by
Diana Johnstone
There is great rejoicing tonight
in places accustomed to rejoicing. The best champagne must be flowing
in places that have plenty of it, chez Bernard Arnault, for example,
first fortune in France (eleventh in the world), owner among so much
else of the newspapers Parisien, Aujourd’hui France and Echos, all
fervent supporters of Emmanuel Macron. The glasses should be clinking
also wherever the peripatetic billionaire Patrick Drahi finds
himself, born in Morocco, double French-Israeli nationality, resident
of Switzerland, owner of a vast media and telecom empire, including
the epitome of post-May ’68 turncoatism, the tabloid Libération,
which ran a headline calling on voters to cast their ballots for
Macron a day after the public campaign was legally over.
The list is long of billionaires,
bankers and establishment figures who have a right to rejoice at the
extraordinary success of a candidate who got elected President of the
French Republic on the claim to be “an outsider”, whereas nobody
in history has ever been so unanimously supported by all the insiders
you can name.
There should also be satisfaction
in the embassies of all the countries whose governments openly
interfered in the French election – the U.S. of course, but also
Germany, Belgium, Italy and Canada, among others, who earnestly
exhorted the French to make the right choice: Macron, of course. All
these champions of Western democracy can all join in gloating over
the nonexistent but failed interference of Russia – for which there
is no evidence, but part of the fun of a NATOland election these days
is to accuse the Russians of meddling.
As for the French, abstention was
nearly record-breaking, as much of the left could not vote for the
self-proclaimed enemy of labor law but dared not vote for the
opposition candidate, Marine Le Pen, because one just cannot vote for
someone who was labeled “extreme right” or even “fascist” by
an incredible campaign of denigration, even though she displayed no
visible symptom of fascism and her program was favorable to lower
income people and to world peace. Words count in France, where the
terror of being accused of sharing World War II guilt is
overwhelming.
Surveys indicate that as much as
40% of Macron voters chose him solely to “block” the alleged
danger of voting for Marine Le Pen.
Others on the left voted for
Macron vowing publicly that they will “fight him” once he is
elected. Fat chance.
There may be street demonstrations
in coming months, but that will have little impact on Macron’s
promise to tear up French labor law by decree and free labor and
management to fight it out between themselves, at a time when
management is powerful thanks to delocalizations and labor is
disorganized and enfeebled by the various effects of globalization.
As Jean Bricmont put it, outgoing
French President François Hollande deserves a Nobel Prize for
political manipulation.
At
a time when he and his government were so unpopular that everyone was
looking forward to the election as a chance to get rid of them,
Hollande, with zealous assistance from of the major media, leading
banks and oligarchs of various stripes, succeeded in promoting his
little-known economic advisor into the candidate of “change”,
neither left nor right, a totally fresh, new political star –
supported by all the old politicians that the public wanted to get
rid of.
This
is quite an amazing demonstration of the power of “communications”
in contemporary society, a triumph for the advertising industry,
mainstream media and the billionaires who own all of that.
France was perceived as a
potential weak link in the globalization project of eliminating
national sovereignty in favor of the worldwide reign of capital.
Thanks to an extraordinary effort, this danger has been averted. At
least for now.
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