Essay by Eric Worrall
President Macron has called a snap parliamentary election after devastating losses to right wing challenger Marine Le Pen in recent European elections.
France’s snap election: what happened, why, and what’s next?
In a shock move, president Emmanuel Macron called a parliamentary election, describing it as ‘an act of confidence’
Jon Henley Europe correspondent Mon 10 Jun 2024 08.01 AEST
In a shock move, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has called a snap parliamentary election that will be held within the next 30 days. What happened exactly, why – and what might come next?
What’s the story?
After suffering a crushing defeat at the hands of Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally (RN) in the European parliamentary elections, the French president on Sunday evening unexpectedly announced a snap general election.
According to usually accurate projections, Macron’s centrist list, headed by MEP Valérie Hayer, scored between 14.8% and 15.2% in the European poll, less than half the 32%-33% tally booked by RN, whose lead candidate was the party’s president, Jordan Bardella, 28.
The president won re-election in 2022. His current term runs until spring 2027 and he cannot stand again.
What were Macron’s reasons?
The president said the decision was a “serious and heavy” one, but that he could not resign himself to the fact that “far-right parties … are progressing everywhere on the continent”.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/09/frances-snap-election-what-happened-why-and-whats-next
Bear in mind, when “The Guardian” say “Far Right”, they mean anyone to the right of President Biden. Le Pen is no President Trump. But she has promised to cancel wind and solar subsidies and instead concentrate on nuclear power, and she has also indicates she wants to protect French manufacturing – she regards driving manufacturing offshore with harsh climate rules but still using the manufactured products, importing the products instead of manufacturing them in France, as “climate hypocrisy”.
The following is from April 2022.
Climate discussed for 20 minutes in 3-hour-long Macron-Le Pen debate
By Nelly Moussu | Euractiv France | translated by Daniel Eck 21 Apr 2022
During the three-hour-long debate between French presidential candidates Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, climate was discussed for just 20 minutes, despite being one of the most anticipated topics. EURACTIV France reports.
Climate was one of the ten topics on the debate’s agenda on Wednesday (20 April), ahead of the final round of voting on Sunday.
…
Le Pen wants a slowed transition
For Le Pen, French purchasing power is at the heart of her discourse on the environment. The far-right leader promises to lower VAT on fuel, gas and heating oil while exiting “the European electricity market” to restore the purchasing power of the French.
While favouring the ecological transition, Le Pen wants “it to be slower than what is being imposed on the French, to enable them to cope with it.”
According to her, the current government is asking too much of the French people, and she blamed Macron for his “punitive ecology”.
Le Pen also believes that “wind power is an ecological and economic absurdity”. She promised a referendum on the dismantling of wind turbines and said she had “a plan to develop nuclear power” at the start of her mandate.
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Read more: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/climate-discussed-for-20-minutes-in-3-hour-long-macron-le-pen-debate/
President Trump said nice things about Marine Le Penn back in 2017, as far as I know he still feels the same about her – though at the time Trump’s focus was mostly Le Pen’s pushback against Europe’s open borders.
If President Macron loses ground in this snap election, he will still be President – it’s a Parliamentary election, not a Presidential election. But Macron will be even more of a lame duck President than he is already, his hands would be tied on many issues, it would be an enormous embarrassment for him.
What can we conclude from all this, with regards to the Paris Agreement? Le Pen has said she plans to uphold France’s Paris commitments, but she also makes it clear the Paris Agreement is not her main priority. If greens play hardball, my crystal ball tells me Le Pen would choose economic sanity over damaging climate commitments. So we are seeing an entertaining though slim possibility that France is kicked out of the Paris Agreement, maybe even before Trump wins office at the end of the year.
Sacre bleu!
Macron is a gambling man. In the best Rothschild tradition
Lightly of topic, but:
Greens suffer massive losses – young voters in particular turn away
Youth vote results at 4,500 schools
Why would France leave the Paris Agreement when they can just pay it lip service? That’s all that matters — say the right things while doing whatever is needed to keep in power.
From the article:
“What were Macron’s reasons?
The president said the decision was a “serious and heavy” one, but that he could not resign himself to the fact that “far-right parties … are progressing everywhere on the continent”.”
Things are looking up! The Left is worried about the growing influence of the Right.
The growing influence of the Right is what will save us, if we are to be saved.
A Paris Agreement with no Paris, were going to need a new name.
“Environmental Suicide Pact”, perhaps?
While favouring the ecological transition, Le Pen wants “it to be slower than what is being imposed on the French, to enable them to cope with it. … Le Pen has said she plans to uphold France’s Paris commitments…”
Again, we see that all of these “conservatives”, “republicans”, “right-wings” “alternatives” etc. are a part of the climate-industrial complex. Since 1980s they allowed CAGW narrative to develop, and they are also deeply invested in the green scam and want their piece of the pie. Their goal is to scale it down to make it more practical for the parasitic green economy to be forever attached to the real economy.
What will they do when the truth comes out that CO2 does not play any measurable role in Earth’s climate.
In the media’s vernacular, anyone not a far lefty is a “far right” politician or person. Or they use the term “hard right” – ever wonder why the term “hard left” is never used? Ever? Fidel Castro or Vladimir Lenin would never have been called “hard left”. Or even far left? Even Bernie Sanders never gets the label “far left” or “hard left”, though he obviously is.
Even AOC, a self described communist revolutionary, is never ever called “hard left” or “far left”. If she is labeled at all, she is described as a “progressive”, as if being radically leftist is a term of progress over all those neanderthals who are not communists.
The use of “far” or “hard” is a pejorative designed to make someone with that label appear vastly far out of the mainstream, weirdly, radically, fascistically to the right of most decent people.
It would be most amusing if the Paris Climate Agreement had to be renamed “The City That Shall Not Be Named Climate Agreement”.
Meanwhile in a small town called Thetford….
Thetford is in Norfolk, England. It falls under the District Council of Breckland, and Breckland in turn is part of the County Council of Norfolk.
You can gather from this that Breckland, and still more Thetford, are fairly small places. But they have global ambitions and are intent on saving the planet, or doing their bit towards that noble goal. So how is that going?
Well, Breckland District Council declared a climate emergency on September 19, 2019 and committed to achieving carbon neutrality within the district by 2035….They pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the entire district to net zero by 2035, which is considered a “whole area pledge”.
The good people of Thetford, or some of them, then decided to give this noble initiative all the help they could. Yes, you guessed right: Thetford Town Council declared a “climate emergency” and committed £30,000 to tackle it. So how did that go?
This decision sparked protests and disruptions during a council meeting in April 2023 by a group called Thetford Council Watch. The protesters objected to the climate emergency declaration and the spending allocation, arguing there were better ways to spend the money in the town.
The meeting descended into chaos during the public question segment when Thetford Council Watch took control and refused to stop speaking despite being asked by the chairman. One protester called the council “a panel of useless idiots.”
The acting town clerk, Alan Yorke, made a 999 call to Norfolk Police as the chairman failed to restore order, but police did not attend due to operational reasons. After nearly an hour-long suspension, the protesters eventually left, allowing the meeting to resume.
In response to this incident, the council decided to hire a private security team for future meetings, which Yorke stated was an “obligation” to protect councillors given the gravity of the situation. The security made its debut at a meeting on May 28, funded through the council’s budget.So in summary, Thetford Town Council’s climate emergency declaration and £30,000 allocation to address it led to protests that disrupted a council meeting, prompting the council to hire security guards to maintain order at subsequent meetings.
Source: perplexity.ai.
A better term than Climate Hypocrisy might be
Outsourcing Emissions (and their associated jobs) on locally used goods
Although “Climate Hypocrite” is still a good term
The weekend’s EU elections showed that Europeans are fed up with climate policies forced on them by bureaucrats, politicians, academics and radical environmentalists all of whose actions have just led to higher taxes and general living costs. Voters on that continent are experiencing the equivalent of being forced to ride on a plane/train/bus that keeps increasing the fare as the journey continues except there’s no guaranteed it’ll reach its destination. Likewise with climate policies. Citizens have been lured aboard an environmental bandwagon that continues to increase carbon taxes in order to subsidize inefficient and unreliable green products like wind and solar energy, EVs, heat pumps, etc. while enacting restrictions on travel, products, foods and anything that makes life more convenient, so that without a change in government they’d have no chance of rejecting the unworkable. More upcoming national elections in both Europe and North America are likely to show that people are likely to refuse to be railroaded into supporting unattainable climate and environmental goals.
More good news. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is a lie. An even bigger lie is that wind and solar can save us.
on a trip to Italy recently our guide predicted change coming. It seemed his biggest complaint was not being allowed to use the heat more than two days a week the previous winter.
The RN is not far right. By any historical gage it is a centrist party.
France is in an unusual position in Europe with regard to “green energy”, since about 75% of its electrical needs are provided by nuclear power plants, with about another 10% from hydroelectric plants in the Alps and Massif Central mountains. Since neither nuclear nor hydroelectric plants emit CO2, France would be relatively unaffected by a push toward or away from wind and solar.
France still relies on natural gas for home heating, and on crude oil imports for transportation fuel, although there are many oil refineries in France, some of them run by French-owned corporations.
The political situation in France is rather complicated. The president of France is elected by popular vote every five years, but has less power than the American president, which mostly concerns foreign policy and the military. Domestic policy is guided by a Prime Minister and other “ministers” similar to the Cabinet secretaries in the USA, which require the support of a majority of the Assemblee Nationale (equivalent of our House of Representatives). It is possible in France to have a government (Prime Minister and supporting cabinet) of a different party from that of the President.
Marine Le Pen, the current leader of the Rassemblement National party, is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who led an ultra-nationalist movement called the Front National in the 1980’s and 1990’s, which was then perceived as racist, and received only about 10% to 20% of the vote, and had few seats in parliament.
Due to increasing immigration to France, mostly from Arab countries in northern Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Libya), there has been increasing resentment from French nationals, so that the old Front National merged with center-right parties in recent years. Back in 2002, then-President Jacques Chirac (from a center-right party) famously admitted that “France cannot accept all the world’s misery”, and this favored the merger of the center-right with the Front National.
If a coalition of the center-right and far-right wins a majority in the upcoming parliamentary elections, Marine Le Pen could become Prime Minister, and lead French domestic policy with a group of like-minded ministers, while Macron would remain President for another three years and lead French foreign policy.