French and Other European Conservative and Populist Parties Are Fighting the Same Battle as Trump against Progressive Elites

Europe is just as politically divided as America and the European politicians who oppose the conservative agenda of President Trump are attempting to create Progressive strongholds in France, Germany and Britain. But, this week is all eyes are on France, where both conservative and socialist parties and candidates are under pressure from the far right's Marine Le Pen for situations they could have avoided. • • • FRENCH LEFT SPLIT IN WAR OVER POLICY AGENDA. The most open warfare between Left and Center is now playing out in France where the Socialist Party has abandoned its own President François Hollande. Socialist voters say the Hollande presidency has been confused and disastrous. They have accused Hollande of zig-zagging on economic policy and betraying Socialist ideals with policies that sometimes favor business. Hollande is the least popular French president since World War II, with a favorability rating of 4%, forcing him to concede last month that he couldn’t run for re-election. • That cleared the way for Hollande's prime minister, Manuel Valls, to run for the Socialist Party presidential nomination. Valls himself has often referred to what he calls two “irreconcilable” wings of the Socialist Party. During the primary race, Valls accused his chief rival, the extreme leftist Benoît Hamon, of having idealist, costly and pie-in-the-sky notions that could not be put into practice, warning that he would relegate the Socialist Party to “certain failure” and the wilderness of decades in opposition. Valls had told reporters last week that he could not defend Hamon’s manifesto for the presidency. Valls, who suggested that if Hamon won, he couldn’t get behind him and would step back from the campaign -- after he lost in the first round of the primary to Hamon, coming in second to set up a confrontation with Hamon one-on-one in round two for the nomination/ Valls is often compared to Tony Blair and the centrist New Labour Party Blair headed. • Well, on Sunday, Benoît Hamon, the unflinchinghly far left rebel outsider who wants to introduce a universal basic income, legalize cannabis and tax robots, was chosen as the French Socialist Party’s presidential candidate. Hamon secured a clear win of more than 58% over the centrist former prime minister Manuel Valls at 42%. It was a victory for the Party’s far left rebels against the pro-market, center-left policies of Valls and Hollande – a damning verdict by voters against what many on the Left consider the failed presidency of an unpopular leader. Speaking to supporters Sunday, Hamon said the French Socialist Party could once again “hold its head high,” saying he represented a Left that was “turned towards the future” and that “wanted to win.” Hamon said : “I believe that faced with a conservative Right that represents privilege [François fillon] and a destructive extreme-right [Marine Le Pen], our country needs a Left that thinks of the world as it is, and not as it was, a Left that can bring a future people want.” Valls, in his concession speech, merely said "Bon Chance" -- that is, wishing Hamon “good luck” and implying that he would indeed walk away form Hamon's campaign. • Hamon, 49, is by no means a newcomer to Socialist politics. He served as education minister and Party spokesman and is the figurehead of leftist rebel Socialist MPs who turned against Hollande in a bloc for his pro-business stance. Hamon was tossed out of the Hollande government in 2014 after opposing Hollande and Valls’s pro-market economic policy. He then led a rebellion of MPs against Hollande’s controversial drive to loosen France’s labor laws. A Socialist MP in Yvelines near Paris, Hamon was the youngest and farthest Left of the candidates in the open Socialist primary race, in which any voter could take part if they paid €1 and signed a form supporting the values of the Left [one French journalist is now bragging that he voted 4 times on Sunday by simply appearing at various polling places and following the rules]. Hamon has been compared to British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and to the US Democrat presidential candidate and Senator, Bernie Sanders, whom Hamon visited earlier this year while gearing up his run for the French presidency. • • • WILL THE FRENCH SOCIALIST PARTY SURVIVE? The modern French Socialist Party is the creation of François Mitterrand, who molded it out of center-left to communist factions and bent them to his unimaginably astute political savvy. The real fear now for the Socialists is that leaders from the centrist pro-Valls wing of the Party will bolt to Emmanuel Macron, seeing his campaign as their only chance of a presidential win and the survival of traditional Socialist ideology. In French politics, parties come and go with the rise and fall of popular figures, and Emmanuel Macron, 39, who served as economy minister under Hollande but quit over policy differences and formed his own party -- En Marche! or Onwards! -- to challenge all the Socialists running for president, is heading an independent centrist ticket and is drawing huge crowds and rapidly rising in the polls. In fact, Macron may beat Hamon in the first round of the presidential election in April and make the Socialists mere observers in the second round that will choose the next French president in May. Because of this likelihood, key figures in the center of the Socialist Party could well jump ship to Macron now that the extreme leftist Hamon has won the Socialist primary. • • • THE RISE OF THE RIGHT IN FRANCE. The French electorate, traditionally center-right, has shifted sharply to the right and the Socialist Party is faced with the possibility of a humiliating fifth place in the presidential race. The conservatives, Les Républicains, could even face the same fate, coming in third, if Macron succeeds in pulling the center together around his candidacy -- a trick often tried in France without success. • The real up-and-comer in the 2017 French presidential race is far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen, who still leads the polls for the first-round of the presidential race with 25% (stable), against the beleaguered conservative candidate François Fillon at 21% (falling) and Emmanuel Macron at 20% rising strongly against Fillon. • François Fillon has been the outright favorite to win the presidential election. Despite 35 years in politics, including five years as prime minister under François Sarkozy, Fillon is presenting himself in the presidential race as an anti-system candidate and an honest, austere and “irreproachable” antidote to years of corruption scandals on the French right. Polls have shown Fillon to be the frontrunner to make it through to the final round of the highly unpredictable French presidential election in May, alongside the far right Front National’s Marine Le Pen. BUT, Fillon is now in big political trouble. France’s financial prosecutor has opened a preliminary investigation into the possible misuse of public funds by Fillon and his British wife, Penelope. The byline now in French newspapers is "Penelopegate." A tabloid that specializes in political scandal-mongering, Le Canard Enchainé, alleges that Penelope has been paid about €500,000 in eight years from parliamentary funds for what it claims could be a fake job. Fillon denies this vehemently, calling it a vendetta to prevent his winning the election. President Sarkozy has undergone similar treatment from French prosecutors, and calls himself the "most investigated but never convicted" politician in France. But, Fillon is under extreme pressure to explain his wife’s role in his political operation after Le Canard Enchaîné claimed she was at various times paid an extremely generous salary from public funds allocated to him as an MP. Hiring family members is legal for French MPs and not against parliamentary rules, as long as the person is genuinely employed. But the newspaper claimed it was unable to track down anyone who had seen evidence of Penelope Fillon’s work. The question is what work Penelope Fillon did to earn a salary of sometimes about €7,000 a month -- rather high -- between the late 1990s and early 2010, since she reportedly remained at home raising the five Fillon children while her husband was in Paris working as an MP. Thierry Solère, Fillon’s spokesman, said Penelope Fillon had “indeed” worked for her husband in parliament. He told Agence France-Presse : “It is common for the spouses of MPs to work with them.” Another spokesman, Philippe Vigier, insisted Penelope Fillon’s work was not fictional. • Fillon said that he would not stand down when he appeared on the evening news on TF1 to answer questions about the scandal that could prove explosive for his presidential bid. Yet, Fillon is an adept politician and he must know that the issue is potentially so damaging because Fillon’s austerity plan for France hangs on his own carefully honed reputation for righteousness. It will be much harder for Fillon to convince a financially suffering electorate of his controversial plans to slash 500,000 public-sector jobs and make state workers put in more hours for less pay if questions persist about his wife’s privileged access to jobs paid for by their taxes. • • • MARINE LE PEN AND EUROPE'S MOVE TO THE RIGHT. We all remember the mainstream media saying Brexit would never happen and Trump would never be elected. In Europe these days, the MSM is saying that Marine Le Pen could never be elected president of France. It is, of course, 'unthinkable' that the leader of the rightwing, populist, anti-immigration Front National should become president of the French Republic in the May elections. And, most of my French friends are still confident that she will lose to François Fillon. In the second round of the presidential election because voters of the center-left will rally around Fillon, holding their noses to vote for him – "for the sake of the republic." They did the same thing in 2002 when they voted for the unpopular Jacques Chirac to defeat Marine Le Pen’s father, the founder of the Front National Jean-Marie Le Pen. In 2002 it was “better the thief than the fascist.” Protest votes in French elections often fill the first round of voting when electors send messages about their dissatisfactions to the major parties. In the second round of the presidential election, voters of the center-left will rally around the Republic, holding their noses to vote for Fillon. After all, in 2002 they voted for Jacques Chirac to keep out Marine Le Pen’s father, the founder of the Front National, saying “better the thief than the fascist.” Protest votes are one thing, but the second round of a presidential election is another thing altogether, it is serious. But the question remains whether Marine Le Pen could ride into the presidency in the same way that Donald Trump did -- on the coattails of citizens so sick of corrupt politicians that any outsider is to be preferred. Marine Le Pen is always presented in the MSM as an anti-immigration anti-EU populist-fascist. But, at the bottom, her popularity is based on the general sense of malaise in France -- economic growth barely reaching 1% last year, 25% youth unemployment, a resentment everywhere against a political class seen as remote, self-serving and corrupt, and a deep desire to boot out the establishment. There are times when history just seems to be signaling a particular candidate. It happened with Trump and Brexit. Can it happen with Marine Le Pen? She is a strong candidate, who makes all the populist arguments ring true. She speaks the language of ordinary people. She is running “in the name of the people.” She demands a new birth of the French nation and democracy. She wants a referendum on France’s membership of the EU, saying : “I’m not afraid of the people.” • • • DEAR READERS, the crisis brewing in France is not so much whether François Fillon will survive -- it seems likely that the investigation will trap him and leave Les Républicains and the center-right of French politics with a badly damaged candidate. If we assume that the French are so angry at President Hollande and his Socialist incompetence -- keep in mind that Hollande is an exception as a Socialist French president, the only other being François Mitterrand -- that they will strongly revert to form and vote for a conservative ("Gaullist" as they often call it in shorthand), then will that conservative be Fillon or Le Pen? French analysts are already talking about replacing Fillon with either former president François Sarkozy or the perennial favorite son of the Chirac era, Bordeaux mayor Alain Juppé. Both were beaten by Fillon in the recent conservative primary. But, surprisingly, both are now saying that they do not want to replace Fillon. We might be tempted to call this "politics as usual," thinking they will finally leap at the chance to run. But, they may actually be calling the Socialist bluff by daring the prosecutors to charge Fillon -- for that would surely give Marine Le Pen a real chance to win the presidency, and her influence will then become a major factor in sweeping other European populists into power. And, even if Sarkozy or Juppé takes over for Fillon, the Socialist Party has still made a huge blunder -- its investigation of Fillon, surely meant to weaken the center-right and give their candidate, whom they expected to be Valls, a better shot at winning -- just might make it possible that Marine Le Pen will win and become President of France now that the Socialists have in Hamon an extreme Left candidate. The French Socialists are truly incompetent, aren't they. Does all their double-dealing and dirty tricks remind us of another Progressive-socialist candidate named Hillary? • Americans have little faith in any European politicians or political movements because we find all of them much more to the left than we are, and so we say Europe is "lost" already. But, we should consider that the conservatives among them -- those the European media calls rightwing extremists, populists, even fascists -- are now fighting for their place in European government, they are in a war for survival against Progressive globalists and corrupt elites who serve only themselves. The populists are trying to defend the remnants of democracy and citizens rights state by state in a European Union that has a massive Progressive infrastructure arrayed against them. If they sometimes sound extreme to us, it is because European politics is extreme -- it is a no-holds-barred system that attacks personally anyone who tries to overturn its privileges, witness the Fillon affair now playing out, and the unanimous rejection of the UK's Brexit vote and of Theresa May in her determination to carry it out. We may wish that Marine Le Pen were not the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen. We may see the populist ideas about social reform as leftist. We may despair for the open borders that have turned the EU into a killing field for jihadist terrorists. We may even believe that it is better to turn our backs on Europe and leave it to its own destruction. This is wrong. As with the grassroots movement that put President Trump in the White House to drain the Washington swamp, the populists -- in France, Germany, The Netherlands, Hungary, Austria -- are trying in their own way, with the means available to them, to drain the European Swamp. We should be sympathetic and support their cause when it is democratic. We can take the guidance of the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr : "Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Especially, Lord, grant us wisdom in these perilous times.