Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Marine Le Pen, who once described climate change as the “new religion of the bobo” (bohemian bourgeoisie), has a real chance of becoming the next French President in 2022.
France’s Le Pen Gains Ground for 2022 Elections, Poll Shows
By Angeline Benoit 11 April 2021, 20:43 GMT+10
- Le Pen is seen beating Macron in the first round in most cases
- Macron and two others could beat Le Pen in the final round
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is increasing her chances of winning the first round of next year’s presidential elections, according to an Ifop-Fiducial poll published by Le Journal du Dimanche.
The National Rally party leader would come first in six out of 10 scenarios in the first round if the ballots were cast this Sunday, the poll showed. She would then be beaten in the second round for the top two candidates, with 46% in a runoff against President Emmanuel Macron’s 54%, it said.
“The results reflect Le Pen’s strong dynamic as well as President Emmanuel Macron’s difficulties in the health crisis context,” Frederic Dabi, Ifop’s deputy general director, was cited as saying in Le Journal du Dimanche. “Never before, with only one year to go to the ballot, has a National Rally candidate obtained such scores.”
…
Even President Macron is not taking the Paris Agreement seriously – in February this year, a French court ruled France was failing to fulfil its Paris Agreement pledges.
Marine Le Pen is still very much seen as an outsider. French presidential elections are held in two rounds, with the strongest two candidates making it to the second round. Marine will almost certainly make it to the second round, but she will face an uphill battle to defeat the votes Macron or whatever other establishment candidate who makes it will command.
Nevertheless, the France 2022 election will be a real popcorn moment. If Le Pen is elected President, and if she follows her gut and tears up the Paris Agreement, President Harris could be in the delicious predicament of pledging allegiance to a climate agreement which even the host country has rejected.
Salute the Marines!
Ma’am, yes Ma’am!
Good one, Eric. If Le Pen manages to win and tear up the Paris Agreement, it would be hilarious, although it would probably not change anything. However, France is a very sclerotic country, and if she tries to institute major reforms, they will be met by protests, strikes, and all the rest of it, in the usual way. When Claude Allègre was chosen science and education minister in the late 1990s—not a position he was elected to, mind you—and took on the teachers, he lost. And so France bumbles along. Ultimately, maybe for the best?
Just to add some information (even if a little OT) :
Claude Allègre is a true scientist and the only French politician I know that clearly discarded the climate scam. He wrote a book on this subject :
“L’imposture climatique” (The climate deception / sham) :
https://www.amazon.fr/IMPOSTURE-CLIMATIQUE-CLAUDE-ALLEGRE/dp/2266212478
To the subject :
Marine Lepen social and economics program belongs more to the left wing (similar to Jean-Luc Mélenchon) than to the right wing economics of her father Jean Lepen. Her only particularity is that she is a strong Frexit (and EURO-xit) proponent.
Even if she was formerly against the climate scam, she will adopt any greenwashing stance to gain votes and since her economics program needs more taxes, she will do anything to increase them (the CO2 tax and other taxes based on the fake climate disruption are a good way to steal mony from taxpayers).
As we say in France :
“Nous ne sommes pas sortis de l’auberge !”
“ Her only particularity is that she is a strong Frexit (and EURO-xit) proponent.”
Not so sure about that mon petit barde. The only true Frexiteer is Francois Asselineau and the UPR.
Indeed François Asselineau is a true Frexiteer (and one of the very few anti-lockdown politicians), but he gleans too few votes to be a real challenger.
Asselineau has been expelled on harassment charges…
Le Pen = Bernie Sanders + Build the wall
Allègre was vulgar, insulting, and useless at reforming. He had a vague success in term of popularity on the right, but that’s all. As a minister he was essentially good at causing media cycle and “bad publicity is good publicity”.
You don’t reform things by insulting people, turning the main unions against you, and still work within the system.
Allègre was a socialist party person. He was working obviously within the system.
The “educnat” (éducation nationale) system probably can’t be reformed, only redone from the ground up (or tore down).
Eric, I think you may be underestimating the socialistic tendencies of the French electorate, which are embedded deeply in their DNA.
The French are inveterate flirters, and I think they like to flirt with conservatism occasionally, but when the bell tolls in the voting booth, it’s their left hands that grasp the pencils.
I agree it’s a long shot, but things are really messed up in France. As King Louis XVI discovered, French don’t hold back when their patience finally snaps!
To paraphrase an old advertising slogan of the American Dairy Association, “You never outgrow your need for guilt.”
Marine Le Pen has hit upon something that Michael Crichton noted nearly 20 years ago, that “Environmentalism is the religion of choice for urban atheists.”
Messianic movements often rely on guilt trips and scapegoats to motivate the faithful.
In the climate frenzies, activists have revived the Original Sin of Prometheus, who stole the secrets of fire and reason from the Olympian gods, and gave them to man, for which Prometheus was tortured for all eternity.
Carbon dioxide is the oversimplified scapegoat that climate worriers flog incessantly. Never mind that it’s a trace atmospheric gas necessary for all life, and that nobody knows what the optimum concentration is. For the purpose of inducing guilty feelings among the faithful, CO2 has been transmogrified into deadly poison.
And don’t forget that messianic movements also need perceived enemies to their religion – heretics and non-believers to burn at the stake. In the case of the climate change cult, they have “climate deniers” to burn at the stake.
In the scheme of things ‘Climate Change’ is not high on the list of voting needs so neither Le Pen nor any of the other candidates will even mention it. And the Left has proven over and over that no matter who is elected they won’t do enough to satisfy their Green desires and everyone knows that. From my seat in the bleachers I think France is all for virtue signaling CC action as long as it doesn’t cost them anything.
Same as every other country then.
Le Pen is almost certainly not going to win. She is currently commanding about 25% of the vote which will probably mean she makes it into the second round but then the overwhelming majority of the french public will vote for her opponent irrespective of who they might be. France is not going to elect a far-right antisemitic president for as long as people remember the second world war.
The ‘far right’ epithet is inapt, on reading her political position.
Besides antisemitism is more an infection of the Left nowadays, e.g. Jeremy Corbyn and friends.
Otherwise many of her policy positions look left-of-center.
Absolutely Chris spot on, she is not a hard right winger.
The far left in France, “La France Insoumise” as they are called, and the Socialist Party, are all a bunch of anti-Semite, identity politics, critical theory, post modernists. That’s why nobody votes for them.
What people need to understand is that as long as France is in the EU, they have to bow to the diktats of Brussels.
Macron is an EU technocrat, not the President of a sovereign France.
Of course Marine le Pen is “far right”. The left-wing establishment hate her, so she is “far right”. Nothing to do with her politics, which could be way to the left in reality. The left won’t call their enemies anything else until the “far right” label stops working. MlP getting in might do the trick. Allez Marine!
It seems France is similar to Ireland where we essentially have a great choice between fifty shades of left. We need to ask politicians their position on five to seven key issues and then show them that these have all failed in the past.
She is against Semites?, really, well I do declare!
Yes, this is a repeat of the US election when people held their noses to endorse ‘anyone but Trump’.
If anything the anyone but Le Pen motive is likely to be even stronger
tonyb
Many people had their noses held for them by the media, and the timing of the pandemic was perfect for removing the incumbent … how about that for a conspiracy theory!
tony,
Any one that frames the
2020 US Presidential election in the way you do,
is either a 100 carat dummy, or a proper stupid fool, or else,
one prone to evil.
Your pick, your choice!
What a peculiar comment. Whatever your take on Trump and whether you believe Biden ‘stole’ the election, the fact remains many millions of people voted against Trump even though they may have not liked the alternative they voted for.
Le Pen has suffered the same fate, as many people hold their nose and vote for someone else because they do not want Le Pen.
Its called tactical voting and you get it all over the world-sometimes it directly affects an election sometimes it doesn’t.
tonyb
tony,
is not about believing, silly boy.
There is very few that believe what you say in the frame as you put it.
Those are simply idiots… boy.
And you are not an idiot are you?
You still got to chose from the other options, where you belong in that point!
I tell you,
you yourself do not believe the version of your framing story telling.
Yeah, tactical voting, like in the third world countries.
By the way North Korea is a Democratic Republic too,
and has the best kind of the tactical voting you describe.
Shameful not only to see and witness the same happening to USA,
but also being lectured by guys like you, about the fairness of such tactics.
That pit is bottomless… please keep flirting and gambling with it.
cheers
(Anything but (anyone on the right)) is an overused mantra.
With the “loi anti séparatisme” (*), Macron lost a lot of “anyone but” support from the islamophile left, even more when his education minister going against Islamoleftism, and literally triggering a lot of Islamoleftists who went on to proclaim (“robustly“) that it is not a thing.
(*) A complete nonsense. There is no “separatism”. Islamists don’t want independent (as regional separatists like separate as in US segregation, or South Africa. They want supremacy (and until then, usual welfare).
Anyone not the equivalent of Karl Marx, is “far-right” to Izzy-dumb. !
Oh I don’t know Fred, Karl Marx is pretty far right to Izzy.
You are absolutely correct.
Indeed, this has happened in previous elections when the far-right candidate has got through the first round. It’s evidently correct.
The sensible question to ask is “What would a Le Pen victory in the 1st round mean for the national debate in France?”
And the answer is “No change”. As she will lose in the second round.
But the questions being raised (like Frexit) may come to fruition a generation later, around 2050.
Just like there was no way Trump would win, or Brexit would happen, or the North would vote Tory…
That JDD poll has two “hypotheticals” for the second round where MLP wins.
1) Jean-Luc Mélenchon, loses 40-60.
JLM is … “far-left” (?) … think “Jeremy Corbyn on both steroids and acid” …
2) Yannick Jadot, if selected as a “unified left” candidate in order to get through the first round, loses 47-53 in the second (which is at least within the margin of error).
Jadot is a “Green Party” EU (not “Assemblée Nationale”) deputy, and a self-described “militant ecologist”.
Marine Le Pen will probably not win the Presidency, but she could force her runoff opponent to move to the right or center in order to defeat her.
Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was the leader of the National Front party, which had a far-right nationalist agenda (sometimes perceived as racist against Arab immigrants) from the 1980’s through the early 2000’s. The center-right parties in France often saw Le Pen and his party as a nuisance, which would siphon votes away from them and enable socialists to win the Presidency or seats in the National Assembly. However, France has two-round elections for all seats in the National Assembly as well as for the Presidency (similar to elections in Georgia and Louisiana), so that most National Front candidates were eliminated in the first round, and had very few seats in the National Assembly.
In the 2002 Presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen stunned everyone by winning second place in a ten-candidate election, narrowly eliminating the Socialist candidate with 17% of the vote, while center-right Jacques Chirac led with 21%. In the runoff, supporters of leftist candidates who had been eliminated rallied around Chirac in order to block Le Pen, and Chirac won with about 78% in the runoff.
Most of Europe has been drifting toward the right since then, mostly as a reaction against massive immigration from Muslim countries, and “nationalist” candidates have recently won elections in other European countries. Marine Le Pen will probably do better than her father did in 2002, but she might not be able to consolidate the center-right if she gets into the runoff, since the name “Le Pen” is toxic to those who perceive themselves as non-racist.
Marine Le Pen might have a chance if the French left is divided among two or three candidates, none of whom can consolidate a majority (or make it to the runoff). The Communist party still has about 15% support in France. The eventual winner is likely the candidate who can best consolidate the center.
As for France leaving the Paris climate accord, it probably won’t happen, regardless of who wins the presidency. France leads the European Union in the fraction of its electricity obtained from nuclear power (about 75%), so that meeting any CO2 emissions reduction targets will be easier for France than for its neighbors.
How is she even “far right”?
Or just “right wing”?
Given the current political climate in France, I would not bet more than a friendly glass of wine on anything. Remember the Yellow Vests? They haven’t gone away. What were they protesting? Fuel prices. What would happen if the government tried to put some teeth into its climate policy? Hmmm.
In terms of politics, 2022 is a long way off. A lot will happen between now and then.
I have less than no clue about France’s electoral laws so I don’t know if it’s even possible for a totally unknown candidate to come storming onto the scene. If it is possible, I wouldn’t bet against it.
Quite right. It also had the police openly feuding with and beating on firemen. It included episodes of self immolation. The army has generally been missing in defending the Macron regime in the gilets jaunes riots.
Macron was essentially unknown in 2017 and only won because he faced Le Pen in the second round. He went from getting about 22% of the vote in the first round to 66% of the vote in the second. The same is likely to be true in 2022 if Le Penn makes it to the second round.
In a first past the post voting system Le Pen would be the favourite to be the next President but with the french system she does not have a chance since all the other parties will rally around whoever the alternative is. It happened in 2002 when Le Pen lost in a landslide to
Chirac and in 2017 when Le Pen (junior) lost to Macron.
Indeed.
I really wasn’t paying close attention but my understanding (possibly faulty) was that Macron needed to be sponsored by a party so he started his own. As far as I can tell, that would be the route a complete outsider would have to take.
The First Past The Post system is probably one of the worst systems in a democratic election. The UK landslide for Boris Johnson was on the back of 43.6% of the votes cast and on about 68% turn out. Meaning of about 48 million registered voters giving 29% of registered voters resulting in 56% of the seats in Parliament.
Still the British people chose this system in a referendum when Cameron was PM so they’ve got what they wanted. Which is strong government by a minority.
Personally I quite like the system where there are two rounds and the least popular with the majority loses, though choosing between Corbyn (a true anti-Semitic Marxist) and Johnson (a liar, cheat and charlatan driven by self interest) would have been a “please don’t make me do it” situation.
And what self-interest would that be, Ben?
I assume you are aware that Johnson is significantly less wealthy than Corbyn.
…He went from getting about 22% of the vote in the first round to 66% of the vote in the second…
I suspect as Uncle Joe Stalin observed ” it’s not the votes that count it’s who counts the votes that counts” .
Certainly seems to be the case here in USA.
Cheers
mike
Don’t you worry about that, Australia will not give up until the declaration of finally achieveing the status of Banana Republic is confirmed.
Climate Change will even prevent the growing of bananas, and don’t even think about transporting any that do grow.
“President Harris.” I saw that sir.
Ha 😉
President Joe will survive by staying in the basement. It’s the one place where Kamala can’t push him down the stairs.
Brought a smile to my face, thank you
As someone else said, when Harris and Biden shake hands she are not being friendly, she is checking his pulse.
Ah, he might still “trip over the dog” and “fall” on a letter opener that pierces his heart and then roll over and stab himself in the back six times in his confusion. “What a tragedy, bwah ha ha ha ha”, cackled President Harris.
Even though they seem cordial to each other in front of the cameras, I get the feeling that Joe and Kamala don’t like each other much.
I don’t think anyone likes Kamala. In the primaries, she could only mange about 2% support.
It is a long shot but you never know these days. The media describe anyone on the right as ‘far right’ even though Marine Le Pen isn’t.
Something worth noting, however. France’s grape harvest was largely destroyed last week by a deep, unseasonal frost. The French may not understand that the earth is emerging from an interglacial period but even they can compare what Macron is saying about global warming with the hard-to-miss destruction of their wine industry. If another frost was to kill next year’s harvest – just before polling day – the French may just start to connect the dots. We live in hope.
Europeans are well enough informed to know that climate change doesn’t always involve warm weather.
Acceptance of the science of climate change is the norm in the UK and Europe.
(Just last week I counted 5 ads in an evening’s TV watching which positively referred to fighting climate change, green issues or similar – not counting the constant ads for EVs)
Most Europeans know the climate scam is just that,a scam.Of course there are gullible fools like you,luckily you belong to the minority.
Griff,
it seems you mistake adverts & propaganda for reality.
”Bobo”
This article was worth posting for that word alone.
This is France.
Politically they are overdue to re-install the monarchy, so anything could happen.
After ditching the monarchy they have had the tendency to go directly for emperors.
vive le Roi!
The Yellow vesters are anti Paris accord, anti taxation, anti being pushed around by globalists, treated like idiots.
And that was a BIG protest. There is a lot of support for a populist govt.
Frenchie here, although I will almost certainly vote for her next year, she still has a low chance of winning. Her party, the RN, has been demonized for decades and described as fascist by left-wingers, and even though she is working on changing their image, a lot of people still fear it (she is mostly anti-immigration and pro-police for example). Regarding the Paris agreement, I don’t think she will leave it if she becomes president. France has become one of the most climate-brainwashed countries the last few years, two weeks ago we had massive protests in the country asking Macron to pass new laws to reduce emissions. Of course, the majority of them want this but become yellow vests when that impacts their life too much…
This is her chance, if she messes it up this time she will have to go.
“…President Harris could be in the delicious predicament of pledging allegiance to a climate agreement which even the host country has rejected.”
Don’t toy with us, Eric!
The Establishment will not be amused if Le Pen is elected. There WILL be electoral fraud. There was last time, there will be massive electoral fraud this time.
Australia is about the only country that is making any effort to meet its Paris commitments , thereby committing economic suicide.
Nonetheless, we live in hope of Frexit and France telling the UN to get lost.
If a candidate collects more than 50% of the vote there willbe no second round. So Le Pen’s only hope is to win the first round with more than half the vote. If she’s polling 44% now I’d say she has a good chance.
She needs to learn stimulus math and offer an extra week of holiday with a cash payment. Then pull out of the Paris Agreement during holiday. Add a wine subsidy if there is any whining.
Why are conservatives always described as “far-right”?
Easier to marginalize that way.
Exactly.
Because she is a “conservative far-right”. more or less like her father (which was an extremist right) but with lipstick. Conservatives are one thing and far-right, at least here in Europe, are another. We do not perceive that divisions as they are used in the USA. Some european moderate left parties here are considered “conservatives” and some moderate right parties are “liberals”. Trust me, it’s not the same thing. We use to say that in USA there’s only right and can be more liberal (democrats) or conservative (republicans). Conservatives in USA, even Trump, are not the same thing as Marine Le Pen and cannot be confused.
How is Marine Le Pen in any significant way “like her father”?
No!
(France just banned internal flights where the train journey is under 2.5 hours…)
Can they send mail-in ballots to the USA?
If France were to try and leave the Paris Accords, the EU would just overrule them. They would have to leave the EU to get out of the Paris Accords.
Overrule?
What if France decides to overrule that?