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March 10, 2017 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
38:55
Is a Breakthrough Possible in France?
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another edition of Radio Renaissance.
I have with me a most fascinating guest, Guillaume de Rocher.
He was born and raised in France, educated in Britain, and as you will soon hear, speaks with a perfect American accent.
He now lives on the continent of Europe and is in a perfect position to observe what's going on politically, not only in France, but all around Europe.
And I'd like to talk about the French elections.
The French elections that are coming up in April and May are likely to be a very significant event for France and for Europe as well.
And so I'm looking forward to getting Mr.
Rocher's expert conception of what we can look forward to.
So, first of all, Mr.
DeRocher, if you wouldn't mind telling me, just in general, how French presidential elections work.
What's the process whereby the French elect their presidents?
Well, first of all, I'd like to say that it's great to be here.
The French presidential elections are somewhat unusual in the European context because in most European countries, the Prime Minister has the most power.
In France, We have a semi-presidential system where generally speaking the president is the most powerful official.
It is a two-round system so the two candidates with the most votes in the first round then go off to a second election which determines the president.
I should say that after that there are parliamentary elections also done in two rounds And usually, the parliamentary majority will be of the same party as the president, but that isn't always the case, and that could also be a factor in this election.
I gather that in the case of the first round, if a candidate were to get 50% or more of the vote, then there would be no second round.
Is that correct? That's right.
To my knowledge, it's never happened, but theoretically it's possible.
And it's my understanding that basically there are five major candidates standing in this first round, all but two of whom are going to be eliminated.
Can you give me just a quick briefing on who these people are?
Sure. Well, we can maybe go from far left to far right of the five leading candidates.
There's Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is a disaffected socialist who now leads the post-communist party.
So he's not a full communist, but he's leading that segment of opinion.
Just on him a moment.
There is still a French Communist Party, is there not?
Yes, there is, yes.
And they support him?
I'm not sure if they support him.
I saw that Robert Hu, who is the former chairman of the Communist Party, is actually supporting a different candidate.
So I don't know if the Communists are supporting him.
Oh, for heaven's sake. But this Melenchon guy, he is the hard-left equivalent.
Well, he's the hard-left party.
And his party is simply called the Left Party, is it not?
That's right. We always get two or three far-left candidates in the presidential elections because you tend to have the left, you have the Workers' Party, and you have the Communist Party.
In this case, Mélenchon.
He's the only one who gets double digits in the polls.
So he's the only one who's going to get anywhere.
Yes, I always find it interesting that in European countries, elections, there's such a great variety of choices.
We wouldn't have anyone who would be even faintly communist as a potential presidential candidate in the United States.
Surely not getting double digits.
Anyway, the next guy, I suppose, along the left-right scale would be Benoit Harmon, the socialist.
That's right. So he is leading the normal socialist party, which really is a party of government, because in France there is a, like in the United States, a duopoly, two-party system, where the socialists and the conservatives pretty much monopolize the system.
And Hamon is taking over after President François Hollande, who is also a socialist, Who has pretty much achieved nothing, and so they are extremely demoralized.
And Hamon, which has led to Hollande not representing himself again, which is unprecedented for a sitting president to not run again.
And it has meant Hamon winning the primaries, who is a bit more leftist than usual.
So he's offered things like a universal basic income, He was a bit of a surprise win.
And he is also fairly anti-white.
I mean, he has said things like, my town in Brittany has too many white people.
And that is kind of new for the Socialist Party.
Wow, he's been as explicit as that.
Too many white people in Brittany.
Yes. And he's also in the lower double digits.
It's unlikely he'll make it to the second round.
Okay, but now it's interesting to me that Francois Hollande was able to win, but has put in such a pathetic performance that he's not even running for a second term as French presidents almost always do or have always done in the modern era.
Just very briefly, what has been such a failure with this Hollande guy?
Well, he came into power in 2012, not really by virtue of his own You know, charisma.
He has no charisma, not by virtue of his own ability.
He's a fairly passive politician who would always sort of stick to the middle ground, but simply because people were tired of Nicolas Sarkozy.
And so he won election more or less by default as the normal alternative.
Then, since being in office, the socialists have always been caught in this contradiction
between the fact that they are voted in based on a large segment of the French population's
egalitarian sensibility that they very much are interested in income equality, welfare
for people, taxing the rich and so on, also employment jobs.
But he's in the European Union system where those policies aren't really possible because
you have open borders, you have free movement of capital, you have the Eurozone which means
that you can't devalue your currency, and you have EU rules which say you're not allowed
to have too much Keynesian deficit spending.
So, he's pro-EU and he's pro that neoliberal and or order liberal framework, but he's supposed
to deliver egalitarian Gibbs for his constituents.
Essentially, he's done nothing and he promised to only run for office again if he managed
to reduce unemployment and to his credit, he effectively didn't reduce unemployment
and is not presenting himself again.
So you make it sound as though he is an advocate of policies that are impossible to implement given the European Union of which France is a part.
But if that's the case, he should have known better.
He should have known better. Anyway, all right, so this is Hamon, who is not likely to make it into the second round, so he's not really a candidate that is of any significant interest to us at this point.
And then I suppose the next guy on the left to right spectrum is this Emmanuel Macron, who it sounds as though he's sort of come out of nowhere.
He's built his own party all by himself, this En Marche.
I suppose that translates as...
Well, he is a very strange guy.
He is a former banker for Rothschild.
He was working with them for four years.
He was then Minister of the Economy under Francois Hollande, but he never was a member of the Socialist Party.
And you have this strange situation now where even people in the government disassociate themselves from the government they're part of, which is very unusual.
And so he passed or was working on an economic reform to make the French labor market more flexible.
Which goes against the socialist principles, but arguably from an economic point of view is necessary for the French economy.
That's so that employers can be more easily hire and fire workers, that kind of thing?
Yes, yes. And then there were a lot of things in the law.
Arguably not that big changes, but it was going in that direction.
And from there, he was able to use that as a springboard to Mark it himself as an independent candidate, different from the socialists, and basically right-wing reforms, you could say, but in the end, I don't know how to describe it, but it's something like the globalist center.
Well, he sounds like something of an economic liberal in the classical sense.
He seems to think markets are good things, that restrictions and regulations are bad for employment and for the economy.
On the other hand, I understand that he thinks Angela Merkel's open-door policy on immigration is essentially a good thing, and that all of these newcomers, all of these people in the Middle East, these Muslims coming into the continent, are going to be good for the economy.
And I gather that although he would expel people whose applications for asylum fails, in general, he's entirely open to the idea of large numbers of non-whites, non-Christians coming into Europe.
Is that correct? Absolutely.
But in that respect, he's no different.
From anyone else in the French so-called mainstream parties, what maybe is worth saying is that he has made a number of more or less anti-French statements in the campaigns.
For example, he said that there is no such thing as French culture.
There is only culture in France and it is diverse.
And he said that French colonialism was a crime against humanity.
I suppose while we talk about Emmanuel Macron, we should point out that he's the guy that we in some respects have to pay the most attention to because according to current polls, he is the most likely candidate to end up getting into the second round and in fact winning.
So this is probably, as far as we can tell, the future president of France that we're talking about who says that there's no such thing as French culture.
There's a strong chance that it will be him.
I think maybe we discuss the other candidates and then come back to him because I think he's definitely worth digging into.
All right, very good.
Then, of course, there's this Francois Fillon fellow, the Republican.
That's the name of the party that is generally considered the alternative to the socialists as the governing party, correct?
That's right. They recently renamed themselves Les Républicains, the Republicans.
All we would need now is for the Socialists to rename themselves the Democrats and we'd be set.
But Fillon is a Catholic.
He is married to an English woman.
He has four children. He was Prime Minister under Nicolas Sarkozy.
And he's really not a radical figure by any means.
He went a little bit off the reservation recently because I believe he said that France should help Vladimir Putin against ISIS. He said something like that, because in the French scene, you're not supposed to be, I don't know, you have to be anti-Assad, basically, and de facto pro-Islamist.
And since then, he's encountered lots of problems, and they've dug up all these scandals, which is quite unusual, because The media and the judiciary are torpedoing the normal conservative candidate.
I'm not into conspiracy theories, but I do think that's unusual because that has never happened before.
Normally they wait until after they're out of office or a bit later to harass them.
Well, I understand the main scandal seems to be that this British wife of his, Penelope, was on the payroll as some kind of parliamentary assistant for not doing very much.
And what does he have? Three or four children and some of them were on the payroll.
Apparently, again, getting fat salaries for not doing very much.
To the point that they call this Penelope Gate.
But I do get the impression that French politics tends to move in this kind of nepotistic, corner-cutting direction.
But you're telling me that it would be unusual for the media and even for the judiciary to get involved at this stage in such a critical juncture in a campaign to the point where this guy could really be dead in the water on account of this Penelope Gate stuff.
I have never seen this amount of pressure against a mainstream candidate.
And you have seen people defect.
You've seen the centrist party, which was supporting him, called the UD, stopped supporting him.
His spokesman resigned.
I've never seen this before. And the reason why I am very sort of, I don't know, I don't want to say confused or skeptical of what they're saying, is that All the French politicians are doing nepotism.
I mean, somebody was drawing up a list of parliamentarians who were employing relatives, and it was just practically systematic.
It was almost every other name.
And then now he's gotten another scandal, which is a funding scandal.
So allegedly, he got money for his campaign from the wrong sources.
But again, that's systematic.
You see that all the time. Well, that's my impression.
I mean, I remember I was actually living in Paris when Valérie Giscard d'Estaing, there was this scandal about having received raw, uncut diamonds from the Central African Republic.
Practically every major figure in French politics, you don't have to dig very far, and they're doing little fiddles of one sort or another.
So you find it somehow worrying and significant that people have piled on, in this guy's case, in the way that they have.
Yes, I think it is a sign of something that both the conservative and the socialist are not the frontrunners.
Well, the fact is, certainly compared to Emmanuel Macron, who seems to be the lead candidate at this point, Fillon certainly appears to be a better man from our point of view.
He's been talking about the six million unemployed Frenchmen, nine million poor people, and he wants to set caps on immigration, keep it reduced to a strict minimum.
He was talking about, I understand, reducing development aid and allocation of visas for Countries that would not take their illegal immigrants back.
All of this was music to my ears.
And was it not the case that when he won the primary for the Republican Party, he seemed to be on track to beat the man going into the second round with Marine Le Pen, who would then become president?
He absolutely was, and I think he still can.
We don't know what the result will be.
I still think he has a shot.
Well, I understand also that there has been so much discontent with him that were they not actually talking about drafting Sarkozy to come take his place, get him to resign, and put in Sarkozy instead to represent the Republican Party?
Sure, they're talking about it, yeah.
But he's really hanging on.
He's hanging on.
He hasn't backed down. Well, all right, good for him.
Well, but then, you had said that these horrible things that Emmanuel Macron had been saying about France having no culture and too many white people in his town in Brittany, that he's not so far out of the mainstream, but...
This Fillon, the Republican, seems considerably more staunch than that.
Is he not a man who, from our point of view, would be a much more promising president of France than the current front-runner Macron?
I think he would certainly be better than Macron.
I don't know that he would do any fundamental changes which would really change the trajectory.
Of course, that brings us to Marine Le Pen of the National Front.
Sometimes I wonder whether even she would make any fundamental changes.
But tell me your assessment of her, of her chances.
I've been following the National Front for many years.
I actually had the opportunity to meet Jean-Marie Le Pen.
At one of the big festivals they had, and it was my pleasure to present him with a Confederate battle flag.
I told him that I was from that part of the United States that's been resisting Yankee imperialism from even longer than the Europeans have.
He accepted it with great pleasure and gratitude, it seemed to me.
But tell me your assessment of his daughter, Marine Le Pen.
Well, that's a wonderful story you just told about Jean-Marie Le Pen, who is really a good man.
I don't know him personally, but it's obvious he's been demonized hysterically over the years, but that he is a very good fellow.
With his daughter, Marine, people have mixed feelings about her because she has softened the line of the National Front quite a bit.
On the whole, I think there's no question that she is by far the best candidate from our point of view.
If only because she wants a shutdown of immigration, she wants to make naturalization or acquiring citizenship almost impossible, except for people who are married to French people, and she wants to abolish birthright citizenship.
So whatever else you think of her, she would put a tourniquet on the demographic replacement problem and at least put a Stop it from getting worse for the foreseeable future.
Do you think that she would really put a stop to any further non-European immigration?
Can that be done with presidential powers alone?
Surely she would require the cooperation of Parliament, of the National Assembly to do that, would she not?
She would need the National Assembly Or she could do things via referendum.
Uh-huh. I see.
I see. That would be interesting.
But, you know, it's always a mystery to me.
Why? In a country like France, which has an estimated 5 million Muslims, the largest Muslim population in Europe, and which has, over the last several years, has had several hundred people killed by Islamic terrorists and also has an obvious and grinding continuous problem with these urban youths who are largely North African immigrants, Muslim immigrants, obviously not assimilating, that a country in which there is just this palpable sense of invasion in certain parts of the country can still be considering voting in some substantial way for a guy like Emmanuel Macron,
who seems to think this isn't a problem at all.
I just, well, of course, looking at the whites in South Africa, whites in the United States, whites everywhere, one is perplexed by the unwillingness of whites to act in their own defense.
But at least we can say, can we not, that Marine Le Pen, her support is rising continuously, and that it's perhaps not out of the question that at some point in the future, some National Front representative could eventually be elected president.
Or do you think that's pure fantasy in the foreseeable future?
Well, I think it might be fantasy for this election.
Oh yes, I'm afraid so.
And I say that as someone who thought that both Brexit and Trump were possible.
I didn't say they would happen, but I thought that they could, that it was really possible.
I don't think it is likely for Marine Le Pen because about two-thirds of French people don't like her and or fear or loathe her.
And her support has risen to unprecedented levels.
So you have a quarter of the electorate supporting her, and I suspect in the second round it would be something like 35 or 40 percent supporting her, which, if you consider that in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen went to the second round.
This was a national trauma.
It was really as if Hitler were in front of the Reichstag or something.
People were acting like that.
And Jean-Marie Le Pen got 18% in the second round.
We're going to get much more than that, and it's almost guaranteed that Marine will be in the second round.
So a lot of progress has been made.
Yes, I find all that encouraging.
I just wish that the progress would be more rapid.
But I have seen polls according to which, if it is Emmanuel Macron versus Marine Le Pen in the second round, that he would beat her with about 65 to 35.
That seems to be fairly consistent poll results for as long as they've been taking those polls.
But at the very least, the French would have a pretty clear choice, it seems to me, certainly as far as these questions are concerned, a choice that's as clear as Trump versus Hillary Clinton, for example.
So it is a disappointment to me that two-thirds of the French would vote for what I consider national suicide, national, cultural, and religious suicide.
But still, that's the sort of electorate we have to deal with, I'm afraid.
But I was interested to see that back when Fillon was considered the front-runner, the Republican, the so-called conservative, he would have been expected to beat her by about the same figure, maybe 60 to 65, 35 as well.
So it's interesting to me that no matter who she might be up against, she would be voted down by more or less the same proportions.
Yes, I think it's because All the mainstream candidates really represent the same thing.
The way I would understand the French political system is that you have an elite, which is state and oligarchic, and the companies in the state are very enmeshed in one another in France, and they also own the media.
So the state and these oligarchs own the media, and it's a fairly small clique.
Their preferences are, for lack of a better word, globalist.
They want open economic borders.
They want France to lose its sovereignty to the EU. They want it to be dependent on financial markets.
And they want to replace the indigenous French population with an endless tide of Africans and Muslims.
That is the consensus.
If you don't agree with those, then you are a fascist and you are not allowed to participate in the French political system and you're Front National.
But what they've done is that they have these two parties who market these ideas in slightly different ways to different parts of the French electorate.
So if you're conservative, it's to the French people who have a bit more of an identitarian sort of sensibility.
And if it's the socialists, it's the ones who are more interested in equality.
But now that system is breaking down.
And Macron apparently is the candidate which the system, the media, wants.
And you will have a more honest system where Macron, if he's elected, will presumably preside over some sort of mainstream grand coalition versus Le Pen, who has the nationalist alternative.
And that to me is progress because we're going away from this fraudulent two-party system with this fake distinction between conservative and socialist towards a absolutely substantive division between nationalist and globalist.
And I would also say that while Macron is riding high, as far as I'm concerned, he's getting the Hillary Clinton treatment.
They are treating him very well.
Journalists are his friends.
Oligarchs who own the media are his friends.
He has gotten so many magazine covers.
Just treating him like he's, I don't know, the second coming.
Just so wonderful, so cool, so hip.
And I wonder if there is not a bit of a bubble to that.
So I don't think that he will lose to Marine Le Pen.
But I would not be surprised if, like Hillary Clinton, he ends up getting less votes than we are told he will get.
In France, do you have this same phenomenon as in the United States, that Marine Le Pen is so officially demonized by the zeitgeist that people are hesitant to tell pollsters that they are going to vote for her, and so that her actual vote results are likely to be higher than what the polls suggest?
That is certainly a possibility.
If you support Marine Le Pen, you will face stigma in many circles.
Well, let's hope that that's part of it.
It would be nice to put a thorough scare into this Macron guy, even if he does end up being president of France.
You know, there's some other interesting things about him.
He seems to be kind of a very sort of good-looking movie star, pretty boy kind of a guy, which never hurts in politics, I suppose.
His wife is 24 years older than he is, I understand, and was his high school teacher.
I would consider any candidate in the United States with a wife 24 years older who was his high school teacher, and they apparently became a couple when he was age 18, that would be considered a political handicap in the United States.
Is that not considered a little bit eyebrow-raising in France?
It raises my eyebrow.
I mean, that just means he's a really weird dude.
I don't know what that means.
It strikes me as weird, yes.
That would be something that would give people, perhaps not necessarily with good reason, it is a weird thing.
I certainly agree.
And a guy who at age 18 picks up with his high school teacher who's twice his age, and they went on to get married despite his family's opposition to this weird match.
And now, even though he's become this famous guy, he hasn't shucked her for a younger woman, which I thought that would be scandalous in its own right too, but it's just an odd, it's an odd guy who would behave in that way.
Yeah, we should say that there's a lot of tolerance for, you know, lax sexual mores in France, and there's almost this expectation that the president will cheat on his wife and, you know, have secret children and that sort of thing.
But this is a bit different than that, even.
Yes, it is a little bit surprising.
Well, let us turn, if we can, to possible elections in other parts of Europe.
I assume you have... observations on those possibilities as well.
There are going to be parliamentary elections in Germany and the hope of course for people like ourselves is that the alternative for Deutschland is going to be so successful that they will embarrass Angela Merkel and that she will be stripped of her chancellorship.
Did you have any expectations as to what's likely there?
Well, in some respects we're seeing a similar situation because the Socialist Party there The Social Democrats are apparently going to be led by a guy called Martin Schulz.
Now, Martin Schulz is quite different from Macron, but he's similar in the sense that he's sort of what the globalist elite would want as the ideal sort of leader of Germany.
Why? Because he is the former president of the European Parliament.
He is kind of a non-entity otherwise.
He has said things like Germany only exists so that it can help Israel.
He said that. He said post-war Germany only exists for that.
He's pro-EU, and there's this sort of vague notion that Schulz and Macron, who strike me as astroturf, to me I don't see what base they have, but there's this idea that those two would be the new leaders of France and Germany, But I think Alternative for Germany will certainly break into the Parliament.
I think they will make the 6% threshold.
It will be the first time that a German nationalist party has a major presence in the Parliament.
And that is very exciting.
And I think it shows that the media in Germany, which were extremely authoritarian, For understandable reasons, against any nationalist or right-wing opinion, have lost control.
And I think it's part of the wider trend across the West, which made Trump possible, which is making Marine Le Pen's relative rise possible, which is that the mainstream media have lost the total control of the narrative that they had in the past.
Yes, it does sound as though this new rising star in Germany is very much an equivalent of Emmanuel Macron.
It would be a pity to see those two really in the driver's seat in the two major European countries.
But this is really a development that we have to keep an eye on.
And I'm hoping that as the elections approach, and certainly perhaps immediately after the election, we can have you on again to talk about your view of what's happened and what this portends.
But in any case, as you said earlier, and I thought this was a very perceptive remark, The fact of having groups like the National Front France and the Alternative for Germany in Germany, it puts the question in a much clearer fashion.
You don't have these Tweedledee Tweedledum parties that pretend to be genuinely different from each other.
Instead, you have a group that really represents the people as opposed to these folks who represent much more globalist, elitist interests.
On the other hand, It seems a little harsh to call Macron or his German equivalent astroturf if, in fact, when it comes time to vote, they get a substantial number of genuine citizens who are voting.
Well, I think the average European citizen or French citizen is not a very impressive creature today.
And pretty much they don't want to rock the boat.
They want their job.
They want economic security.
They don't want to ask questions.
And they're scared, you know, they're scared of nationalists.
Sounds like Americans.
Sounds just like Americans.
Yeah, so, but that's how people are.
And this is more relevant for Marine Le Pen probably than for the alternative for Germany.
But she also wants to get out of the Euro, which, whatever you think, would lead to a lot of uncertainty economically.
And it would mean that she would be pretty much dedicating her term to dismantling the EU and the Euro.
A lot of people think that's a good thing, and I can understand why.
There's certainly a case for restoring France's financial sovereignty and not being dependent on these financial markets.
But it really detracts from what really probably should be the major thing, which is the demographic issue.
Yes, yes.
I've heard that about her.
I'm a little bit quizzical as to why she is so anti-Euro, anti-EU. But has she not promised that she would put that to referendum if she became president?
Yes, they would do a renegotiation of the EU's terms and then put it to a referendum.
All right. Well, returning to Emmanuel Macron, it seems to me a little bit odd that, as you had described, he has been getting support from basically across the entire elite, the Greens, lefties, semi-conservatives, et cetera.
And this at a point where we're really going into the first round, which
is an opportunity for the French people to vote hard left or moderate left if they wish to.
But they're suggesting that they want to get behind him.
Even the lefties and the semi-lefties should be getting behind him in the first round.
Can that be seen as perhaps a very deliberate way to try to get Francois Fillon out of the second round.
In other words, it seems like anybody who is left in the second round, along with Marine Le Pen, is going to be president of France.
And so it's important now not to vote your preference for a lefty, but to vote anti-Le Pen right from the start.
Is that a correct way to see what's going on now?
Well, I think it reflects the preference of the real ruling elite of France for Macron.
They're really giving him a lot of support in the media and elsewhere.
You have people like Alain Marc, who is a right-wing economic liberal.
You have Corinne Lepage and Bertrand Delanoet, who are environmentalists.
You have Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who is a jack-of-all-trades, leftist green.
All these people who we have known for years and don't really have much legitimacy, but have always been telling French people what they should think.
They are all supporting Emmanuel Macron.
Even though there are alternatives, which normally, if you're a green or if you're somewhat left-wing or progressive, are more interesting than Emmanuel Macron.
And so I think it shows the id, which the so-called French elite wants in charge.
I think it's very revealing.
Yes, that's really my point.
They could vote for the Left Party, or they could vote for the Socialist Party, and that would seem to be their natural home.
But instead, all of these people lining up behind this Emmanuel Macron It seems to me in the hope that he can keep Finland from surviving into the second round.
But as you say, it reflects the general French elite's view for this kind of globalist, let them all in kind of mentality.
I will say, although this is maybe a bit speculative, that I get the impression that this is also
because our liberal elites have been completely traumatized, understandably, by Trump's election
and by the Brexit vote.
I see this also with the people I know because I know a lot of liberals and globalists.
They are in a state of moral panic.
They are scared on a day-to-day basis.
They are kind of going nuts.
I feel like these media political elites are kind of going into overdrive now and are kind
of energized to make things right by really enforcing the values and the preferences that
they have because otherwise there's no real reason why a guy like Macron or a guy like
Martin Schulz would be the preference, would be the front runner because they don't really
have any roots in the population.
It's a bit odd.
But it might be this, I don't know how to define it, this liberal hysteria, which is very prevalent nowadays.
I see. That seems to be a very good insight.
Just as in the United States, those who wish to preserve the status quo are in panic mode because of Brexit, because of Trump, and they don't want to see a trifecta in Europe.
Yes. Well, these are very interesting times.
And again, as the French election approaches, I hope we'll have another opportunity to discuss this.
And I look forward to hearing your views as to what's about to happen or what has happened.
So thank you very much, Guillaume de Rocher, for being my guest on this program.
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