By Monica Showalter
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, had it all figured out.
Following victories of conservative parties across Europe, he decided he’d secure his center-left legislative majority to keep the so-called ‘far right’ away from power by holding a snap election. If his party got enough votes, it could pick the prime minister and the cabinet officials, making for a very comfy presidency for himself indeed.
It was proactive. It was clever. It was a hardball power play to check an opponent.
The New York Times’s Roger Cohen noted that it took on this tone:
In a statement of its own, Mr. Macron’s party declared: “We cannot give the keys of the country to the far right. Everything in their program, their values, their history, make of them an unacceptable threat against which we have to fight.”
Just one problem with it: The French voters thought otherwise. The Marine Le Pen train had already pulled out of the station, leaving Macron and his masterplan in the dust. The results of June 6-9 parliamentary elections of Europe, which triggered this snap election, were a waving battle banner of more to come, not a minute little protest vote, as Macron had calculated. The former global investment banker forgot that the trend was not his friend.
It was about as bright a move as that of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who had launched a U.K. referendum on leaving the European Union, figuring the Brits would vote ‘no,’ as he had wanted — and much to his surprise, they voted ‘yes.’ Emmanuel, meet Dave.
This time, the French voters elected members of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party to the National Assembly by a stinging 33% margin, leaving Macron’s own Ensemble party with 20%, and the socialists with 28%. That’s misery itself for Macron’s French globalists, who’ve allowed in too many illegal migrants and seen the country explode into an orgy of crime, disorder and welfare bills. As a second round beckons next week, they may even get the prime minister’s job if they get enough votes in the runoff next week, which will make for some very interesting “co-habitation” as the French say.
What’s vivid here is that Macron was completely out of touch with the zeitgeist, or as the French say, l’esprit de l’époque. He didn’t seem to think there was much to grotesque new wave of crimes seen in France by unassimilated and ungrateful migrants claiming asylum or refuge, or else just there illegally. He could stop letting them in and the problem would go away, and there were some restrictions on illegal immigration, as the prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, who detests Macron, could attest.
Migrant problems, though, carry on long after migrants get past the gate.
A major cathedral, Nantes, was set on fire by an illegal. The monstrous fire at Notre Dame was called an ‘accident,’ which seems like a coverup but coincided a lot of problems with illegals.
A rejected asylum seeker (who was not thrown out) went on a stabbing spree in the sylvan city of Annecy, slashing four children in strollers and two adults, and was only stopped by a young French man with a backpack who was on a pilgrimage to see France’s cathedrals. Authorities insisted it wasn’t terrorism.
Migrants claiming to be Jihadis stabbed a priest who was saying mass in Normandy in 2022. Another priest in St. Etienne, near Lyon, was attacked during Islamic race riots in what authorities claimed was a robbery, in 2023. Protestant churches have been trashed by Islamist militants in those riots, too.
Meanwhile, in Paris, migrants lead in rapes of French women in public places.
According to GBNews:
More than three quarters of rapes on the streets of Paris last year were committed by foreign nationals, according to shocking data from French authorities.
97 rapes were recorded in public spaces in France’s capital in 2023 – fewer than a third of which have been solved, local outlet Europe 1 reported.
Of the 97, 36 were arrested, 28 of whom were of foreign nationality – a staggering 77 per cent of those accused – while 30 cases were solved by the authorities.
Cohen’s piece in the Times is very good but contains one flaw down the page in its description of how Marine Le Pen’s conservative party has changed, with a dismissive use of academic statistical studies on migrant crime:
Also unchanged was its readiness to discriminate between foreign residents and French citizens, and its insistence that the country’s crime level and other ills stem from too many immigrants, a claim that some studies have challenged.
Surely the migrant stabbing sprees, the migrant rapes, and the migrant attacks on cathedrals and churches would affect French voters in the way they lived, in the way they continued their culture, in the way they asserted themselves as French citizens in the aftermath of these attacks. French people would be afraid to go out on the streets, would shudder at the migrant campouts and garbage, litter and feces being left across city centers in France’s beautiful cities, and would force certain residents to consider arming up for self defense.
Those kinds of forced cultural changes of French people are what drive them towards the conservatives, Le Pen’s conservatives understand very well what the problem is that French people are experiencing, even as authorities dismiss every monstrosity committed as an anomaly or not their fault and let it go on and on and on, waving their misleading statistics as Chesa Boudin once did before he was thrown out as district attorney in San Francisco.
As adventure travel writer Robert Young Pelton once noted: The first and foremost human right is personal security. Without it, there aren’t any other human rights.
I have a friend who’s a foreign correspondent who has spent time in Paris with a major news organization, he’s a closet conservative. He once told me he spent time with Marine Le Pen and found her extremely empathetic, very pleasant, her charm and kindness actually took him off guard.
That kindness and empathy had to be a vote getter with France’s voters, making them vote for the “unelectable” party (as it has been dismissed) much to Macron’s surprise.
He now faces the unpalatable choice of hooking up with the far-left socialists, whom he disdains, or watching Le Pen’s party take most of the power, if not an unbeatable majority come next week.
That’s what comes of ignoring the feelings of the voters, who’ve been battered by crime and seen their beautiful French culture trashed in the name of globalism, including unfettered migration from unassimilated migrants who hate every civilized value. Macron rants about the socialists messing with his foreign investors, but where is his concern for the French and their ability to walk around without getting molested in their own cities? If he had paid attention to that, he might just have had a different political story.