The Duran Podcast - New Popular Front shocks world with French election win

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

New Popular Front shocks world with French election win

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the results in the second round of the parliament elections in France. New Popular Front, first place, Macron's party in second place, and Le Pen's National Rally in third. A shock to many people who were expecting Le Pen to be in first place. And new Popular Front, they do not. have a majority. They were not able to secure a majority. And it looks like we're heading into a chaotic parliamentary situation in France. We have a fragmented new popular front, which will lead a fragmented French parliament. But, hey, they prevented Le Pen from coming in first place. So they're celebrating that, but I think it's going to be a very short celebration because things are going to be very turbulent in French politics. What is your take on the election results?

Well, the election in some ways is a reflection of the fact that I've been out of touch with France for a very, very long time, because looking at the, looking at the clues, there were some indications that this was coming. Now, what has basically happened is this. The momentum is clearly behind Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblementonement National. Now, bear in mind, in the first round of the election, the Rassonlement National won 33% of the vote. It's exactly the same amount that Kirstama won in the British general election, which has just happened, and which is, given him this stonking majority. The Rassamblement National clearly positioned to be the leading

party in France. So it's heading towards, it's moving towards becoming eventually the dominant party in France. I didn't think anything we've seen over the last couple of hours changes that fact at all. However, the French establishment doesn't want to see that. happen. Emmanuel Macron doesn't want to see that happen. The way in which the French electoral system is created, it was created a long time ago at the time of basically the creation of the 5th Republic and thereafter. It was basically created to keep one party, the Communist Party, the old French Communist Party, in many ways the biggest party in France in the 40s and 50s, still a very powerful force of the 60s and 70s to prevent it breaking through.

So they created this complex system, the first having one round and then the second round, and the second round was intended to facilitate stitch-ups in particular constituencies, where it looked as if the Communist Party in the 60s and 70s might break through. so you'd get anti-communist parties pulling back candidates in order to allow one person to take all the anti-communist vote to allow the anti-communist to win and to prevent the Communist Party winning. That is the nature of the French electoral system. I lived here. I was in France. I saw it happen in exactly this way, many times. So what has now happened is that they've tried to use the same device, the same mechanisms to stop the Rassonblemen national. And they have succeeded in a fashion in this election.

But they've succeeded in a way that is completely different from the way that it succeeded in France in the 50s and 60s and 70s. because in the France, in the 50s, 60s and 70s, there was an overall majority for the anti-communist right. In those days, in fact, it used to be referred to simply as la majority. It was the majority, which was coherent. What they've done this time is that instead of having various right-wing parties, you know, Shirakians, Giscardians,

the people who could work together in government. One pull back in order to allow the other to win so that the communists didn't get in. Even the socialists in some places playing that kind of game. What they've done this time is they brought together, they cobbled together, completely incompatible forces. So we have the Front Popular,

the left-wing block, which is itself a patchwork of different parties. And irony of ironies, the French Communist Party, the party that the system was intended to block in the 50, 60s, 70s, is a part, in fact, it's a key part of the Franc Popular. Its leader, Manco Rousselle, is one of the most intelligent people, in my opinion, in this bloc. So anyway, they pulled it together, getting all kinds of different socialists and communist parties and all kinds of things like that together. And of course, they also have Macron's party, which is still there.

And it also was pulling back candidates so as to allow the Front Popular to win in individual constituencies. So Macron's party utterly discredited, exhausted force. The French left a cobbled together rag-bag of different parties, many of which absolutely hate each other, all involved in this coalition to stop the Rassamblement Nacional. You could call it the marriage of the Frankenstein's monster with a zombie. The zombie being Macron's party, the Frankenstein's monster being this united left, all to stop Le Pen. And the result is that we now have an ungovernable France, because the popular front, it's called it the popular front. It's not a coherent force. of its faction leaders don't get on.

There's Afaid Gluckmann, who is the socialist. He is absolutely part of the neoliberal globalist order. He supports a project Ukraine. He has to, he's accepted the leadership in this movement of Jean-Luc Melancho, old guard, French, leftist, deeply pro-American, strongly opposed to Project Ukraine, want some kind of alliance with Russia. Friend, by the way of Jeremy Corbyn,

far more radical than Jeremy Corbyn. So it's like bringing together, you know, Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn into the same sort of movement. I mean, and that's only one inconsistency and contradiction on the left. And of course, they're only, what they've done is because they lent support in individual constituencies to Macron's party. That has been inflated in size, even though it is completely discredited and represents a discredited and a deeply unpopular president who was advised, by the way, not to campaign in this election

because people didn't want to make him, you know, his own party didn't want to be too, closely associated with him. So you're going to have a, you're going to have a majority in the French National Assembly, which isn't a majority for anything at all. In other words, chaos. And that is exactly what Macron and the French establishment in this obsession to keep Le Pen at bay. and it must be said, a very large number of French voters have provided.

And this at a time in France is entering deep economic uncertainty. National debt is over 100% of GDP. French national debt is the second biggest proportionately in the West, apparently. I mean, it's running out of control. French economy has not really been doing very well. lots of problems all across France, and of course a very difficult global situation. So a situation where nobody's going to be able to govern France, the president is discredited and exhaustive. The parliament is antagonistic to him and now has a majority of people

who are opposed to him on every single individual policies, but who cannot agree with each other. So to stop Le Pen, they've created chaos. When you mean majority, you mean the popular front combining with Macros party. Plus, Maxis Party. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. The popular front wants to create a government, but they can only do that if Macross

Party either supports them or enters into coalition with them. And I mean, these are completely incompatible, completely contradictory movements. I mean, it's difficult to convey to people who are not familiar with French politics. For example, how radical Melanchin is on many of the issues that he talks about, if he's serious about them, which I suspect at some level he is. And of course, remember, the popular front also contains within it, the French Communist Party, which remains strongly opposed to Project Ukraine, for example, retains a kind of Russophile tradition. How do you put all this together?

And how do you get all of these various parties, for example, either to agree to expenditure cuts or to agree to pursue a more dirugist model, if that is what you want to do? There is no coherence from this French parliament, and there's no mechanism to dissolve it now for at least another year. Yeah, well, who cares as long as you keep Le Pen out of the majority, right? That's what this is all about. Create chaos in order to keep Le Pen from governing.

A responsible thing would have been if they allowed Le Pen to govern. That would have been the responsible thing to do. That would have been the best thing for France to have allowed to happen. but nope, they couldn't have it happen. If you look at the numbers, the only party that the new popular front can govern with in a coalition in order to get a majority is Macron's party. I mean, there is no other option. The minute they've said no to national rally, I mean, they're stuck together.

There is no choice, is there. Absolutely. Well, of course, Melanchon, who, you know, has his. qualities, but perhaps realism is not one of them. Anyway, he is insisting that he's not going to enter into any kind of arrangement of coalition with Macron's party because he knows how profoundly discredited and unpopular Macron and his party actually are. But that's what he announced immediately as the results started to come through. But of course, that doesn't then explain how in that case the popular front can form a government, given that it is well short of a majority in the French National Assembly.

I get to say something, this might shock some people, but if you take some individual policies, if you look at economic policy, for example, if you look at foreign policy, the populist front and Le Pen's movement have more in common with each other than either does with a with Macron. I say that, though, as I said, to come back to my earlier point, the Popular Front is hardly a coherent force, and you have within it straightforward neo-liberal globalists who would be absolutely happy to work with Macron.

But if you look at Melanchin and Roussel, there's much more in common in many respects, not on immigration, of course, but on other things, they have much more in common. with Lopin than than they do with with Macro? I don't think that's a shocking statement at all, a shocking analysis, because the trend is the populist left. If you want to take out the populist components,

the populist components from this umbrella party of the popular front, those populist components, which you could call the populist left, is definitely merging with parts of the populace, right? I mean, pick a country, policies from the populist left and policies from the populist right. And in most countries do have a lot of things in common. So I don't think this should surprise anyone that they have more in common than the neoliberal globalist Macron. Indeed. And can I just make a further point here? Because this is where you go, it's useful to just look at French history.

because this has been understood in France before. I've made the point many times that if you actually compare Le Pen's policies with those of any French political leader, she is closer to the ideas and thinking of Charles de Gaulle than any other French political leader that you can think of in the last. 70 years. I mean, de Gaulle's ideas and Le Pen's ideas were very close, including, by the way,

on immigration. Just saying, now, de Gaulle, in the 1940s, his first post-war government, which was a very successful government, was a coalition with the communists. And in 1968, when de Gaulle faced the, you know, the famous student uprising and all of that, the Communist Party backed him. So, you know, there is this, there has always been within France itself, this compatibility. But of course, the current iteration of left-wing politicians, the Melanchons and people like that, They reject that completely.

They insist that Le Pen isn't, you know, a gollist part of the French Republican right tradition, which is a very strong one in France. They insist that she's the inheritor of Vichy, that she's, you know, belongs to the, you know, I don't want to mention the word, but, you know, the ideology, which starts with an F that goes all the way back to the 30s and 40s. which based on her actual program is nonsense. But as I said, they won't see that. And they insist instead that she mustn't ever be allowed anywhere close to power because she is supposedly a threat to republicanism and democracy and all of those things.

Even though, as I said, on pretty much everything, she's aligned very, very much more closely with the tradition of de Gaulle than the so-called Gaulist party in France, currently is the L'Erepublican actually. So this tactic of putting together these types of umbrella parties, you cobble together a bunch of parties that are incompatible, may even hate each other, may even despise each other, but if you put them together under this umbrella,

you give them a label, a title, a name, new Popular Front, whatever. This has been used and tried before in Europe. It was successful in Chequia, the Czech Republic, and they prevented Babbage from winning those elections. It failed in Hungary. They did the same thing in Hungary, and Viktor Oban won easily in a big victory. But this new popular front reminds me in a way of Cittiza in Greece, where you take a party and you take a bunch of smaller parties. mostly from the left, center left, socialist, anarchist, communist, whatever. You put them under the banner of a new name, Cidiza.

And you run them in elections, and you hope that they win. And Cizade did win. And my question to you is Cizade was led by a young, inexperienced activist, an activist. He's an activist, Cyprus. He became the leader of Cizza. and when they won the elections, he eventually became prime minister. He at first was making statements that he would push back against EU policies and IMF policies and austerity against Greece. But eventually they turned him into a globalist.

He came around and he became a neoliberal globalist. And Cizza eventually became a neoliberal liberal. left globalist party. Do you think they're the globalists running Macron that came up with this scheme of dropping 200 candidates? Do you think that they're viewing new popular front in the same way, but the problem may be that you have an experienced Melanchon, who's more dug into his positions, whereas Sipras was very malleable, and it wasn't very hard to turn him. 24-hour period. They pretty much divided him to Brussels, and he signed up to every globalist policy prescribed for Greece.

But Melanchot may be a little bit more difficult. Do you think that this is how they're viewing things now going forward? That we prevented Le Pen, great. Now let's work on new popular front. Let's work on Melanchov. let's try to dangle a seat at the globalist table for him and other people in his party. And we can we can turn this this rag-tag grouping of parties into a neoliberal force in France. I mean, I don't know.

This is how I'm kind of seeing things. But what do you think? Well, the first thing to say is you're absolutely correct. I mean, the new popular front, which by the way invokes the popular front. that was created between the communists and the socialists in the 1930s to prevent the actual right with the F of that time from gaining power. So you can already see the manipulation of history and language being used in this. But you're absolutely, you can at the popular front,

is exactly the same as series. It is no different in any way. And they will end up doing exactly what you said. because don't overestimate Melanchon. First of all, he's an immensely vain personality. He might be committed to his positions, but I don't think most of them in the popular front are. And, I mean, they can get rid of him.

I mean, he's there. He would not be a difficult person, in my opinion, to sort of leverage out if he becomes too much of a problem. if you remember with Sirizer itself, there were some people who were genuine left-wingers, and they were winkleed out fairly quickly, and it's going to happen exactly here, too. That is exactly what is going to happen. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't, you know, over, you know, emphasize Melanchon and talk about his contemporaneous. The big difference with Greece, the fundamental difference,

Greece is that in Greece there was no analog to Le Pen and the Assemblement National. That is the change. And what I think could quite easily happen is that, I mean, this government will collapse into chaos, it will disappoint everybody, people who feel really left-wing, radical, will feel deeply shortchanged. There might well be an economic crisis. The euro, by the way, is already falling because the markets don't like this development. The markets would have preferred to have been just saying because the markets want a coherent government.

They don't want this. Whatever the French establishment might want, but, you know, people who actually are in the business of operating markets and keeping economies going, they're looking upon this with deep unhappiness. Anyway, there's quite a question. possibly going to be an economic crisis. There will very, very likely be a collapse. In Greece, it was the old establishment new democracy party that benefited. In France, by contrast, it's more likely to be, I would have thought the Rassamlement Nacional, which is the party, the political force, which is actual momentum. In some ways, I tend to think it's more like,

These developments are more likely in the end to deliver, exactly as Le Pen said, an even bigger win for them when they do eventually come to power. Because this is the last desperate gasp of a French establishment trying to block Le Pen and they're creating chaos in order to stop her. And I think that it's becoming more difficult to play this game. And I think this is probably the last time that they're going to be able to do this convincingly. By the way, again, this isn't exactly the first time that this has happened. Remember, I was very connected with France in the 1970s. And I remember that in 1978, there were parliamentary elections in France. the left, which included the Communist Party, was widely expected to win.

Again, the same kind of jiggery-pokery happened. And the right, in fact, won. La Majority were re-elected and retained control of the Parliament. But in fact, as became clear later, that was the last gasp of the old French majority. Just three years later, François Mitterrand, as a socialist with communist backing, was elected president of France. So, you know, history isn't repeating itself, but perhaps it will rhyme. Yeah, I agree with you. In Greece, Cittes that did such a terrible job that new democracy swept into power, easily swept into power.

But new democracy is global, it's neoliberal right. So you got you got rid of the globalist neoliberal left. But what became the globalist neoliberal left is such a terrible job. It made it easy for the neoliberal globalist right to take power. But in France, it is a different situation because you do out Le Pen. And Le Pen did say that she wasn't so disappointed at this result. And she does believe that come the presidential elections, national rally will will do very well. We'll wait and see. But just to close out the video, I believe a better

strategy would have been for the globalists, for the people behind Macron, a better strategy would have been to allow Le Pen to govern during these very difficult times. And you'd make a bet, you gamble that a Le Pen government, a Le Pen parliament with a national rally prime minister, during these very, very difficult economic times, because the prime minister is going to be handling mostly domestic issues that they would not do well. And that would create a shift back to your party. But instead they're going to be the ones.

They're going to be the ones that have to navigate this difficult time in France and the world. And chances are that they're not going to be able to manage it well, and that's going to open up the pathway for a national rally. I completely agree. I think they made a strategic mistake. I think they have made a strategic mistake. I think they've got them so worked up about the national rally that they've just lost the larger picture.

They are constantly playing, as I said, this game, at trying to exclude the national rally as if it was what they said it was, you know, the inheritor of Vichy and all of that, or alternatively as if it was the equivalent on the right of the old French Communist Party as it was in the 60s and 70s. But of course it isn't, I mean, this is a fundamental mistake. I think if it had won the election, being allowed to win the election, former government, it would have tried to govern in a, I suspect, fairly conventional, responsible way, very plausibly.

It would have been overwhelmed by events. And, you know, the pendulum would have shifted back. As it is, it's now going to be, because of all of the chaos, it's going to be the president, the left, all of these people who are going to try to wrestle with these problems, who will become discredited. And when the National Rally and Lopin do win power, they will win power gaining control of all the major institutions, the presidency and the parliament and all of the rest,

and will have a much stronger government and a much stronger chance of power than they would if they'd managed to break through now. Having said that, you know, when I must always add a word of caution, I don't know what Le Pen herself is going to do if she becomes leader of France. It might not be quite the revolutionary event that many people expected to be. But that's something we'll have to wait and see and work out when it happens. But happen, I think it now will. Just as me, there was endless attempts to stop me.

on becoming president. And then when he did become president, he turned out to be very much aligned with the globalist order. Perhaps the same thing will happen with Le Pen. Perhaps not. But one way or the other, I think with this election,

she's closer to that goal. It's important to remember that the national rally has, even despite coming third, considerably increased its footprint now in the National Assembly. It's a much stronger political force than it previously was. And also got the most votes, I believe. Absolutely.

Out of all the parties. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, yeah. I mean, the elections are 2007. Absolutely. Yeah. If a lot can happen, we don't know, a lot can happen.

We'd exactly. A lot can happen in that time, exactly. Yeah. So, okay. Anything else that you want to add? Or should we wrap it up? The Prime Minister resigned, by the way, as well. Gabriel Latal.

I mean, he's probably going to be caretaker, but I doubt that he's coming back. I think his political career is over, to be honest, in France. Not that he will worry about that, because he'll be given a nice job doing something else before very long, as these people always are. But this is a complex time. I know a lot of people are either shot. or stunned or elated or depressed by this result. My own view is that the way to understand it is a step towards a process. And it again demonstrates how profoundly manipulated politics in the West has now become

because parties don't stand on their own issues and campaign on them and do so in a straightforward way as they use. used to do. There's all sorts of, you know, we pull back candidates here, pull back candidates there, come up with all sorts of solutions here, with a lot, endless wire pulling and manipulations and things of this guy to deliver outcomes which are not the ones that the people the France probably want and don't deserve either. We're going to get a government which is chaotic and disorganized.

and, well, it might in the end bring about the result that we talked about. But in the meantime, it would be very difficult for France. The EU is good at that. Europe is good at kicking the can down the road. Absolutely. How do you make it so that they can keep the countries somehow on the EU policy path? I don't know if that's going to be the case with Popular Front. We'll see, but, you know, that's what they did in Greece and it worked. Indeed.

But popular France is a different story, but yeah, they're good at this. They're good at kick at the camp. They're good at this, absolutely. Even if, as I said, what they've done this time is broken the marriage between the Frankenstein's monster and the zombie. It really is, looking at these two parties or two groupings, Ensemble, Macron's grouping, and the popular front. I mean, neither has coherence.

And this marriage, this forced marriage that we're going to see between them is so profoundly unnatural, as Le Pen's parliamentary leader, Jordan Bardela correctly said. All right, we will enter there at the durand.com. We are on Rumble Odyssey, Fitzsheet, Telegram, Rockfin, and TwitterX and go to the Duran shop. Pick up some limited edition merch. The link is the description box down below. Take care.