Slightly Premature Victory Laps
The nightmare of nightmares of the globalist elites and France’s political establishment has been avoided: as the polls had indicated, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen are moving on to the run-off election; Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s late surge in popularity did not suffice to make him a contender – it did however push the established Socialist Party deeper into the dustbin of history. That was very Trotskyist of him (we can already picture a future Weekly World News headline: “French socialists discover giant alien dust mites”).
Lateral entrants to the business of avenging the disinherited, leavened by strawberry cake.
Around three micro-seconds after the election results became known, the entire French and European political elite immediately announced its undying support of Emmanuel Macron, with only a handful of “populist” parties outside of France saying that they were rooting for Marine Le Pen.
Just to clear this up beforehand, Ms. Le Pen may be the terror of the establishment, but she is just as statist as her competition was and is – in some respects probably more so. The run-off election is between two central planners (or at least “third way” proponents), each one of whom believes to be in possession of the “better plan”.
First round election results: the distribution of support between Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Macron reminds us a bit of the 2010 election map of Ukraine, which showed a similar East/ West split (see “Mapping the Conflict in Ukraine” for more details on this). Amazingly, Hamon didn’t even win a single department – click to enlarge.
There is no political constituency for liberty or anything remotely resembling classical liberalism (= libertarianism) in France. Moreover, in view if Mr. Trump’s recent magical transformation from putative swamp-draining rebel to slightly confused neo-con (who urgently needs a compass), it is clearly time to once again focus on the only thing that one can actually hope for in politicians, and that is entertainment value; luckily we have good news on that front.
Given unanimous establishment support for Macron, it was apparently concluded that the 2nd round voting ritual will be a mere formality, a kind of rubber-stamping exercise for the Brussels-approved candidate. Just to be safe, the French bureaucracy nevertheless mailed two ballot papers each instead of one to several hundred thousand Frenchmen living abroad so they will be able to vote twice.
That should produce a small haul of fraudulent votes for Macron, as it was decided to simply let the matter rest. Action will only be taken if fraudulent voting attempts are “detected” after the fact, which sounds like a difficult thing to do without Batman (in view of Le Pen’s anti-EU stance, most Frenchmen living elsewhere in the EU are bound to vote against her for personal reasons).
Second-round voting intentions, from the department of reasonable assumptions: after Geert Wilders “lost” the election in the Netherlands by enlarging the presence of his party in parliament by 33%, the conviction that Mr. Macron will deliver a Hillary Clinton-type landslide victory has solidified (“it doesn’t matter if the probability is 91%, 95% or 99%” – only climate science dazzles with more exactitude and prescience!). Admittedly, the recent French polls are probably more accurate than the US polls were, but we will still spend most of this post explaining why an upset could happen anyway – click to enlarge.
Confidence that the Brexit and Trump polling failures were non-repeatable one—off events seems indeed quite strong, judging from the party that was thrown in stock markets around the world. Even the sickly looking euro regained its footing.
To this we would point out the following: for a variety of unrelated reasons the euro was ripe for a rally regardless of the outcome of the first round election. Moreover, it simply doesn’t matter what the candidates say they want to do about the euro – not one of them is likely to abandon it.
