François Hollande (Image credit: Paul Delort/Le Figaro)
The five-year interregnum of the strange jerky marionette Nicholas Sarkozy is over.
What we are now about to witness is an almost exact replay of the Obama succession in the United States.
Like Obama, Hollande peddles ‘the audacity of hope’ as a means of erasing the peculiar brand of neo-con a la francaise which has dominated French politics for the best part of four decades.
His election pledges are like something from the playbook of the French Revolution: Guillotine the rich. Bring home the troops from foreign wars. Revivify the Republic. Vive la France! Aux barricades!
Ordure, as they say in France. Safely installed in the Élysée Palace, Citoyen Hollande will make a splendid feast of all his election promises on the very first night before he slips between the crisp white sheets of the presidential grand lit.
By the time he gets to the NATO summit in Chicago in mid-May, then far from pulling the plug on further French immersion in foreign wars, he will be up for repeat helpings. That’s the power game is it not?
Sarkozy’s last hope was the crime and punishment card, following the atrocities committed in and around Toulouse in March, which cost the lives of a rabbi, his two children, another infant and three French servicemen.
These events, heavily flavored as they were with Islam-hysteria, given the Algerian origins of the alleged assassin and his questionable alleged connections to terrorists, seemed to present the perfect opportunity to zap his fragrant opponent Marine le Pen.
She is the standard bearer of the Front National, the leading force on the French far right, having succeeded her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
French presidential elections are always conducted by the two round elimination system. Sarkozy’s nightmares feature Le Pen senior’s famous show down with the Gaullist Jacques Chirac back in 2002.
Then, Le Pen came from nowhere to defeat the incumbent socialist premier Lionel Jospin in the first round. Chirac struggled to the deciding contest having scored barely 20%.
This year’s first round, on April 22nd, features ten main contestants and a gaggle of camp followers. If there is no outright winner – which is certain – then the two finalists go to the final shoot-out at the OK Corral on May 6th.
To squeeze through the eye of the needle, Sarkozy must leech sufficient support from the Front National to push Hollande into second place.
The reverse is now the most probable outcome, because the more that he tacked to the right, the more he bled votes to the no-hope centralist and liberal runners.
Moreover Mlle Le Pen’s support base has solidified at 15-16%. Her supporters are not in blinking mode.
In any event, Sarkozy’s shameless personal wind milling over the events in Toulouse backfired before a wide French constituency that regarded his behavior as quite typically lacking in taste and gravitas.
If Sarkozy runs second to Hollande in the first round (where Hollande has a current percentage advantage of two to three points), then the game is, essentially, up.
But even if Sarkozy makes it wheezing to the pole position, he will then lose to Hollande – as the polls unanimously agree – by a grand slam of 12-14 percentage points in the deciding contest. This is a huge margin.
Hence the decision by the entire massed chorus of the globalists – Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission, the US, the EU, NATO, IMF, ad infinitum – to quietly shift their collective centre of gravity to François Hollande.
Hollande is essentially a dull and repetitious political bureaucrat with all the electrifying personality of a cardboard packing case.
His former unwed partner, Ségolène Royal, with whom he has four children, was trampled by Sarkozy when she ran against him in 2007.
Her campaign – overseen by Hollande, who was then general secretary of the socialist party – hit the rocks virtually immediately and never recovered. The gutsy fire she demonstrated before the campaign mysteriously evaporated.
At the election Joan of Arc was duly burnt at the stake.
The pair parted, amid bitter personal acrimony within a divided family. Yet her core support within socialist ranks remained strong.
This led Hollande to propose the innovation of a US-style primary to select the next candidate to face off with Sarkozy.
He deployed his organizational control of the party to dominate the campaign, with a little help from the difficulties that his main opponent, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, encountered in keeping control of his trousers in a five-star New York hotel.
I mention these personal matters because it is possible to recognize the prescient signs of a stubborn, if occasionally ruthless civil servant whose natural cousin is the eternal grey man of Italian politics, ex-premier Romano Prodi.
It was once said that Prodi could induce narcolepsy in a rioting football crowd by making a speech about economics.
But he was also a master of Machiavellian machinations which allowed him to dominate the Italian left. Be it remembered that he too adopted the primary ruse to trample his opponents. Dogs and tricks come to mind.
Hollande’s only significant political advantage lies in the distaste that a majority in France recognizes as the inconsistencies of their half-Hungarian, half- French president.
Sarkozy has spent his term in the Élysée largely working off the personality deficit which he has openly admitted lies with his abandonment at a tender age by his ducal Hungarian father.
Turning now to the new president-in-waiting, it would be most unwise to expect an innovative Hollande break with the departed régime.
He will not tinker with the post-war concordat with Germany. He will not take France out of the euro, as a clear majority demands. He will certainly not relegate France to a back seat in NATO, the alliance for peace and progress which is currently gearing up for the role of planetary policeman.
He will not halt the steam-rollering EU juggernaut in its tracks. He will not starve the French military-industrial complex. Still less will he really bash the rich. The priorities lie elsewhere on the global agenda.
He must immediately face the realities of the flagging French economy, which is fast sinking into recession thanks to economic imbalances ignored in the Sarkozy years, and long before.
France’s best recourse is to pull out of the euro and revive the economy via a devalued and restored franc. This will not happen. It is not on the globalist agenda.
The only cosmetic gestures will be token advances towards France’s five million or so Muslims. That is about as far as the promised restoration of liberté, égalité, fraternité will travel, at least for the time being.
Sarkozy is likely to be best remembered for taking France back into the full operational machinery of NATO. Thus he reversed the long standing ‘empty chair’ policy imposed by President Charles de Gaulle dating to the 1960s.
The breach owed its origins to bitter disputes with the US concerning the independent French nuclear deterrent (and not least the various attempts by NATO supremo General Lyman Lemnitzer to have him assassinated).
Ironically, having met one of the main aims of the globalist alliance, and despite his warm associations with the Central Intelligence Agency, Sarkozy is now a suitable case for sacrifice.
The globalista are nothing if not iron in their resolution. We are now in exactly the same ideological frame as the promotion of Obama over the rival claims of Hilary Clinton at the Bilderberg conclave held in Washington (June 8-11 2008). This preceded the selection of Obama two months later.
The unvarnished truth is this: vote as they will, Hollande or Sarkozy, the French will end up with the same revolving door president.
As the saying goes, plus ça change, plus c’est lamême chose. (The more things change, the more they stay the same).
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