Macron's second presidency was as calculatingly managed by France's liberal elite as his first. As the country's economic and geographic schisms widen further, yesterday's Yellow Vest protests will seem like a tea party by comparison.
Emmanuel Macron now has a second term, courtesy of France's urban elites. But the magnitude of the problems he faces, both domestic and external, will ensure indefinite strife in the country. Photo Credit: The Cradle
By Pepe Escobar, posted with the author's permission and cross-posted with The Cradle
In the end, it happened exactly like the French establishment designed it. I called it last December in a column here at The Cradle.
These are the essentials: Certified Arabophobe Eric Zemmour, who is of Algerian origin, was manufactured by key establishment players of the Institut Montaigne variety to cut off the populist right-wing candidacy of Marine Le Pen. In the end, Zemmour's electoral performance was dismal, as expected. Yet another candidate pulled off a miracle intervention and was even more useful: ambitious egomaniac opportunist and so-called progressive Jean-Luc Melenchon.
'Le Petit Roi' Emmanuel Macron generates less than zero empathy across France. That explains the huge voter abstention of 28 percent in the second round of votes.
The numbers tell the story: There are 48,803,175 French citizens registered to vote. Macron got 18,779,809 votes. Marine Le Pen got 13,297,728 votes. Yet the most eyebrow-raising performance was by the Abstention/Nullified/Blank candidate: 16,674,963 votes.
So the president of France was re-elected by 38.5 percent of voters while the real second place, Absention/Nullified/Blank got 34.2 percent.
That implies that roughly 42 percent of registered French voters bothered to hit the polls basically to bar Le Pen: a brand that remains toxic in vast swathes of urban France - yet hardly as much as before - and even with the whole weight of oligarchic mainstream media engaged in Two Minute Hate campaign mode. The five oligarchies who run the so-called 'audiovisual landscape' (PAF, according to the French acronym) of campaign messaging are all Macronists.
Madam Guillotine meets the working classes
Who, in fact, is this illusionist Petit Roi that qualifies at best as a messenger of transnational plutocracy?
From the bowels of the system, arguably the sharpest verdict comes from Mathieu Pigasse, informally referred to in Paris as "the punk banker" because of his infatuation with the British punk-rock band The Clash.
When Macron was a mergers & acquisitions banker at Rothschild & Company, Pigasse was working for the opposition, Lazard Freres. It was Macron who convinced Nestlé's interests to be handled by Rothschild, while Pigasse was representing Danone.
Pigasse also happens to be one of the major shareholders of Le Monde - which used to be a great newspaper up to the 1980s and now is a shallow carbon copy of the New York Times. Le Monde is Macronist to the core.
Pigasse defines Macron as "the purest product of French elitism, in terms of the Parisian microcosm." Although Macron is a provinciale from Amiens, he perfectly fit into the Parisian beau monde, which is in itself a quite rarefied, and yes, equally provincial universe, like a village where everyone 'that matters' knows everyone.
Pigasse also identifies the establishment characters who invented Macron and placed him at the top of the pyramid - ranging from avowed eugenicist Jacques Attali to Serge Weinberg (ex-CEO of Sanofi), Francois Roussely (ex-president of EDF) and Jean-Pierre Jouyet, a former minister under disgraced former President Nicolas Sarkozy and then number two at the Elysée Palace under the supremely incompetent Francois Hollande.
Attali, incidentally, describes Macronism as a "pro-European modernization, engaged, liberal and optimist. That corresponds to a center-right of modern France" - and then Attali himself gives away the game - "which is not necessarily the whole of France."
"Not necessarily the whole of France" in fact means the majority of France, if one bothers to leave a few tony Paris arrondissements to talk to people in Pas-de-Calais, Bourgogne or the Var. This 'real' France identifies the "social market economy" extolled by Attali and promoted by Macron as a gigantic fake.
It would be too easy to paint the current national divide between, on one side, the elderly and the very young carrying a diploma, living in comfort; and on the other side, the 25 to 60 year olds, without higher education and barely making ends meet. That is, the working class masses.
It is more nuanced than that. Still, the two most important factors in this election are that close to one third of voters didn't even bother to show up - or nullified their vote (even here in Paris). And that the gullible Melenchon horde handed it over to Le Petit Roi, assuming their leader will become a de facto 'prime minister.'
The working classes will be literally exterminated throughout another five years of hardcore neoliberalism. France's until recently stellar social welfare system will be decimated. Retirement age will be extended to 65 years old. Smaller pensions will be barely enough to live on. The super-wealthy will pay much lower taxes while the common worker will pay much higher ones. Education and healthcare will be privatized.
France will merrily catch up with the fast decaying casino capitalism of the US and UK. And don't forget further travel restrictions and food and fuel shortages.
Islamophobia will not dissolve into a mellow woke rainbow. On the contrary: it will be instrumentalized as the perfect scapegoat for serial Macronist incompetence and corruption.
Meanwhile, in Azovstal...
If we add the spectacular performance of the Absention/Nullifed/Blank candidate plus people who didn't even bother to vote, we have something like a silent majority of 30 million people who instinctively feels the whole system is rigged.
The winners, of course, are the usual suspects: the BlackRock/McKinsey/Great Reset/weapons industry/EuroNazicrat axis. McKinsey virtually run French government policy - bordering on fiscal fraud - a scandal corporate media did everything to bury. For his part, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, a very close 'consultant' of the Elysee Palace, must have popped a few extra bottles of Krug.
And then, there's France as Great Power. Leader of great swathes of Africa (fresh from receiving a punch in the teeth from Mali); Leader of West Asia (ask the Syrians and Lebanese about it); Leader of the Great Resetting EU; And deeply embedded in the NATO war machine.
Which bring us to the top invisible story before this election, totally buried by corporate media. Yet Turkish intelligence picked it up. The Russians, for their part, have kept themselves deliciously mute, in their trademark 'strategic ambiguity' mode.
Denis Pushilin, the head of Donetsk People's Republic, confirmed once again early this week there are roughly 400 foreign 'instructors' cum mercenaries - from NATO - huddling in the bowels of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, with no way out.
Turkish intel maintains that 50 of them are French, some of them high-ranking. That explains what has been established by several Russian sources - but not acknowledged at all by Paris: Macron has placed a flurry of frantic phone calls to Putin to set up a "humanitarian corridor" to extricate his valuable assets.
The measured Russian response has been - once again - trademark geopolitical judo. No "humanitarian corridor" for anyone in Azovstal, be it Azov neo-Nazis or their foreign NATO handlers, and no bombing them to oblivion. Let them starve - and in the end they will be forced to surrender.
Enter the still unconfirmed yet plausible Macron directive: no surrender by any means. Because surrendering means giving Moscow on a silver plate a series of confessions and all the facts of an illegal, secret operation conducted by the 'leader of Europe' on behalf of neo-Nazis.
All bets are off when - and if - the full story breaks out in France. It might as well happen during the upcoming war crimes tribunal to be set up most probably in Donetsk.
Aux armes, citoyens? Well, they have five years down the road to hit the barricades. It may happen sooner than we think.