Thoughts on the recent French Presidential Election

The following was sent in by an Australia First member and reader of this blog, regarding the French elections.  Although written before the final result was known, the writer has got it 'spot on' and the comments he has made are just as valid now with the benefit of hindsight as they were when he made them.  Despite being received too late to publish as an election preview, we publish this item now -- unaltered -- on its own merits.  Of course readers must allow for the use of the future tense in describing what is now a past event.

Establishment Watch:

The French Elections.

At the time of writing, the French presidential elections are not complete.

In France, the election of a President of the Republic is potentially, and often in actuality, a two-stage process. A round of voting takes place in which all duly nominated candidates are eligible. This may result in a majority of votes for one candidate, in which case he is declared elected. If not, a second round of voting takes place in which the voters must choose between the two candidates who placed first and second in the first round.

This resembles the “preferential” system of voting used in many Australian elections, except that it is cruder, and easier for voters to understand.

The present French elections have caused some concern to degenerates around the world: the evil, “extreme right” party, the Front Nationale, did better than expected, with 18-20% of the vote (the story to hand doesn’t put it more precisely than that).

As we all know, nice people do not vote for “far-right” parties. Voting for plain “right” parties is not very nice either, but when the “far right” comes into the picture, the “right” suddenly becomes halfway respectable.

The “Australian Financial Review,” Australian business’s newspaper of record, published on 24th April 2012 an opinion piece which, in the absence of anything else on the subject, may be taken as the newspaper’s own opinion on French politics.

The story describes the good result for the Front Nationale as unprecedented, which it isn’t: one or two elections ago, the Front Nationale candidate came in second, knocking the Socialist candidate out of the race, and forcing French leftist leaders to beg their followers to turn out and vote for the Conservative candidate, for fear (alors!) that the extra-evil candidate might win. This time, the Socialists actually came first, assuring them of a place in the second round.

That potentially leaves it up to the evil right-wing voters to choose between the two leading candidates, and on the usual (fictional) political spectrum, this means that the Conservative candidate should win comfortably. But French voters know more about French politics than Australian journalists do, and apparently the (sitting Conservative) President has such a reputation as a rat and a sycophant to Arab immigrants that the Front Nationale voters are unlikely to be able to bring themselves to vote for him.

So the Socialist candidate seems likely to win.

What Establishment politicians do is often unpredictable: politicians who claim to be conservative sometimes run spendthrift, race-mixing administrations, while leftist politicians have been known (on rare occasions) to clean things up. So it isn’t clear that honest (“evil right-wing”) voters have a dog in this race, or which dog it may be.

What may be more interesting is that the “Fin. Review” claims that the Front Nationale has abandoned free-market economics. According to the “Fin. Review,” whose readers generally speaking have a big stake in the continuation of some degree of free-market policy, the evil rightists are now making common cause with the Reds on this issue. Over one-third of French voters, the paper says, now vote for anti-market parties. Notice that this counts the French Socialists, like the Labor Party in Australia, as a business party.