Global Empire - France: The Banker President

[Music] hello and welcome to another episode of the world today a few weeks ago France elected a new president Emmanuel macron who has immediately become the great white hope of the euro elite which runs the continent even the German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble who normally doesn't say too much welcomed his victory in very strong words one of the principal reasons for the victory of macro was that the only candidate standing against him marine lepen was painted in lurid colors as a fascist she is of course of the extreme right but the atmosphere in France was that if we don't vote for macro we are going to have fascism taking over France etc etcetera an exaggeration and an exaggerated campaign but nonetheless the actual results of the first round because in France they have two rounds were very positive the left-wing candidate is jean-luc mélenchon won nineteen point five eight percent of the vote the highest vote received by a candidate of the left in France for a very long time probably ever since the birth of 3/5 Republic so the situation in France is not as calm as it seems there is a volatility underneath the surface and if macro attempts to push down what they call reforms but which are in reality regressions then we could see trouble on the streets in the plants etc the one point worth noting is that this last presidential election in France saw the defeat of the two prints of traditional parties the conservative right and the Socialist Party who formed the extreme center of French politics for a long time the Socialists in fact privatizing more industries than the conservative right did in that country so we have an interesting situation and those who think that everything is going to settle down maybe in for a few surprises I'm very happy to have in these studio with me or deviate or know who is a lecturer in Modern Languages at Hamilton College Cambridge and is actually a candidate in the forthcoming French National Assembly elections on behalf of men and Sean's party France assume ease which can be translated literally but means more or less France defiant Olivia welcome let's discuss the presidential campaign the way in which it has been presented largely in the euro media and the American media is a victory for reason a victory for rationality a victory for capitalism yes but water relief many of my French friends tell me that this was a carefully orchestrated campaign for the last two or three years to find the perfect candidate because they knew the Socialist Party couldn't produce one and they found one and a lot of unpleasant things went on behind the scene with the involvement of the French state and I know sometimes we were accused of being conspiratorial but it's not accidental that the French satirical magazine they cannot on sunny came up with the story but how do you think they managed it so calmly and smoothly well it's hard to tell I think your of course I agree but you just said and it is very striking of course that Michael was alongs private secretary for two years and in his a minister of finances for tu an something more yours and they managed to rebrand him as the radically new thing and a radical change in French politics how did they manage to actually perhaps the answer is that they have not managed in the sense that if you look at opinion polls they show that Macomb has a tiny tiny base of support there was one poll that showed that only 8% of the French population supported his program so there is there is in a sense a very big failure here and what you said that it had been crucial to pit him against lepen that is precisely a sign of the fact that they themselves knew that they would not manage to build consensus around this candidate so that the only solution was to make him run against tyloo 10 as a sort of a hope of suave and untouchable and so the real story might very well be how did they manage to build a pro 10 and as a beneficial supporter this is something I could witness firsthand for years and which infuriated me if you want I can give you one example of a typical strategy so you know the pen has been stealing many many elements in our program to appear to the working class constituency now every time made offshore was on the news the question was put to him your program is the same as that of Mahinda then how do you explain this if they had been factual journalists would have said no pen has stolen your program you just needed to compare the dates you know when does one measure appear on Maryland's program and one does it appear on a test program they would never do this they would accuse me oh sure of copying England time now by equating constantly laburnum a notion what was the effect produced on middle classes the effect was to say because men always like to append he he too is an untouchable and therefore you cannot win you cannot vote for this guy as for the working class constituency the message was well since after all lepen too is offering what melash was offering then why bother vote for Manasa just keep on voting for the pen you see so you had my name is like this and this is just one example that were constantly engineered so as to both credible iyslah pen as the working class candidate and D credible as Menasha as an alternative then there are more simple data such as the the media exposure of the different candidates I think Makaha something like 40% of the total media coverage of all the candidates and Latinos was cause very high D far higher than an awful said what can you do but two other points here maybe one is that it's worth remembering that jean-marie lepen Marines father when he stood for the presidency the first time and the positions of the party were indistinguishable from those of Makarov today the front Nacional was staunch supporters of the EU chin Maastricht they were staunch supporters of the free market - so this shift has been very carefully planned by their leadership and by marine in particular to try and win over some class support which she succeeded in in doing but the more interesting thing is this that when jean-marie Le Pen became the possible choice in a two horse race in the second round 80% of France voted she ran they said we did it holding our nose this time fewer people voted for macro which means that there was probably the largest abstention absolutely in in French electoral history which is in itself quite astonishing and shows that they might not pull this operation off I think that's right I think the two big differences from 2002 the first difference is the solidification of the four national vote there are very good studies that show that up until 2012 the four national vote remained volatile people voted once in their life for the four national it remained a protest vote it is under France felons presidency that it actually grew roots which shows that a betrayal from the left always has worst consequences than a betrayal from the right well because from the right it's not a betrayal it's simple application of their program so that's one side of the equation the other side of the equation is that I think in 2002 everybody perceived the the qualification of Luton for the second round as an accident maybe you remember that the left was divided yes and that Joseph are failed to get to the second round for something ridiculous as some tenth of a point this time there was a sense that we had been set up that everything had been done to lead us there and therefore there was a very strong refusal to give him there was a sense of really being he mediated now we got the scenario we wanted you just go down and do what we told you to do so for a lot of people on the Left they were that was simply impossible and also it's so clearly strategy of always saying vote for anybody because we have lepen in front of you but at some point it has to stop this is also why men are shown did not give the instructions for the second one because there was a sense where if you get in then then you're gonna give it forever no that was a big step forward actually I thought and now you say so because not everybody thinks so very important step forward for French in their politics you know not effectively to do the bidding of the rulers of the country which is what they want you to do but to draw back and make an independent analysis can I add something to this that's very important what is really crucial of course nonetheless they know Sean gave one instruction which was not one vote for the National Front this is a very important because early people filled his position as as if he was saying that then I'm not who are not the same this is not the case because that would be an exaggeration and the other thing that's very interesting is that if we achieved one thing during this election is that we Warren back votes from the National Front and indeed very often I mean I have concrete cases of this people who did vote National Front swim towards main ocean or other also people who had been abstaining for you know decades certainly decided to return to politics in order to vote for beneful and these people only did this because they felt that we were offering a radical break from the system getting in structures would have been detrimental to this so it was a motion well I mean it has to be said that prior to the Malan shock before it got going there was a real danger that the majority of young people between the ages of 18 and 30 might vote for the pendant she was writing I had the poles with young people and taking that vote away from her a vote that the extreme center parties could not win at was extremely important anyway that was really depressing when you read that young people actually thinking of voting for now Olivier in France the system is partially a presidential monarchical system the president is the president but he behaves like a mono it's a system that was effectively created by and for shall de Gaulle is the only one who would fit the role none of the others succeeded at the same time you have National Assembly elections on the basis of the first opposed system is there any possibility of breaking this corrupt well one possibility of course would have been to elect us it's a cornerstone of our program is the convocation of our Constituent Assembly to move towards a sixth Republic I think what is very problematic as well is that normally there should Fioretti be at least a balance of power between the executive power and the Parliament which holds a legislative power but it never works because of the party system because the government is the head of the political party which holds the majority and all the deputies internationalist the MPs in a National Assembly they are career politicians and they need to be reinvested by the party for the for the forthcoming election and so there is a blackmail from party machines onto the MPs if you don't vote the right way for the as the government tells you them you would not be invested at the next presidential or the next campaign so for instance under France followed the crazy thing is that he passed all these liberal laws and I'm pretty sure that deep down you know in a house of heart his MPs did not agree with him none of them did object because they are caught in it so this also we one thing that is characteristic of our movement is that candidacies for local directions or decided at the bases I for instance I'm running because the local group of beneficial supporters in London asked me to be their constituency their candidate for this strange thing we have but explain this that the French who are resident in Britain they get they have a Member of Parliament yes yes that's a that's a funny thing so just to go just to finish however if candidates for elections were elected by the base at least that would relief MPs from the pressure of party machineries and that would already give some breathing space in the Fifth Republic I think that generally the fact that political parties are the least democratic institutions in democratic societies is itself very problematic so back to my case yes so this is a strange thing that was created by Nicolas Sarkozy the French residents abroad have 11 MPs the whole world is divided into large areas and the idea of Sarkozy was that this because French living abroad are generally a bit wealthier than the overall French population he thought he would win these constituencies and they would enable him to secure a majority it has not turned out this way many of them were won by the Socialist Party so we would see if we managed to take them even further left this time but in France itself only period just explained to us how the National Assembly seats will be divided there will be a vote for members of parliament on the first-past-the-post spaces right in the beginning yes sir more or less so the way it happens is that anybody any party that obtains more than 12.5% of registered voters in the first round of the digestive elections can maintain itself at the second round of the presidential of their legislative elections so theoretically you have to divide it a hundred registered voters by 2.5 and you see that we could have many many candidates on the second round then that leads to very complex games of alliances and sometimes to unexpected victories so for instance of defined France could win a parliamentary seat parliamentary seat with 16 or 17 or 20% if the votes are divided between if you like the older parties are basically center-right so everything's possible but at the end of the day it is a first-past-the-post system in the sense that the world he wins the election sits as an MP in a set so what do you think in terms I mean the fact that defined France got nineteen point five eight percent of the national vote in the presidential elections will this automatically roll over to the National Assembly elections or not it's hard to tell during at the first part of the presidential election we came first in a quite a large number of major French cities to lose masse many others so in all these areas we certainly do have run a strong chance and may not show himself is running in Marseille and according to the first polls he stands a very very strong chance of winning yes but then a lot of things can happen so you know that there is a sort of dynamics of the winner so strength goes to strength so it's like me that Michael will do a bit better in a legislative election that he did in the presidential elections meanwhile we should not underestimate the conservative right I agree with the because you said in the beginning that it was a significant fact that they had been eliminated at the first round of the presidential election but it film was targeted to be a very easy winner before he got embroiled in scandals and the big big shots in his party have distance eiated themselves from him quite early on so it's possible that his party would not have been tainted by his own disgrace and we will see if they actually perform just returning to this point just for a minute that the way in which film was discredited at the last stages of the election campaign certainly made one very suspicious because this fact about his wife taking money which by the way is awful but it's not uncommon in France but the way in which it exploded and was used you know one suspected involvement of the secret state I don't think so I think what I heard from very reliable sources is that it's even Hettie own and this is specially event that are within the right so what I heard is that I saw of course I I can't I cannot vouch for this but I probably it Sarkozy who took I'm not very prone to as a conspiracies personally I think a lot can be explained simply by the internal dynamics of the media in very crude terms so whatever comes up that creates the buzz they will be lay in a sort of sheepish way so no one sits out of course it acquires a momentum of its own there's no doubt about that it's just discuss a matter on bit this guy is for me an identikit leader of an extreme center grouping we're going to do horrible things but we do them with a polite smile we are very charming we are young we are well-dressed it's a phenomenon which is used all over the world so we know this procedure well but at the same time it's important to stress that unlike Hollande who was a complete disaster or valves who was too keen to come to power and an unpleasant figure semi racist we one can say hard life yeah is much more intelligent than yes guys and one shouldn't underestimate that fact I mean the interview he gave to media part the other press interviews he's given of course there's a lot of in it but nonetheless there is a core the guy does think yeah he's a very bizarre a synth synthetic product if you look at his body language its characteristic of Sarkozy he moves his shoulders or Sarkozy if you look at here is a very crass liberal credo is characteristic of Oh Lord but then he stole from me no as well because he he decided to design a completely fake popular movement you know there was something I was supposed to be elaborated from the grassroots it's completely Hollow but he sensed that this was also something that was a and that he had to capture and meanwhile he's also a populist in the in a vulgar sense of the term so it's very difficult to understand what I want to go at all about him he's a chameleon he's a comedian yes you know that's what what is very striking the question is this he has no party he has this sort of more Martian movement and he's told people if you want to become members of the National Assembly just drop your pack you know people who were harassed by his movement so that they would run because they were so short on actual candidates that he so people have applied well some people have applied but his movement have been sent sending emails to people would you consider running for it it is it is yes only via the government which he set up is a national government socialists conservatives so it is a government which we've seen before but now under a new president it doesn't belong to any party and can play the role of petit Bonaparte you know who can maneuver these people and do what he wants with them so how is he going to manage it more importantly what is he going to do okay so there is the question of course of what he wants to do and the question of what he's going to be able to do yes he wants to flexible I stay below he wants to fire 120,000 public servants he wants to make a 60 billion savings here's something very interesting that just as a digression so he said he was he was going to do 60 billion cuts and then he was asked but where and his answer reveals everything you need to know about Michael which is that his real intellectual matrix his cooperations and management he said I'm going to preside I'm not gonna cover and I'm gonna do what the CEO does set tasks to my team and up to that to find a solution so of course the the option that does not even register is that maybe the teams could come back saying we cannot do 60 million cuts you know actually we need more investment in public services but it's like in management I said a task for you and you have to get it done and so that's what he wants to do now my fear is that he will get a majority to do it if not simply from his own party because we know that the conservative right and the Socialists party are gonna vote with him on those things and even if they made a show of disagreeing and voting against him simply to you if you like asserts their own existence then he would still be able to use this article 49.3 of the Constitution which allows the government to bypass the parliamentary vote and leaves only one option to the Parliament which is to put a defiant defiance motion against the government and therefore bring down the government what will happen in this case is that Malcolm would trigger the article bypass the parliamentary vote and the other parties would find a reason not to bring down the government because deep down the agree of these measures they know they are unpopular so they are happy for Michael to push forward with them and therefore they can work their heads a bird of the hate if you like so what is gonna happen then what's gonna happen is that you have a program that has very slow popular support and that is most likely gonna be carried forward anyway and that's gonna even widen the huge gap between a French population and a political representation I think also the campaign and a constant idealization of Macomb has not convinced people but it has even broadened the gap between the media and the people a gap that had stretched enormously in 2005 when the media had campaigned really shamelessly for the yes to the European circuit so then what we are going to see is we're going to see a population in need of representation and this is where we have to be there and again now my men'll show is being constantly criticized for being of extreme intransigence in building up of alliances towards the legislative elections because he's saying no compromise with anyone anybody can join us but on our own term and we're not putting water in our wine as we say in France but also the experience of linking up with the Socialist Party as it is a disaster for delinking in Germany they can't bring them selves to break and their votes go down as a result but okay that's the Socialist Party what about the pace a so there is a complicated situation for the pizza because if you go back to 2012 they did a very brave thing by making may not show their candidate for the presidential elections which meant running a candidate against the Socialist Party because traditionally they are always aligned with the Socialist Party and but then after 2012 you know they did this thing where during all the local elections they returned to being allied with the peers but here there was a real thing at stake you had only one hand they had been on strong as they're very powerful spokesperson their only chance to have a future but on the other hand the BCF has money only because it still has the local network exactly and Wapiti and these seats it only games in alliances with the Socialist Party so the Communist Party was caught between two imperatives one was continuing on the path opened by Bernard Shaw but the other one was retaining the money and to be fair to them we were happy that they had this money because they basically bankrolled the 2012 campaign and they retained a very good militant de stroyed people by the way who are you know tirelessly black are doing and things like this so the problem nonetheless is that by reverting to alliances with the path a socialist after 2012 they completely blurred the message of the food Agosta Left Front which was the previous incarnation of fossa so nice to the point where I mean also had to say look we're going nowhere if we compromise this ourselves to this point one mineral show announced his candidacy to the 2017 election he announced it unilaterally coming out first and he counted on the fact that the Communist Party will refuse but the Communist Party's base would would overturn the ruling of the of the head and nothing's idly what happened now after the presidential election the party communist is doing something that is a bit quite unpleasant the moment the first one had been done you had candidates of the Communist Party flooding circumscription in with very ambivalent language trying to pass themselves as the people continuing the dynamics have been are showing the presidential elections some of them even used visuals of the phosphorus abhi is defiant France or even been on transpose picture they don't show has immediately said that there will be lawsuits against each and every candidate that will use the graphic charter of defiant France or his poster so there is no national agreement and there is that that does create tension between the militants and this is one side because in a way we should we should stick together of course I I have a communist candidate running against me yeah yes it's a she's a woman she seems very nice her I don't know her she doesn't live in the UK nobody knows her alleviate what was very noticeable you know which we witnessed the last time as you said in the Euro campaigns is that the entire French media especially in Paris we were where the bulk of the media is based in terms of the propaganda they put out for micro it could have been Casa Costa only one view going up absolutely to my great surprise and dismay I think the situation was even worse in a publicly owned media that in privately owned media I can give you two examples I have a journalist from an LC I you know which is a big big a media channel it's the same company as a TF one so yummy the worst of the worst of the media who contacted me at some point so that we do a piece on Mineral Show and Chavez that would set the record straight I asked this guy but are you sure sure I do it but are you sure you're not gonna put yourself in danger and what he said because the real problem of the media of course is the working conditions of the journalists he said look of course if it was known I would get it I would get into a lot of trouble but I'm working on my own with my own word processing software nobody even looks at what I do so poor we won't even be noticed yes so he wrote the piece together and I could see how rushed he was that he had to upload it online very quickly it was sort of a spelling mistake so I proof read the article we've reached and send it back to him and he said okay sure and he uploaded by us even when there was a another kind of the pedal against mineral for about our album you know this yes we don't need to return to the details it was bfmtv which is one of the worst private TV channels that produces very long very well-informed refutation of the Academy I don't know who wrote it I don't know that guy mean one on all the publicly owned channels of course do France and air force and forth from school to you it was a complete disgrace which shows that today in France the the power of the incestuous relationships between private sector public sector and manpower are even worse than the grass power of money no I don't know if you've noticed but to JA das he was the the precipitator of the biggest 8 o'clock news in France a disaster himself has been replaced by an Sophia Latics who's you know that would that took a lot of work but they found someone even worse and she is the wife of a Mac who's a communications director wonderful this is the way the world goes Olivier thanks very much for being with us best of luck in your campaign thank you and given what one expects to happen in France over the next few years I hope we'll be talking that would be my great pleasure thank you for you

Channel: TeleSUR English

Views: 11,112

Rating: 4.9282513 out of 5

Keywords: Política, Colombia, The World Today

Id: XfO8gNG46rU

Length: 30min 31sec (1831 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2017