fraud documents being leaked, I think she might squeak by.
It might be bad to want her to win, but judging from this thread alone, you are in some pretty good company.
I have to single out a remarkable statement you made, sump’n like , “if you are the second most popular candidate for president you are not, by definition, extreme.”
Yet in our country THE WINNER of our presidential election is considered “extreme” by his enemies.
Have you seen that red and blue map of the US showing which states and counties went for Trump? All red, except for little clots of blue mostly at the coasts…..
Yet our president is a fascist (???? too funny, but I won’t go into that!) tyrannical dictator, who must be “resisted” like the French would like to believe they resisted Vichy?
Funny ol’ world!
And yes, I want Le Pen to win too. B. Hasbeen Omega is backing Macron; that’s good enough for me.
My thoughts exactly, Le Pen is obviously a very flawed candidate but the status quo in Macron doesn’t fill me with a lot of optimism either the fact that a Le Pen victory will send shivers down the spine of the Brussels eurocrats means I almost want to see her win.