Le Séisme?

French election results seem to confirm the two surviving candidates of the crowded first round of Presidential voting as Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. As of this writing, a bit over 2% separates first-place finisher Macron from Le Pen. That means, absent some last minute vote surge by one of the other approximately 3,570 candidates, Macron and Le Pen will do battle May 7 to see who becomes the next President of France.

Macron, of course, is now the new darling of the French and global media, who now portray him as the last chance to save France from the Le Pen apocalypse. Those more familiar with French politics than I please feel free to correct me, but it seems that both candidates project a vaguely non-establishment aura, although young Macron, born in 1977, has a record as a former Socialist Minister for the Economy (2014-2016) and, presumably, will have to explain/defend France's lackluster economic performance during his tenure. Le Pen, labelled by almost all the press as "far right," despite a lack of evidence for that label, has run a very populist campaign with many of the same themes that we saw Trump use in his successful drive to the White House. The MSM, of course, are calling for unity against Le Pen, and the pollsters predict Macron will beat her handily next month. That happened to her father in 2002, when the establishment factions joined forces to defeat him, but we'll see if the past is prologue.

Whether this new Le Pen wins or not, however, we, in my view, have seen a seismic event in French politics. The established political parties of the Fifth Republic got sidelined. Le Pen's performance, in particular, has sent a mighty shiver down the collective spine of the globalist elite who run the EU, the World Bank, the IMF, the UN, etc, -- perhaps even more so than the "surprising" Trump victory in the US. I also would note that Marine Le Pen's possession, presumably, of a vagina gets her no support from the Progs. "Far right" vaginas don't count.

Why do I say this has the potential to prove even more of an earthquake than Trump's win?

France arguably is the mother of modern progressivism; it is the French who gave us the concept of "right" and "left"; it is the French Revolution, not its elder American sister, that has served as the model for revolution for the past two hundred years all over the world. Prog talk (To the ramparts!) is full of references--see Marx--to the French Revolution of 1789, and to the Paris revolts of 1832, 1848, and 1968. The progs are drawn to the grotesque dramatics and hypocrisies of the French Revolution, where terror, mass murder, and imperial wars were launched in the name of freedom and brotherhood. Why? Because there was a self-annoited arrogant "intellectual" elite in charge of all things, in charge, most notably, of shaping the sans-culots into progressive killing machines at the beck-and-call of the revolutionary elite. Progs see themselves as the inheritors of that elite. Lest we forget, France, more than any other country, is the producer of the original cigarette-smoking, beret-wearing "radical intellectual," e.g., Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, who questioned and derided everything about the very bourgeois society that gave them fame and, in many cases, riches.

In rides Le Pen. For all her flaws as a campaigner, she has thrown a massive stink bomb, perhaps even bigger than her father's, into the progressive world. She has shown, again, that underneath the PC culture, underneath the censorship, and the atmosphere of ridicule for those who believe in something other than the state, there is a living breathing body of citizens and voters who will not be silenced, who want to see an end to the destruction of their country and culture. Progressivism is skating on thin ice. That is the message, and while the progs might well manage to patch over the holes in the ice this time, what about the next time? And the next?

Let's see what happens.