The Duran Podcast
Macron works to break left coalition
All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is happening in France and the struggles that Macron's new prime minister, Michel Barnier, who's very much aligned with the European Union. He was an EU commissioner at one point in time. Barnier was being considered for the top job that Ursula now holds anyway. He is the appointed prime minister of Macron and he is having a real difficult time forming a government. We actually said he would run into troubles and he is running into serious troubles. And he has even said that if he cannot form a government, he may have to resign as a prime minister. I imagine that would be a huge setback for Macron, but it doesn't seem like Macron really cares too much. I don't know, that's the impression I'm getting anyway. Your thoughts on the major. I don't think he cares at all. Macron continues to govern France, if that's the right word, or remains president of France for the moment. There's attempts to get impeachment proceedings organised against him. A parliamentary committee has voted that through. Impeachment of the French president is incredibly difficult. I don't think he's done anything that breaks the letter of the law here. I don't think he's going to be impeached. He's going to remain president of France and effectively at the moment he's got more power than any other than he's had for a long time in France. Because he doesn't have to contend with the hostile parliament and the government itself, the government that is accountable to the parliament by definition is extraordinarily weak. So we had the parliamentary elections. The party that won the popular vote by a clear margin was the Rasson-Blomont National, led by Marine Le Pen. All kinds of deals were done before the actual election itself, so that when, despite winning the popular vote, in terms of the number of seats, they only came third. The part, the group that came first was Jean-Luc Melanchon's group, which got around a quarter of the vote, well behind the Rasson-Blomont National. But they insisted that because they had come first in terms of seats, they should form a, they should be the ones with the right to form a government. They proposed as we remember, Lucy Castes, we went into a huge explanation about the fact that she's a complete establishment figure, but Macron rejected her. Macron has now appointed Michel Barnier, Prime Minister, and Michel Barnier has cobbled together a government. And it is a government that basically reflects very much his orientation. It's based on Les Republiques, the old Gauliss party, which is now basically reduced to a small rub within the French National Assembly, with some people left over from Macron's grouping. So it's a centrist right-wing grouping. It can only survive so long as the Rasson-Blomont National supported, and the left strongly or at least publicly oppose it. It's got to pass or get through the French Parliament a budget, a very difficult austerity budget. The left has rejected it outright. The Rasson-Blomont National La Pains party seemed to oppose it as well. It is very, very difficult to see this government surviving for very long. And I think Barnier himself knows this. And as you rightly said, he's talking about the fact that he may soon have to resign. So it's likely we will see this government collapse. More likely than not will then happen, is that Macron will propose another Prime Minister, very similar to Barnier. And this whole process will repeat itself, and go on repeating itself for the next year or so. We will have a new to Parliament, a government that is hardly functioning, a group of technocrats around Macron himself running things in France, impeachment proceedings, which will go nowhere, and Macron himself to the extent that France is being governed will be the person who is governing him. That, it seems to me, is the situation. The very bleak situation that France is facing. He's going to have to call elections, after a certain amount of time. He has to call them within a year. In a year's time, he's got the right answer. It just can't go on forever. No, it can't go on forever. But it can go on for many, many months. The economic situation in France is getting worse. There's the budgetary crisis, which of course, nobody is working towards solving. But Macron refuses to create a coalition, which will include Melanchon. And he refuses to include, create a coalition that includes Le Pen. He refuses to work with either of these two figures, who are in their respective in very different ways, the two most electrally popular figures in France. Le Pen, much more so than Melanchon. It must be said. And he would rather see the situation deteriorate in France than change his position with respect to that. So things are gradually cracking and getting worse. And in my opinion, what Macron is doing is he's playing out the clock and calculating that eventually the left will crumble. It hasn't yet happened, but that it will eventually crumble. He's got a key ally there in the form of President Francois Hollande, who is clearly trying to maneuver to create a centrist, a centrist left-to-center coalition, which is what I think Macron would like. And I think eventually he will get what he wants. I think that's what Macron is working towards. I was going to say the same thing, actually. It looks like he's trying to run out the clock. And I remember we did a video on this, I want to say, three, four weeks ago, where you mentioned that Macron was eventually over time was going to look to peel away certain elements of this umbrella coalition of Melanchon, because that's what it is. It's not a single part of that one, the parliament elections, it was very much four or five parties that really should not be aligned with each other under normal circumstances, but they aligned in order not to take on Macron, but in order to take on Le Pen. So they kind of brought this on to themselves in a way, and Macron understands this, and he's going to run out the clock and he's going to try to peel away certain parts of this umbrella coalition and get them on his side. That's what he's doing, because elections in France, proper elections, are in 27, they're not too far off. I mean, he does seem to have the ability and the timing seems to be there for him to say, okay, let me take this to the next year, maybe he has to call elections, but maybe not. Maybe you can take this to 2027, if you allow certain elements of Melanchon's umbrella coalition, what a blow to Melanchon. Well, absolutely, I mean, Melanchon is going to be completely marginalized and isolated eventually, and there are already hit pieces starting to peer against him, that he's the spoiler, that he's thrown away the victory that the left supposedly achieved, and it didn't really achieve a victory. I mean, it's important to remember this, but he threw away that opportunity because he wasn't prepared to enter into a coalition with Macron and his bloc. There's even articles that have started to appear about that in the British media, by the way, the British and French establishments are fairly close to each other, as a matter of fact. But we're going to see more and more of this, and eventually, I think we will see some of the left parties break from Melanchon, and he will argue and claim betrayal and all of that, but I think it's going to happen. Does this explain Macron's recent flip-flopping? I mean, he flip-flops a lot, but now he was three months ago, he was talking about, or six months ago, he was talking about sending French troops to Crimea and effectively getting NATO involved in a conflict with Russia. Just the other day, he was speaking at some event, and he talked about that Prashmong with Russia. He didn't phrase it like that, but he said we need to figure out a new system in Europe, a new system in the collective West, which takes Russia's concerns into consideration, its interests and consideration. Does this explain his recent flip-flopping? Yes, it does. Yes, it does. I mean, the point about Macron, the thing to understand about Macron is that he has to think of two audiences. One is the Anglo-American EU audience, which wants him to take a stronger line against Russia as possible. He's inspired at various times to lead that group, specifically the European part of it. So that's why he's often spoken about taking the hardest possible line against the Russians. His finance minister talked about destroying the Russian economy, if you remember. He's talked about sending troops to Crimea, so to Ukraine. He's also provided Ukraine with missiles. And he was the first person to authorize the delivery of heavy weapons of tanks to Ukraine. He did that before the British and the French, British and the Americans and the Germans did. So he sometimes takes a very, very hard line against the Russians. At the same time, and now it's become absolutely clear, this is not a popular policy with the French people. The French do not want to be drawn into a conflict with Russia, not at all. In fact, France is one of those countries where outside Paris, you will find Mr. File Sentiments expressed quite openly, not to the extent that you will find them and say Italy, but they do exist in France. And anyway, the French are absolutely not interested in a war with Russia. So the result is he sometimes maneuvers towards the Russophobic NATO EU position, because when he aspires to be the leader of Europe, other times when he wants to stabilize the domestic situation in France, and to persuade the French that he is the President of France, that he is interested in, is responsive and cares about them, he tilts back towards taking a softer line on Russia. I think he was shocked actually by the French parliamentary and before that the European Parliament elections in discovering the extent of anti-war sentiment in France. I think he thought that the hard line against Russia actually had more support than it really did. And I think the reason for that is very simple, like a lot of French politicians. He's very centered on Paris, and Paris has a very EU line, takes a very EU line, pro-EU line. And I think that he underestimates how different sentiment outside Paris is to sentiment in Paris. He listens to people in Paris, he doesn't understand that people outside Paris take completely different views on these things. And by the way, just to respond to a point of view of me, there is of course a very strong left outside Paris, there is a very strong right outside Paris, but the point is that they are different from the left and the right that you will find in Paris. Yeah, I don't know, did I say Crimea or Dessa? I might have said from Africa what I said. But he was talking about sending troops to Odessa. And that obviously would have provoked an eventual conflict, would have led to a conflict between Russia and France and possibly NATO. But what do you think Macron's position is with the conflict in Ukraine right now? I'm starting to believe that he's taking a position of, don't include us in this discussion about long-range weapons into Russian territory. Specifically scalp, we are talking about scalp and even the storm shadow is effectively a scalp missile, the storm shadows. But it seems like Macron and France has kind of stayed out of this debate or they've distanced themselves from this debate, even though France is as the Russian government has acknowledged one of the big sponsors and donors for Ukraine and for this war with Russia. But with regards to Ukraine entering NATO, with regards to long-range missiles, storm shadows and scalps hitting pre-2014 Russian territory, Macron has remained fairly quiet. He's not siding with the US, he's not siding with the UK. I don't know, that's my sense of things. What's your sense? You are absolutely correct. The difference between the Macron of today and the Macron six months ago is stark. After I've decafailed, he was going all out, talking about sending French troops, about not allowing Russia to win, and it was absolutely impossible not to allow Russia to win. He seemed to be taking the hardest line of all. And now, he says as little as possible, he's gone completely quiet. And on storm shadow, storm shadow is actually scalp, and scalp itself is a development of a French missile developed in the 1980s. So it is in fact a French missile. This is something the British media have recently discussed. The British have tweaked it, but basically it comes from France. It's a French missile that we're talking about, but they're saying as little as they can about this whole idea of deep strikes on Russia. Six months ago, it would have been the British and the French, Macron and the British advocating this. No, Macron stays completely out of the whole debate. And the reason is that he's discovered that this very, very strong war position that he took was not popular with the French people, with the people of France, and by the way with the French army. The French military strongly opposed the whole idea of sending French troops to Ukraine, and one sense is that they're not talking and having French missiles used to attack Russia. Was it Lamy in France just a couple of weeks ago, trying to lobby France to align more with the UK as far as hitting Russia? And at the same time, you had Germany and all of Schultz saying very publicly, I think this was not by chance, we are not going to send tourist missiles to Ukraine. Exactly. So Germany is on one side, the UK is on the other, and Lamy was in France trying to bring France onside with the UK. They've been lobbying the French, because since Stormshade is really scald, and since scald is French, they need the French to agree to deep strikes, just as they need the Americans to agree. They come, if the French were to say no, straightforwardly no, this thing couldn't happen. The French have not said no, because they've not said yes either. They've just decided to hide behind the Americans. And in each of the American technology, as it's been revealed by the Times, and now everyone is saying, I think the economists even put out an article the other day, and they also echo what the Times wrote, which is that at the end of the day, if you are going to launch Stormshadels into Russia, you need American tech to do the targeting of the surveillance. This is absolutely right, which is fascinating, because effectively, they are corroborating, and Port Putin has been saying, even though they don't want to mention what Putin actually said about this. But if you read what they've been saying recently, they're effectively saying that Putin was right. So the UK needs France on board and the United States on board and Germany's resistance. And Germany's resistance. All right, any other final thoughts, or should we wrap this one up? It's very sad to see what's happening in France, actually. I mean, it also demonstrates what utterly irresponsible person Macron is. He came in, told everybody that he was going to rejuvenate France, that he was this great anti-establishment figure. I don't know to what extent French people really fell for this, but they went along with it, and they have brought France. He's brought France to a standstill. And all of this is being done on the basis of keeping Le Pen out. That this is supposedly the worst thing that could happen to France, is that Le Pen might become president or lead France. I hope that people in France begin to see that, in fact, the worst thing is not keeping Le Pen out. It is engaging in all of these incredibly complex political maneuvers that Macron and others are using, and which they're justifying by this constant narrative on the supposed danger to France if Le Pen were to become president. All that they're managed is to deprive France of the government, to create instability, to put the situation where the economy is gradually sliding out of control, and to deprive France as of its voice at a time when its voice matters, because Europe is right in the middle of the greatest conflict that it has experienced since the end of the Second World War. All right, we will end the video there, the dorand.locals.com. We are on Rumbolada Seepichu Telegram Rockfin and Twitter X, and go to the Durand Shop pick up some merch, like the polo that Alexander is wearing today with the Union Jack on the sleeve, or a T-shirt like I am wearing today with the Greek flag. On the sleeve, the link is in the description box down below. Take care. [music]