Here are my thoughts on the French presidential elections. In addition to the well-publicized 66-34% victory of Emmanuel Macron vs pro-nazi Le Pen there are a few more facts that offer an interesting comparison between our two countries:
First, among the voters of right-wing candidate Fillon in the first round, 48% voted for Macron while only 20% went for Le Pen. If your honest Republican voters had chosen to vote for Clinton or stay home in the same proportion instead of tribally voting for fascist Trump, things would have been very different. Nearly half of the French right-wing exhibited moral principles, while I’m sorry to say, the GOP voters had none.
On the Far left, 52% of Melanchon voters went for Macron while only 7% chose Le Pen. The Bernie Bro/lesser of two evils etc. dynamic was there, but not as pronounced as in the US. Chalk up one more for sanity.
The fact of the matter is that Le Pen got a total of 10.7 million votes while abstentions got 12 million plus another 4.2 who voted blank. That’s 16.2 million who chose to not vote nazi even if they didn’t like the center-right candidate Macron which got 20.6 million votes. So the nazi finished a distant third.
Speaking of abstentions, voter turnout was 74.62% universally considered dismal by the French political pundits (and indeed lower than in previous elections), until they learned that the turnout in the 2016 US election was 54.7% then they laughed hysterically.
Finally, the Russian hackers joined forced with the American alt.right to hack the non-nazi candidate Macron and succeeded, but only to the extent that (a) anticipating the hack, the Macron IT staff played a magistral intox/disinformation campaign on the evil hackers, and (b) the French Government and French Media joined forces to conspicuously NOT report the hacks. Only a feeble mention of a fake Bahamas bank account attributed to Macron (fake news) was mentioned by Le Pen herself and her “Bannon” in the last days or so — and she will face judicial consequences for that.
All in all, I have good reasons to be proud of France and my fellow French countrymen, even though there is still a heap of problems ahead of us, especially the legislative elections (mid-June) that will take place in a chaotic and yet-to-be restructured political environment.
On the plus side, the National Front appears to be solidly fractured between the old nazi guard and the younger neo-nazi wing who want to change the party’s name, platform and kick out the old guard. Popcorn time.
It may be churlish of me to bring it up but Trump’s message of congratulation to the newly elected Macron was a third-person tweet, the official message that came later was a letter from the State Dpt being credited to a minor official. Not even Putin did that. It saddens me to observe once again that the US continues to behave like an a mild enemy of France, and indeed of Europe.