Emmanuel Macron managed to win his reelection bid as French president,
and of course, he was up against the far right candidate, Marine Le Pen.
However, Le Pen was able to close in on Macron and
some of the results from this election are not good in that it shows
that the right wing is in fact gaining steam.
And the only way that that's allowed to happen is if you have a neo liberal
candidate like Emmanuel Macron,
who does not have a great track record with economic policies in his own country.
Now, here are the results of the election.
Macron managed to bring in 58.54% of the vote
while Marine Le Pen brought in 41.46%.
So, some might argue, well, Macron's got a pretty significant lead there.
What are you talking about Anna, you're being you're being a negative nancy here.
How dare you?
Well, am I really a negative nancy when Macron managed to bring in 10 million
votes in 2017, and this time around that number was halved to five million votes.
Also, the voter turnout was much much lower because of the fact that
the electorate in France were dissatisfied with both candidates.
They hated the far right candidate, we're not happy with Macron.
So many people sat it out, didn't show up to vote.
Others decided to vote, but they did so in a way that was determined to
be spoiled ballots, meaning they either left the ballot blank for
the president or they wrote in a different candidate.
There were about nine million individuals who did that.
By the way,
far right ideas are also dominating the media discourse in the country.
And part of the reason why is Macron much like the neoliberals here in
the United States allow the right wing to take charge of the framing.
And Marine Le Pen, of course,
has focused all of her framing on anti-immigrant anti-foreigner rhetoric and
rather than push back against that with something better to offer
the electorate in terms of economic policies, what did Macron decide to do?
Well, let me just be right wing light on these issues, thus providing credibility
to the bigotry that you hear from Le Pen and other far right members of her party.
>> Yeah, so in France, there's two rounds for an election.
So you're the first round with all the candidates, that's where the left wing
candidate almost beat Le Pen, it was like 23 to 22, but she edged them out.
So she went to the second round where there's only two candidates,
that's where nine million people not voting for it.
In America, people not voting is very, very normal, but in France,
this is record in terms of how low the voter turnout was.
I think three million people left it completely blank.
They went to bother to vote and left it blank.
It's in America unheard of, you just wouldn't go, but they do.
That's them saying no, no, I care about democracy, but
I hate these two candidates, okay?
So how did Le Pen have the success that she did when she
used to be a fringe extreme right wing character.
Most of the things she advocates for
in social policy is against the French culture, in the sense that she says, no,
we should not be an open society, we should be a closed society, et cetera.
Well, she did better not because of those positions necessarily.
That's always had a base and that base is growing to give it its due, but
the main reason she did better is economic populism.
So she's talked about, hey,
he did basically a regressive tax, through the diesel tax.
And so I'm going to give you relief on that for the middle class.
And Anna's got more details about her economic populism.
But guys, this is happening all across the world.
If the left to moderate wing says, no, we're gonna do austerity,
we're not gonna give you any economic populism,
we're gonna crush the workers and we're gonna be in favor of corporate rule.
And then they let the monsters on the right say, here's bigotry and hatred, but
we're gonna give you a couple of economic goodies.
That's a recipe for disaster.
Fascism will be on fire throughout the world.
And that's kind of where we are.
>> So I wanna help you all visualize how this all went down, right?
And so two videos, I wanna get to starting with a democracy now interview
featuring journalist cole stangler, I think he did a really great job explaining
all the economic miscalculations that Macron made in his first term.
Let's take a look at that then I'm gonna show you how Marine Le Pen exploits those
weaknesses for her own purposes.
>> If you look at the breakdown of Macron's support,
around 40% of people who voted for Macron said that they voted for
him to deny the presidency to Marine Le Pen.
So that's a big chunk of voters that don't necessarily agree with his agenda and
in terms of his actual policies, again, in the French context, I think it's
fair to say that he has a very right wing policy program that he's put into place.
If you look at the repeal of the wealth tax, so
that they used to apply to people with €1.3 million in assets Macron did that in
his very first budget as president, repeal the wealth tax,
put into place labor reforms to make it easier to lay off workers,
recently embarked on reforms to the unemployment insurance system,
which make it harder to have unemployment benefits.
He's now talking about raising the retirement age to 65.
So all these economic policies clearly put him in the right wing camp,
I think in France, I think people call him a centrist.
It's probably more accurate to say center-right.
>> I mean, the incompetence of Macron can only be rivaled by the democrats here in
the United States, like people like Joe Biden, who I mean with an upcoming midterm
election, can't do something as simple as cancel student loan debt.
And then in France, you have Macron whose like I'm facing re-election,
I got an idea, why don't I threaten to increase the retirement age,
I'm sure that will play out really well.
And then you have someone like Le Pen who much like Trump,
is able to identify economic anxiety in the country and
exploit the weakness of her opponent.
And that's exactly what she did.
What you're about to watch is a snippet from her concession speech,
but listen to her language here.
>> With more than 43% of the votes, tonight's
results represents in itself a shining victory [FOREIGN].
The French are showing tonight a wish for a strong counter power against that of
Emmanuel Macron for an opposition that will continue to defend and
protect them in the face of the degradation of their purchasing power,
attacks on liberty, putting into question our public service and our social system.
Emmanuel Macron's proposition to push the retirement age insecurity and
an archaic immigration and the laxity of the courts.
Now to be clear, much like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and
other right wingers in any other country are not interested
in making the economic situation better for workers in the country.
But they will co opt the language that speaks to the economic anxiety that
the voters are feeling and neoliberal policies and neoliberal politicians
like Macron make it so easy because all they seem to advocate for is austerity,
is the policies where are the policies that end up hurting the electorate and
making them want to retaliate.
>> Yeah, so the example, you used an as an excellent one.
You're gonna raise the retirement age, are you insane?
And there's no position that is less popular, whether it's in France or
in America.
I mean that's so
unpopular that even Mitch McConnell didn't wanna do it in the Republican party.
He tricked Obama into saying that he would do it.
God, that was the worst decision strategically by the Democrats.
Anyways, luckily it was so deeply unpopular, they never got a past righ?
But he's actually doing it in France.
Of course you're gonna lose ground to these fake populist.
Now, look guys,
in most of these countries of the media is in favor of corporate rule.
So they love the status quo and they beat up the left wing and the right wing.
Now, why can the right wing get past it and here the left wing almost beat
the right wing to be the alternative because if they are,
left wing populism is gonna win everywhere, okay?
They just got to get on a one on one matchup where they were so
close to it here in France.
The reason is because the right wing has tons of money, right?
And the left wing doesn't.
So when the media beats up on the left wing, it is near impossible for
us to get back, but the right wing can just use
their money to get past the corporate media in all of these countries.
So that's why they seem to be the only alternative to otherwise honestly
despotic corporate rule that's crushing us all across the world.
>> And so, look, I want to emphasize again, you see the results and and
some might argue, well, he still has a significant lead.
What are we talking about?
No, it's about what the future holds, the direction that the broad left is going in,
not just here in the United States, but in other Democracies like France.
So, I wanna give you these numbers so you know exactly what I'm referring to.
More than one in three voters did not vote for either candidate.
By the way, we're talking about France.
The context is different.
Here in the United States, we've always had low voter turnout,
whereas in France usually has very high turnout.
Now turnout was just under 72%, the lowest in a presidential run-off since 1969,
and more than three million people cast spoiled or blank ballot.
So that's the exact number.
The low turnout also reflected the apathy of voters who complained neither
candidate represented them.
Voters who said that they were casting blank ballots,
told the BBC they wanted to punish the sitting president obviously.
And so look, when you look into why there's such low voter turnout here in
the United States, why there's voter apathy, it's because these voters,
it's not that they don't care.
It's that they don't think that either candidate is really gonna do anything
to improve their lives.
And you're seeing that trend play out in France as well in response
to the neoliberal policies that have been put out by Macron.
>> So one last thing is, I'm worried that here in America we're going to
find some sort of solace in this and
a lesson in this because Ron claimed the White House Chief of staff put out
a tweet saying, see he was at 36% and hewon by double digits.
First of all, that totally misrepresents the two vastly different systems, right?
But getting beyond that, what it looks like the corporate candidates are doing,
whether it's Macron or Joe Biden is, it turns out fascism is not so
bad rising fascism because we'll go one on one against them.
And that way, it's not just us versus a weak candidate, it's us versus a fascist.
Then people will really have no choice and they'll have to vote for us.
And that is what happened in France.
And they're new to this game.
Americans had a couple of rounds of this, or actually, honestly, decades of this.
That's why we have so much lower voter turnout,
coz election after election, it hasn't mattered.
It's been a corporate Democrat or a corporate Republican for 40 years.
Now, the Bidens of the world are like, great,
your only other choice is a fascist, then you've gotta vote for me.
But, what if they don't?
>> What if they don't show up?
>> Yeah, you're playing with fire, you're risking the entire planet because you
found what you think is a more convenient way for you to win.
But Joe Biden only won by 43,000 votes in three states, okay?
He won the popular vote by a large margin but
the electoral college only 43,000 votes.
They're playing with all of our lives while they celebrate the idea that they
think they're clever, that they're running against fascists and
they're partly enabling that.
Don't do that.
You're risking all of our lives.