The Duran Podcast
France elections. Establishment scrambles to keep Le Pen out
All right, Alexander, let's talk about the first round of parliament elections in France. Huge turnout, big riots as well, and a big win for Le Pen and National Rally, but not sure if that's going to be enough in the second round to guarantee her a majority in the parliament. We might be heading towards some sort of an impasse, but how did you see the results of the first round? Macron definitely got it hard. I think Macron is a discredited figure. I mean, his party came third. Let's just look at the results overall. So Le Pen's party, the guy sombre-mor, Nationale got around, well, got 33% of the vote, a third of the vote. On a high turnout, large numbers of young people now voting for her. She's clearly got momentum. Le Pen clearly has momentum now. The United Left group, which is a Frankenstein's monster, if I can put it like that, are various left-wing parties, some of which are deeply rivalrous and hostile with each other, and who have different opinions about all kinds of different things. Anyway, they came third with around 30%. Now, they have come together basically in order to stop. They came second. They came second, sorry. They came second. They came second around 30%. They came together essentially with one objective, which is to stop Le Pen. Macron's party has collapsed to around 20% of the vote, 22% of the vote. Macronism is discredited. Whether he stays or goes, he is now a repudiated president in France. Now, as you absolutely rightly say, every lever is now being pulled, every wire is being tugged, everything is being done in order to deny Le Pen and the Rasombre Monasional, a majority in the French Parliament as a result of the runoff votes that happened in the second round. We're seeing extraordinary coalitions being cobbled together. We see communists now going to be voting for members of Macron's centrist bloc. We're going to see conservative capitalists voting for anarcho-syndicalists, part of this left-wing. Everybody is going to try supposedly to try to come together to stop Le Pen. Now, it might work, and it's possible that we will, as a result, have a completely chaotic and broken national assembly. I don't see how that assists the situation in France. We will have a discredited and disliked president, and we will have a fragmented Parliament. It will only make the situation in France worse. The logical thing is to let Le Pen's party, already to allow Le Pen's party to achieve its majority, which it is clearly trending towards, and to take the responsibility in France of forming the next government. Creating a chaotic situation in France, in my opinion, is more likely to provoke, ultimately, an economic and political crisis. And those who think that that is going to stop Le Pen, I'm going to suggest that on the contrary, it is more likely when the presidential election comes, and I still believe it will come sooner rather than later. It's more likely, at that point, to result in Le Pen winning the election with an even bigger majority. Why do these groups want to prevent Le Pen from having a majority, from governing? What makes it so controversial to say the conservative capitalist, you mentioned the centralist capitalist that maybe supports Macron and other globalists, is she that much of a threat? Because I look at Le Pen as something similar, a person who could be similar to say a Maloney, that that may be where her governing style will tread towards. I don't know, maybe, but is she that radical of a figure? No, she's not that radical of the figure, and you make comparisons with Georgia Maloney in Italy, and I agree with those comparisons. I think she's a much more mainstream figure than people are making up. But as I've also pointed out many, many times, if you compare Le Pen's program, or at least not perhaps her current program, but the program that she used to have just a few years ago, which many people found even more far right and even more extreme, it was very, very similar to that of Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s. In fact, it was essentially the same as Charles de Gaulle's in the 1960s. Charles de Gaulle believed in an independent France. He wanted a Europe of nation states, not an integrated Europe. He wanted friendly relations with Russia, and he had a certain aloofness from the United States, even though ultimately he remained an ally of the United States. And again, like Marine Le Pen, he was an opponent of immigration. So, I mean, this is Gaulism. Le Pen's policies or program, which of course she has since moderated, is simply Gaulism in its modern form. There is a party, the Alire Publique, who claimed to be the continuous of de Gaulle's legacy. But in reality, it is Le Pen, who is much closer to what de Gaulle actually stood for, and the policies that he had as president of France, than they are. What has happened, and the real problem in France, and the true reason why there is this fierce opposition to Le Pen, well, it's twofold. Firstly, they're very adept now at conjuring up, you know, the old spectres of Vichy, of the 1930s, of all of that, even though there is no basis to any of this in anything that Le Pen says or stands for, or indeed has ever really said. But secondly, all of the parties in France left, right, and center, including even the communist party. Though not entirely, the communist party still has some interesting, well, some, you know, divergent thinkers. But all of the parties in France, to a greater or lesser extent, other than Le Pen's, and even to some extent Le Pen's, have now become assimilated into the Europeanist neoliberal system. And to the extent that Le Pen still stands for a return to goalism, that is, of course, unacceptable, because it is completely contrary to the doctrines of the neoliberal system. And that is really all the, the reason for all the hysteria, all the tantrums, all the attempts to mobilize all of the parties. We speak of the communist party and the anarchic party and all of those parties. Ultimately, they are much closer to each other than their various labels might suggest. They're just different spectrums of the Neolib, Neokhan. Yeah, blob, I guess you can say everyone else in your party. I don't even know that Le Pen herself is that different. But for some reason, they believe that she is. And for that reason, they're doing everything they possibly can to stop her becoming president of France. And the result is France's internal situation is deteriorating. If they succeed in the second round in denying her party a majority, we're going to get more chaos and drift in France. And of course, ultimately, it is going to lead to some kind of a breakdown and perhaps eventually, in fact, I believe eventually, to an even greater repain victory. So what she will do with that victory remains to be seen. Yeah. What happens to Macron? Well, does he remain a discredited, a toxic president for two, three more years? Does he take on that role? Maybe he only deals with foreign policy stuff. And does it even bother with domestic issues at all? Do we have a national rally prime minister, even if even if there is an impasse? Does he does he call it quits? If there's an impasse? Well, I have questions. I still personally think that sooner or later he's going to go. And I'd say sooner or later, I mean, sometime within this year, maybe even within the next few weeks. The fact is, he has lost control of the French Parliament conclusively. And you talked about foreign policy. It's absolutely correct that the president of France controls foreign policy. The foreign minister and the defence minister take their instructions from him, not from the prime minister. But what we have in the French Parliament is a situation where two thirds of the MPs, presumably, or at least two thirds of the votes in the election have gone to parties which categorically reject his foreign policy. Both the Frankenstein left movement and Le Pan's party and the various other minor parties that lie to the right of Le Pan's which are, to some extent, aligned with her all agree on certain things, which is, of course, that they reject Project Ukraine and that they're deeply skeptical about further integration, or at least that is what they say. So the French, the French voters have overwhelmingly in an election with a high turnout backed parties that oppose President Macron's foreign policy. Now, of course, he might try and hold out and remain president in the face of all of that, but I suspect that if he does, you mentioned how toxic he's become, I think it will mobilise more opposition to him and to his policies within the French National Assembly. I think that there is at least a possibility that rather than face, what will almost certainly be a recurring series of crises, whatever the outcome, I mean, if the Assemblément National wins a majority, he'll have to coexist with a French prime minister, Yod Don Bardela, who leads the Assemblément National in Parliament, who is deeply opposed to his ideas and, you know, who he passionately dislikes. If he's able to stop the Assemblément National at forming a government, well, because there will be denied a majority and they will lack coalition partners, where we will have an even more chaotic situation, where we'll have a government that is completely incapable of governing France, and where there'll be constant chaos and problems and a government likely to collapse at the first crisis. So I don't think Macron really wants to be tied up with any of that. He knows that the French are rejecting his policies. He looks at the situation in the Parliament. He sees very bad choices ahead from him for him there. I still think more likely than not, he will go. What happens with Project Ukraine, just to wrap up the video with all of this, this uncertainty and this chaos that we have in France, that is coming even after July 7th, I think we're still going to have a lot of uncertainty with the situation in France. What happens with Project Ukraine? Does it matter? Does it matter who wins a majority in Parliament, who becomes the Prime Minister, where the Macron stays or goes? France is definitely part of the NATO-US system, but it's not as captured and controlled as Germany. Yes, it is part of the system. It is controlled to a certain extent, but we're not talking about a country like Germany, which is from top to bottom, completely run by the United States. France does exert a bit of independence a bit, but it does exert it. What happens with Project Ukraine? I'm going to discuss Germany in a moment, because bear in mind I'm here and I've been having discussions with all kinds of people here, but let me first of all deal with France. I think this makes continuing Project Ukraine a lot more difficult, because to repeat again, two-thirds of the French have voted for parties which they believe are opposed to Project Ukraine. Now, of course, the parties might simply do what they regularly have been doing, which is, well, we've got the votes. Now we can turn around and start backing Project Ukraine and moving forward and continuing to vote the appropriations and agree to all the programs for supporting Project Ukraine, but I've just been here in Germany. I've had discussions with various people. These are all, of course, anecdotal discussions. I've talked to some young people. I have been very careful not to try to prompt people into expressing views. I want to make this very clear. These have just been conversations, and one of the things that has struck me, and I am, of course, in western Germany, very much in the heartland of the old west Germany, the one that existed before the fall of the war, is the project Ukraine continuously comes up, and especially for younger people, it is indeed exactly as some of the opinion polls are saying, becoming the crystallising issue. It's the thing that differentiates for them those parties that they trust, because they oppose Project Ukraine, from those parties which they don't trust, which are the ones that are in government, or which look like they might support Project Ukraine, if they became the government. Now, you're absolutely right in saying that in France, the political system is far less tied up and closed down than it is in Germany. So, of course, if all the parties in France simply turn their backs on what they said to the electors, and just go on supporting Project Ukraine, you're going to inevitably get an even bigger reaction in France, and you're probably seeing in Germany, you're going to start getting intense even greater cynicism amongst the French, and of course in France, with this very important volatile revolutionary tradition and history, it becomes almost inevitable, I would have said, that Project Ukraine will then indeed become the major crystallising issue, and will lead to political forces that are actually committed to stopping it, starting to win important votes in local and national elections. Now, I think that this is well understood certainly on the part of some of the left-wing parties, and also on the part of the Croissant Le Mans, Massonal. So, I think more likely than not, whatever their personal feelings and views, since all of these parties want to be in power in some form, and they probably know that one way or the other, they're not going to get parachuted into globalist and EU institutions if they fail, I think we will probably start to see more opposition to Project Ukraine in France, in the French Parliament, less willingness to support more funding for Ukraine, more opposition to transfers of weapons. In fact, I'm going to suggest that the turning point on Project Ukraine has been reached, and that in France especially, the people are now turning that back on it. All right, we will end the video there, the duran.local.com. We are on Rumble Odyssey, Bitchea Telegram, Rockfin, and TwitterX, and go to the Duran shop pickup, some limited edition, merch the link is in the description box down below. Take care.