French Presidential Election Sunday -- Watch Macron and Fillon

There are only two names in European news right now -- Theresa May and Marine Le Pen -- and they both want to get out of the European Union. One will succeed. The other will most likely not. • • • THERESA MAY'S SNAP ELECTION. British Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday called for an early parliamentary election on June 8 to strengthen her hand in negotiating the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union, Brexit. May said she had been reluctant to ask parliament to back her move to bring forward the poll from 2020. But, after thinking "long and hard" during a walking holiday in Wales, she decided it was necessary to try to stop the opposition "jeopardizing" her work on Brexit. Some were surprised by her move because she has repeatedly said she does not want to be distracted by campaigning, but opinion polls give her a strong lead and the British economy has so far defied predictions of a slowdown, with growth faster than expected, consumer confidence is high and unemployment low. Mrs. May stood in front of 10 Downing Street on Tuesday to make the announcement : "It was with reluctance that I decided the country needs this election, but it is with strong conviction that I say it is necessary to secure the strong and stable leadership the country needs to see us through Brexit and beyond." She later told ITV News : "Before Easter I spent a few days walking in Wales with my husband, thought about this long and hard, and came to the decision that to provide that stability and certainty for the future that this was the way to do it, to have an election." Parliamant has agreed, voting on Wednesday to dissolve and stand for re-election. Mrs. May had, as required, told the Queen of her plan on Monday. • May is banking on capitalizing on her runaway lead in the opinion polls that show her Conservative Party 20 points ahead of the opposition Labour Party, meaning that the Conservatives could win an additional 100 seats in parliament. The prime minister's own personal ratings also dwarf those of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, with 50% of those polled saying she would make the best prime minister. Corbyn wins only 14%, according to pollster YouGov. May, who has served in many positions in Conservative governments, was interior minister under David Cameron, and then was appointed prime minister after Britain's vote to leave the European Union led to his resignation as PM. The election will be a vote on her performance so far, and an affirmation that Britain agrees with hte Conservative Party that she ought to be prime minister. She is counting on winning the support of British voters, who backed Brexit by 52-48%. Business groups largely welcomed the move, while expressing concern that the government's focus may stray away from the economy, which May said had defied "predictions of immediate financial and economic danger." • Underlining tensions are not likely to be healed by the election. Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of the Scottish government, described the decision as a "huge political miscalculation" that could help her own efforts to hold a new independence referendum. Corbyn welcomed the election plan, but some of his Labour members of parliament doubted whether it was a good move, fearing they could lose their seats. At least two said they would not run. • If Theresa May has guessed right, she will win a new mandate for a series of reforms she wants to introduce in Britain and and at the same time get a vote of confidence in a vision for Brexit which sees the country outside the EU's single market. May says : "The decision facing the country will be all about leadership. What they [her opponents] are doing jeopardizes the work we must do to prepare for Brexit at home, and it weakens the government's negotiating position in Europe." • Britain thus joins the European countries scheduled to hold elections this year. Votes in France in April and May, and in Germany in September, have the potential to reshape the political landscape around the two years of Brexit talks with the EU expected to start in earnest in June. • • • POLLS FOR FRANCE'S SUNDAY VOTE. The polls are tightening as four people battle for the two places available in the May 7 second round vote that will choose France's next president. Le Figaro, the conservative French daily newspaper, reported the latest OpinionWay/Orpi opinion poll on Thursday. Calling the poll an affirmation of "general stability" in the results -- none of the scores of the top four principal candidates has varied much in the last two days, according to Le Figaro. The poll shows that those who have the intention to vote place Emmanuel Macron ahead with 23%, Marine Le Pen still at 22%, François Fillon at 20% and Jean-Luc Mélenchon at 19%. The Socialist Party candidate, Benoît Hamon, is at 8%, suffering from the almost total repudiation of the outgoing Socialist President François Hollande. In the second round, the poll shows that Marine Le Pen would lose to Emmanuel Macron by 65% to 35%, and she would also lose to François Fillon by 57% to 43%. The OpinionWay/Orpi poll has a margin of error est of 1.1 to 2.2%. • The UK's Telegraph has been doing tracking polling by averaging the last eight national French polls every day, and Thursday afternoon reported the results of their Wednesday tracking : Macron 23.6%; LePen 22.5%; Fillon 19.4%; Melenchon 18.8%; and Hamon 7.8%. • The Le Figaro and Telegraph results are very similar, with Emmanuel Macron locked in a duel with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen at the top of the polls for the first round of voting. Centrist Macron, the former protege of François Hollande who left his position as economy minister to found his own party -- En Marche! (On the Move) that just happens to have Macron's initials EM, is now the bookies' favorite to become president, with the average of the latest polls showing him marginally ahead of Le Pen. Far left communist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon is surging in the polls and has drawn level with François Fillon in third place and is within four points of Macron. If you like odds, here they are for the first round on Sunday : Emmanual Macron - Even; Marine Le Pen - 3/1; François Fillon - 3/1; Jean-Luc Mélenchon - 7/1; and Benoît Hamon - 200/1. • • • FACTS ABOUT THE KEY CANDIDATES. Let's dismiss Melenchon first. He is considered to be a 'wild man' communist who would drive France into the arms of Venezuela or Bolivia, whose president has called on the French to vote for Melenchon. The race is a 3-way race among Le Pen, MAcron and Fillon. • Marine Le Pen is 48. Her political career has been marked by her efforts to distance the Front National from the more explicitly far-Right party of her father, FN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. She calles the process “de-demonisation.” It ended in an attempt to expel her father from the party in 2015, over controversial statements about the Holocaust. She won that battle for control of the FN and is not now speakign to her father, at least publicly. The Front National's major policies are : zithdrawing from the EU and the Euro; protecting the French economy from “unfair” competition and globalization; giving priority to French citizens in jobs and housing; ending mass immigration; taking a tough stance on law and order issues; reasserting “French cultural identity”; and, being a “strong and independent” France in defence and foreign affairs. In late 2015, Marine Le Pen said : “The National Front is the only party to defend an authentic French Republic, a Republic with only one vocation: the national interest, the development of French employment, the conservation of our way of life, the development of our tradition and the defense of all the French.” She says she will hire 15,000 police, curb migration and leave NATO's integrated command. Although she has sought to make the Front National more mainstream - removing both the party name and her surname in election posters and rallies in favor of a blue rose and the name 'Marine' - anti-immigrant rhetoric is still central. • Emmanuel Macron, at 39, would be France's youngest president under the Fifth Republic. He launched his centrist En Marche! party as a maverick outsider candidate fo rthe presidency. He is a pro-business former investment banker who made a lot of money at Rothschild, but has never held elected office. When Macron quit the Hollande government last summer to form his own party, he said : "I've seen the emptiness of our political system from the inside....I reject this system." He calls for a “democratic revolution” but without providing much in the way of a detailed action plan. Perhpas the biggest question mark concerning Emmanuel Macron is his marriage to divorcee Brigitte, a chocolate maker heiress 24 years his senior. The relationship has intrigued the French public. The pair met when he was 15 and she was a married mother of three and his French and drama teacher. Braving the disapproval of his parents, who sent him to Paris, the pair wed in 2007. She has three children from her first marriage and seven grandchildren. Madame Macron plays a hands-on role by her husband's side, offering support and helping him edit speeches. The couple have publicly tried to quash persistent rumors that he was having a homosexual affair, which he accused the entourage of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy of starting. Macron describes himself as both Left-wing and a "liberal." He is in fact a pro-business reformist, who is firmly on the Left on social issues, including the freedom to practice religion in a secular state, equality and immigration. Macron has pledged to reduce public spending by €60 billion and cut 120,000 public sector jobs. He has also vowed to get tough on unemployment benefits for those who repeatedly turned down job offers and wants greater flexibility on the retirement age, currently 60, and the statutory 35-hour working week, allowing employers and staff more latitude to negotiate. In a headline-grabbing sweetener, he said 80% of households would be exonerated from a property tax known as the ‘taxe d’habitation’, which is an annual tax everyone in France pays on their home, whether rented or owned. He also plans a €50 billion public investment program on green energy, training of tradesmen to reduce youth unemployment, transport, public sector administration and justice. • François Fillon, 63, was Nicolas Sarkozy’s prime minister for his entire five-year term - a feat uniaue in its longevity in modern French politics, where the prime minister changes often as presidential policies rise and fall in public favor. Fillon ended up more popular than his then boss in the polls. An Anglophile who admires Margaret Thatcher, he has described France as “bankrupt” and pledges to slash the number of state workers by up to 600,000 in five years to fund €40 billion in tax breaks for companies and slashing state spending. He lives with his Welsh wife, Penelope, and their five children in a 12th-century home near Le Mans in western France.He is seen as embodying the values of provincial conservative France and has the backing of conservative Catholics, many of whom are opposed to gay marriage. He wants a rapprochement with Russia to protect Christians of the Middle East. His campaign is in jeopardy after a "fake jobs" scandal involving his British wife sent him plummeting in the polls. But, this week the conservative political elite is rallying around François Fillon. Wednesday, former prime minister Alain Juppé, whim Fillon beat in the conservative party primaries, shook Fillon's hand for the cameras and told conservatives to vote for him. Thursday, Fillon had breakfast at Nicolas Sarkozy's home and the two posed for photos afterward. Sarkozy, the former French president beaten by Hollande in 2012, was also beaten by Fillon in the party primaries. Sarkozy then sent a new message to the French public to vote for Fillon : "This is a serious matter, a very important election, and I want to signal that we conservatives should be together. I support François Fillon. It's normal that we sat down ot breakfqst to talk, to discuss, and to show to everyone who has shown confidence in me and has voted for me that I consider that not one of our voices should be missing in the support of François Fillon." Fillon posted a photo of Sarkozy and himself on his Twitter account, and thanked "Nicolas Sarkozy for his clear and important support." • • • WHO WILL WIN ON SUNDAY? Macron is the professionals' favorite to be elected president at this stage. While Le Pen and Macron are in a dead heat in the polls for the first round, it is expected that Macron or Fillon would be the likely winner if they were to face her in the second round. • There are many conservatives in America who think Marine Le Pen would be the nationalist, anti-elite president France needs. But, they don't understand French politics, or France. Le Pen has a family name that is anathema in France because Jean-Marie Le Pen represents the anti-Semitism and extremist pro-Hitler right that led France into the shame of Vichy during World War II. And, instead of going away into oblivion after WWII, Le Pen insisted in his point of view until shut down for good by his daughter Marine. But, she bears a tainted name, and it will take more than one generation, if the Front National survives beyond the Le Pen family, to bring the FN into the mainstream of French politics. In addition, Marine Le Pen controls no governing coalition, or even a minor voice, in the French National Assembly, where all French law is made -- she could not enact withdrawal from the Euro or the EU, or even hire police, without Assemblée Nationale agreement. And, finally, most French voters today remember vividly the presidential election of 1995 -- when sitting conservative president Jacques Chirac, whose Assemblée Nationale was controlled by Socialists. His Socialist prime minister decided to run against him for the presidency. Remember that we are talking about French parliamentary government where, uniquely, the president and majority coalition in the Assemblée Nationale don't have to be from the same political spectrum. Jean-Marie Le Pen was also running, as he did every time. The Socialist lost -- because the French were delivering their traditional "message" vote in the first round but delivered it too thoroughly against the unpopular Socialist -- and Chirac faced Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round. France was well and truly traumatized. Even the Socialists called on all patriotic French to vote for the conservative Chirac. The Tricolor was unfurled all over the country and Chirac won with over 80% of the vote. • Skip forward to this 2017 election. In the homes and cafés all over France, you will hear the same discussion. They do not want a repeat of the horror of 1995. They do not want a 'Le Pen' to come even close to the presidency. They are afraid of what may be the dark underside of those who support Marine Le Pen. And, they know that she would have a hard time finding enough ministers to fill her government, let alone deal with a hostile Assemblée Nationale. AND, they are conservative-to-centrist Gaullists at heart. The great man may be long dead, but whoever the French president is, he visits De Gaulle's grave every year. • The talk in those French cafés right now is about how to play the first round vote on Sunday. The French know that a vote for Marine Le Pen is a lost vote because she cannot win the second round, or as the conservatives say, it is "a vote for Macron," whom they see as a Socialist in centrist clothing. Macron is fascinating but untested and unknown for the most part. Fillon is the only tried and tested politician in the lot. And he is conservative and Catholic -- two great attributes for anyone who wants to move into the Elysée. • • • DEAR READERS, here is my prediction. It is not one I have heard from a single political analyst so far, and it is certainly a longshot. BUT, I predict that on Sunday the French will vote for Macron and Fillon, in that order. Le Pen will place third and will not get to the second round. And on May 7, French voters will decide whether Emmanuel Macron or François Fillon will be their next president. Vive la France !!!