921 French Jews 'relieved' Macron won but worried by Le Pen's gains

French Jews 'relieved' Macron won but worried by Le Pen's gains

Newsletter published on 10 May 2017

(1) French Jews 'relieved' Macron won but worried by Le Pen's gains
(2) Why The Jews Loathe Le Pen -  Brother Nathanael Kapner
(3) Jewish-owned PayPal bans Brother Nathanael
(4) Globalization has shattered French unity; "Open Society" benefits
only the Elite
(5) Le Pen's pro-working class & anti-imperialist commitment branded
'extremist' - James Petras
(6) Macron called LePen a misinformed, corrupt, "hate-filled"
nationalist liar who "feeds off France’s misery"
(7) Marine Le Pen’s nationalism meets the unrepentant globalism of
Emmanuel Macron - The Economist
(8) Facebook Shut Downs pro Le Pen accounts before Election
(9) Facebook disabled iBankCoin’s account after photo of Schumer with Putin
(10) 'Fake News' can now be "disputed" on Facebook
(11) Marine Le Pen interview with Financial Times

(1) French Jews 'relieved' Macron won but worried by Le Pen's gains

http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/371201/french-jews-relieved-macron-won-but-worried-over-le-pen-s-electoral-gains/

French Jews ‘Relieved’ Macron Won But Worried By Le Pen’s Gains

JTA

May 7, 2017

(JTA) — Leaders of French Jewry expressed both relief over the defeat of
the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the presidential elections and
concern over her receiving more than a third of the vote.

Le Pen, whom the chief rabbi of France and the CRIF umbrella of Jewish
communities have decried as dangerous to democracy and minorities,
received 34.2 percent of the vote compared to the 65.8 percent who voted
for the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron, according to a report by Le
Monde based on exit polls from Sunday’s final round of the elections.

"I am happy with the result of Emmanuel Macron being elected president,
which constitutes a veritable relief for all our nation and for the
Jewish community of France," Joel Mergui, the president of the
Consistoire, wrote Sunday evening in a statement by his group, which is
responsible for providing religious services to Jews.

Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia, who is employed by the Consistoire, also spoke
of his satisfaction from the vote. But in his statement, Korsia also
referenced concerns over the support shown to Le Pen – a nationalist who
seeks a ban on wearing Jewish and Muslim religious symbols in public,
ritual slaughter and the provision of pork-free meals in school cafeterias.

The vote was the best electoral result ever obtained by her National
Front party, which was established in the 1970s by her father, the

Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has multiple convictions for
inciting racial hatred against Jews. He clinched 18 percent of the vote
in the 2002 presidential elections — the first time that National Front
made it to the final round.

"Well aware that many voices have been raised in favor of the candidate
of the National Front, the Chief Rabbi calls on all political leaders to
take seriously the voters’ cry of despair and anger in order to review
their platforms and to regain the enthusiasm and support of the
citizens," the statement by Korsia’s office read.

Francis Kalifat, president of CRIF, called the victory "uncontestable"
and congratulated Macron on it. "Everything starts right now," Kalifat,
who has lobbied intensively in favor of Macron in recent days, wrote
optimistically on Twitter.

The president of European Jewish Congress, Moshe Kantor, said in a
statement: "We remain extremely concerned by the still large support for
parties of the far right, not only in France but across Europe." He also
wrote in a statement that the result was "a victory against hate and
extremism" by the French people.

Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European
Rabbis, said in a statement that while Macron’s election is "extremely
encouraging," his group is "concerned that a third of the French
population voted for a dangerous political leader." This, he said, is
part of a "worrying political landscape in Europe and the increase in
far-right rhetoric which has swept the continent."

Macron’s positions on Israel, its conflict with the Palestinians and the
Middle East in general correspond with those of the government of
France’s outgoing president, Francois Hollande, Macron told a
predominantly Jewish crowd in March during a town hall meeting organized
in Paris by CRIF.

Hollande is one of France’s least-popular presidents. Citing dismal
approval ratings, he had withdrawn from the presidential race to better
the chances of his party to remain in power.

The economic policies of Macron, a former banker who at 39 will be the
youngest president in the history of the Fifth Republic of France,
differ significantly from those of the Socialist Party. A believer in
free-market economy, he is calling for an economic reform opposed by
labor unions and advocates of France’s relatively generous welfare
amenities.

This has alienated many left-wing voters in what could explain a
historically low turnout in Sunday’s vote.

According to Le Monde, a quarter of registered voters did not show up to
vote, making the turnout of 75 percent the lowest recorded in any final
round of the presidential elections since 1969.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not address National

 >Front’s gains in the vote in a standard statement congratulating

Macron. He said that one of the greatest threats facing Israel and
France "is radical Islamic terror which has struck Paris, Jerusalem and
so many other cities around the world," adding he was sure the two
countries "will continue to deepen our relations."

President Donald Trump congratulated the "people of France on their
successful presidential election." Trump, who said last month Le Pen was
"the strongest candidate on borders," added: "We look forward to working
with the new President and continuing our close cooperation with the
French government."

(2) Why The Jews Loathe Le Pen -  Brother Nathanael Kapner

http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=1205

April 27, 2017 @ 6:06 pm

Why The Jews Loathe Le Pen

By Brother Nathanael Kapner

Marine Le Pen stands for everything Jews hate:

Economic nationalism; Snubbing holocaust guilt-tripping; halting
dual-citizenship; ending mass-migration; vacating the EU; and desiring
friendly relations with Russia.

She’s rankling the Jewish banksters by wanting to break France’s money’
tie…the "Francafrique"…with its former African colonies, also tied to
the Euro.

Instead of African countries on a currency leash with their cash
reserves in France’s Central Bank, Le Pen says they should coin their
own money.

This way the Africans grow their own economy, reducing the need for
‘economic migration.’

Gaddafi was doing just that and the banksters with a gang of neocon Jews
had him killed, and straightaway set up a ‘Rothschild’ central bank in
Libya.

Le Pen better watch her back.

Especially that she’s now saying France was NOT guilty of rounding up
Jews in 1942.

[Clip: "Was Jacque Chirac wrong in his speech on Vel d’Hiv?" "France is
not responsible for the Vel d’Hiv roundup. I think more in general if
there is someone responsible it is those who were in power back then,
it’s not France, not France!"]

‘Ruvi’ Rivlin, Israel’s president, accused Le Pen of a ‘new form’ of
‘holocaust denial’…another Jewish ploy to silence the disobedient.

Unyielding, Le Pen insists that France was led by De Gaulle from London
in ‘42, whereas the Vichy regime was an interruption of sovereign France.

That’s not ‘holocaust denial,’ that’s ‘French guilt denial.’

Mitterrand and De Gaulle said the same.

Why should later generations be guilty of Vel d’Hiv long after the
‘responsible’ are dead?

Le Pen makes a good point. Merkel should do the same.

But the Jews accuse to keep France under their guilt-tripping boot just
like they do with Germany.

Their game?

Only by France embracing mass-immigration and anti-nationalism can it
ever ‘atone’ for its ’sin.’ Le Pen ain’t buying it.

Raising Jewish ire even higher, Le Pen railed against dual-citizenship.

Like in America, Jews in France want it both ways.

[Clip: "We have to put an end to double nationality. We must choose, you
are Algerian or you are French. You are Moroccan or you are French… any
Nationality or you are French, but you cannot be both at the same time."]

Jews are offended. What else is new?

[Clip: "We sense that we’re being targeted. When she talks about wanting
to ban dual-nationality we can see that it’s targeting the Jewish
community." "How might you react if she actually won?" "We’ve been
planning to make aliyah for a while now anyway. That is, we’re preparing
to move to Israel. So, if she wins, that will speed the process up."]

So go already. They won’t. Jews like their lox and bagels as far away
from ‘zion’ as possible.

Then there’s Le Pen’s push for friendly relations with Russia.

But BBC’s Emily Maitlis—a Jew—contradicts.

[Clip: "You borrowed money from a Czech-Russian bank." "Several years
ago we borrowed money from a Czech-Russian bank. But that’s because
that’s the bank that agreed to lend us money. If it had been a British
bank we would have borrowed from a British bank. What do you want?" "But
it was a Russian bank." "Yes, and so what? I don’t owe the bank anything
other than to pay it back. I have no obligations towards it. I’m not
reliant on anyone." "You don’t regret it?" "So I’m prevented from
borrowing from a French bank and then I’m reproached for borrowing from
a foreign bank. What would people have said if it had been an American
bank?"]

Right, if an ‘American’ bank, it’s kosher approved.

But a ‘Russian’ bank—with no conditions other than to pay it back—that’s
a sin for which there is no redemption.

Le Pen’s about a different redemption.

She wants a France for the French, not a France for the Jews.

(3) Jewish-owned PayPal bans Brother Nathanael

http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=1197#comment-1928238

Truth-Hating PayPal Bans Brother Nathanael

Initial PayPal Letter

March 28, 2017

"We have recently reviewed your usage of PayPal’s services, as reflected
in our records and on your website http://brothernathanaelfoundation.org
. Due to the nature of your activities, we have chosen to discontinue
service to you in accordance with PayPal’s User Agreement. As a result,
we have placed a permanent limitation on your account.

Please remove all references to PayPal from your website. This includes
removing PayPal as a payment option, as well as the PayPal logo.

Tanya,

PayPal Brand Risk Management ——

COMMENTARY by +Brother Nathanael

PayPal is owned by the Jew, Daniel Shulman. This is what the world has
come to. Jews own EVERYTHING now and if the Jewish script is opposed
then you are "hateful" and "intolerant."

Not only this, but because JEWS are so FILTHY RICH and OWN EVERYTHING,
they can afford to lose money (yes they made money off of donations to
me these past seven years) if they see their wicked agenda is EXPOSED.

AND, not only this, it is "Tanya" who notified me and denied my appeal.
What does that tell you? That a GOY does the dirty work of the Jew
masters. THIS is what the world has come to. The GOYS do the dirty work
of the wicked, truth-hating, free speech-denying JEWS.

(4) Globalization has shattered French unity; "Open Society" benefits
only the Elite

From: chris lancenet <chrislancenet@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2017
17:29:28 +0900

https://www.city-journal.org/html/french-coming-apart-15125.html

The French, Coming Apart

by Christopher Caldwell

The Weekly Standard

The real-estate market in any sophisticated city reflects deep
aspirations and fears. If you had a feel for its ups and downs—if you
understood, say, why young parents were picking this neighborhood and
drunks wound up relegated to that one—you could make a killing in
property, but you also might be able to pronounce on how society was
evolving more generally. In 2016, a real-estate developer even
sought—and won—the presidency of the United States.

In France, a real-estate expert has done something almost as improbable.
Christophe Guilluy calls himself a geographer. But he has spent decades
as a housing consultant in various rapidly changing neighborhoods north
of Paris, studying gentrification, among other things. And he has
crafted a convincing narrative tying together France’s various social
problems—immigration tensions, inequality, deindustrialization, economic
decline, ethnic conflict, and the rise of populist parties. Such an
analysis had previously eluded the Parisian caste of philosophers,
political scientists, literary journalists, government-funded
researchers, and party ideologues.

Guilluy is none of these. Yet in a French political system that is as
polarized as the American, both the outgoing Socialist president
François Hollande and his Gaullist predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy sought
his counsel. Marine Le Pen, whose National Front dismisses both major
parties as part of a corrupt establishment, is equally enthusiastic
about his work. Guilluy has published three books, as yet untranslated,
since 2010, with the newest, Le crépuscule de la France d’en haut
(roughly: "The Twilight of the French Elite"), arriving in bookstores
last fall. The volumes focus closely on French circumstances,
institutions, and laws, so they might not be translated anytime soon.
But they give the best ground-level look available at the economic,
residential, and democratic consequences of globalization in France.
They also give an explanation for the rise of the National Front that
goes beyond the usual imputation of stupidity or bigotry to its voters.
Guilluy’s work thus tells us something important about British voters’
decision to withdraw from the European Union and the astonishing rise of
Donald Trump—two phenomena that have drawn on similar grievances.

At the heart of Guilluy’s inquiry is globalization. Internationalizing
the division of labor has brought significant economic efficiencies. But
it has also brought inequalities unseen for a century, demographic
upheaval, and cultural disruption. Now we face the question of what—if
anything—we should do about it.

A process that Guilluy calls métropolisation has cut French society in
two. In 16 dynamic urban areas (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence,
Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes,
Rouen, Toulon, Douai-Lens, and Montpellier), the world’s resources have
proved a profitable complement to those found in France. These urban
areas are home to all the country’s educational and financial
institutions, as well as almost all its corporations and the many
well-paying jobs that go with them. Here, too, are the individuals—the
entrepreneurs and engineers and CEOs, the fashion designers and models,
the film directors and chefs and other "symbolic analysts," as Robert
Reich once called them—who shape the country’s tastes, form its
opinions, and renew its prestige. Cheap labor, tariff-free consumer
goods, and new markets of billions of people have made globalization a
windfall for such prosperous places. But globalization has had no such
galvanizing effect on the rest of France. Cities that were lively for
hundreds of years—Tarbes, Agen, Albi, Béziers—are now, to use Guilluy’s
word, "desertified," haunted by the empty storefronts and blighted
downtowns that Rust Belt Americans know well.

Guilluy doubts that anyplace exists in France’s new economy for working
people as we’ve traditionally understood them. Paris offers the most
striking case. As it has prospered, the City of Light has stratified,
resembling, in this regard, London or American cities such as New York
and San Francisco. It’s a place for millionaires, immigrants, tourists,
and the young, with no room for the median Frenchman. Paris now drives
out the people once thought of as synonymous with the city.

Yet economic opportunities for those unable to prosper in Paris are
lacking elsewhere in France. Journalists and politicians assume that the
stratification of France’s flourishing metropoles results from a glitch
in the workings of globalization. Somehow, the rich parts of France have
failed to impart their magical formula to the poor ones. Fixing the
problem, at least for certain politicians and policy experts, involves
coming up with a clever shortcut: perhaps, say, if Romorantin had free
wireless, its citizens would soon find themselves wealthy, too. Guilluy
disagrees. For him, there’s no reason to expect that Paris (and France’s
other dynamic spots) will generate a new middle class or to assume that
broad-based prosperity will develop elsewhere in the country (which
happens to be where the majority of the population live). If he is
right, we can understand why every major Western country has seen the
rise of political movements taking aim at the present system.

In our day, the urban real-estate market is a pitiless sorting machine.
Rich people and up-and-comers buy the private housing stock in desirable
cities and thereby bid up its cost. Guilluy notes that one real-estate
agent on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris now sells "lofts" of three square
meters, or about 30 square feet, for €50,000. The situation resembles
that in London, where, according to Le Monde, the average monthly rent
(£2,580) now exceeds the average monthly salary (£2,300).

The laid-off, the less educated, the mistrained—all must rebuild their
lives in what Guilluy calls (in the title of his second book) La France
périphérique. This is the key term in Guilluy’s sociological vocabulary,
and much misunderstood in France, so it is worth clarifying: it is
neither a synonym for the boondocks nor a measure of distance from the
city center. (Most of France’s small cities, in fact, are in la France
périphérique.) Rather, the term measures distance from the functioning
parts of the global economy. France’s best-performing urban nodes have
arguably never been richer or better-stocked with cultural and retail
amenities. But too few such places exist to carry a national economy.
When France’s was a national economy, its median workers were well
compensated and well protected from illness, age, and other
vicissitudes. In a knowledge economy, these workers have largely been
exiled from the places where the economy still functions. They have been
replaced by immigrants.

After the mid-twentieth century, the French state built a vast
stock—about 5 million units—of public housing, which now accounts for a
sixth of the country’s households. Much of it is hideous-looking, but
it’s all more or less affordable. Its purpose has changed, however. It
is now used primarily for billeting not native French workers, as once
was the case, but immigrants and their descendants, millions of whom
arrived from North Africa starting in the 1960s, with yet another wave
of newcomers from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East arriving today.
In the rough northern suburb of Aubervilliers, for instance,
three-quarters of the young people are of immigrant background. Again,
Paris’s future seems visible in contemporary London. Between 2001 and
2011, the population of white Londoners fell by 600,000, even as the
city grew by 1 million people: from 58 percent white British at the turn
of the century, London is currently 45 percent white.

While rich Parisians may not miss the presence of the middle class, they
do need people to bus tables, trim shrubbery, watch babies, and change
bedpans. Immigrants—not native French workers—do most of these jobs. Why
this should be so is an economic controversy. Perhaps migrants will do
certain tasks that French people will not—at least not at the prevailing
wage. Perhaps employers don’t relish paying €10 an hour to a native
Frenchman who, ten years earlier, was making €20 in his old position and
has resentments to match. Perhaps the current situation is an example of
the economic law named after the eighteenth-century French economist
Jean-Baptiste Say: a huge supply of menial labor from the developing
world has created its own demand.

"The young men living in the northern Paris suburbs feel a burning
solidarity with their Muslim brethren in the Middle East." [...]

Guilluy has written much about how little contact the abstract doctrines
of "diversity" and "multiculturalism" make with this morally complex
world. In the neighborhoods, well-meaning people of all backgrounds
"need to manage, day in, day out, a thousand and one ethno-cultural
questions while trying not to get caught up in hatred and violence."
Last winter, he told the magazine Causeur:

Unlike our parents in the 1960s, we live in a multicultural society, a
society in which "the other" doesn’t become "somebody like yourself."
And when "the other" doesn’t become "somebody like yourself," you
constantly need to ask yourself how many of the other there are—whether
in your neighborhood or your apartment building. Because nobody wants to
be a minority.

Thus, when 70 percent of Frenchmen tell pollsters, as they have for
years now, that "too many foreigners" live in France, they’re not
necessarily being racist; but they’re not necessarily not being racist,
either. It’s a complicated sentiment, and identifying "good" and "bad"
strands of it—the better to draw them apart—is getting harder to do. [...]

Guilluy came to the attention of many French readers at the turn of the
millennium, in the pages of the leftist Paris daily Libération, where he
promoted the American journalist David Brooks’s book Bobos in Paradise.
Guilluy was fascinated by the figure of the "Bobo," an acronym combining
"bourgeois" and "Bohemian," which described the new sort of
upper-middle-class person who had emerged in the late-nineties
tech-bubble economy. The word may have faded from the memory of
English-language readers, but it stuck in France. You can find Bobo in
any good French dictionary, alongside bébé, Dada, and tutu.

For Brooks, "Bobo" was a term of endearment. Our nouveaux riches
differed from those of yesteryear in being more sensitive and cultured,
the kind of folks who shopped at Restoration Hardware for the vintage
1950s Christmas lights that reminded them of their childhoods. For
Guilluy, as for most French intellectuals, "Bobo" is a slur. These
nouveaux riches differed from their predecessors in being more predatory
and less troubled by conscience. They chased the working-class
population from neighborhoods it had spent years building up—and then
expected the country to thank them.

In France, as in America, the Bobos were both cause and effect of a huge
cultural shift. The nation’s cultural institutions—from its universities
to its television studios to its comedy clubs to (this being France) its
government—remain where they were. But the sociology of the community
that surrounds them has been transformed. The culture industry now sits
in territory that is 100 percent occupied by the beneficiaries of
globalization. No equivalent exists any more of Madame Vauquer’s
boardinghouse in Balzac’s Père Goriot, where the upwardly mobile
Rastignac had to rub shoulders with those who had few prospects of
advancement. In most parts of Paris, working-class Frenchmen are just
gone, priced out of even the soccer stadiums that were a bastion of
French proledom until the country’s World Cup victory in 1998. The
national culture has changed.

So has French politics. Since the age of social democracy, we have
assumed that contentious political issues inevitably pit "the rich"
against "the poor" and that the fortunes of one group must be wrested
from the other. But the metropolitan bourgeoisie no longer lives
cheek-by-jowl with native French people of lesser means and different
values. In Paris and other cities of Guilluy’s fortunate France, one
often encounters an appearance of civility, even consensus, where once
there was class conflict. But this is an illusion: one side has been
driven from the field.

The old bourgeoisie hasn’t been supplanted; it has been supplemented by
a second bourgeoisie that occupies the previously non-bourgeois housing
stock. For every old-economy banker in an inherited high-ceilinged
Second Empire apartment off the Champs-Élysées, there is a new-economy
television anchor or high-tech patent attorney living in some
exorbitantly remodeled mews house in the Marais. A New Yorker might see
these two bourgeoisies as analogous to residents of the Upper East and
Upper West Sides. They have arrived through different routes, and they
might once have held different political opinions, but they don’t now.
Guilluy notes that the conservative presidential candidate Alain Juppé,
mayor of Bordeaux, and Gérard Collomb, the Socialist running Lyon,
pursue identical policies. As Paris has become not just the richest city
in France but the richest city in the history of France, its residents
have come to describe their politics as "on the left"—a judgment that
tomorrow’s historians might dispute. Most often, Parisians mean what
Guilluy calls la gauche hashtag, or what we might call the
"glass-ceiling Left," preoccupied with redistribution among, not from,
elites: we may have done nothing for the poor, but we did appoint the
first disabled lesbian parking commissioner.

Upwardly mobile urbanites, observes Guilluy, call Paris "the land of
possibilities," the "ideapolis." One is reminded of Richard Florida and
other extollers of the "Creative Class." The good fortune of Creative
Class members appears (to them) to have nothing to do with any kind of
capitalist struggle. Never have conditions been more favorable for
deluding a class of fortunate people into thinking that they owe their
privilege to being nicer, or smarter, or more honest, than everyone
else. Why would they think otherwise? They never meet anyone who
disagrees with them. The immigrants with whom the creatives share the
city are dazzlingly different, exotic, even frightening, but on the
central question of our time—whether the global economic system is
working or failing—they see eye to eye. "Our Immigrants, Our Strength,"
was the title of a New York Times op-ed signed by London mayor Sadiq
Khan, New York mayor Bill de Blasio, and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo after
September’s terrorist bomb blasts in New York. This estrangement is why
electoral results around the world last year—from Brexit to the election
of Donald Trump—proved so difficult to anticipate. Those outside the
city gates in la France périphérique are invisible, their wishes
incomprehensible. It’s as if they don’t exist. But they do.

People used to think of the economy as congruent with society—it was the
earning-and-spending aspect of the nation just living its life. All
citizens inhabited the same economic system (which isn’t to say that all
took an equal share from it). As Guilluy describes it, the new economy
is more like a private utility: it provides money and goods the way,
say, the power company provides electricity. If you’ve always had
electricity in your house, what’s the worry? But it’s quite possible to
get cut off.

For those cut off from France’s new-economy citadels, the misfortunes
are serious. They’re stuck economically. Three years after finishing
their studies, three-quarters of French university graduates are living
on their own; by contrast, three-quarters of their contemporaries
without university degrees still live with their parents. And they’re
dying early. In January 2016, the national statistical institute Insée
announced that life expectancy had fallen for both sexes in France for
the first time since World War II, and it’s the native French working
class that is likely driving the decline. In fact, the French outsiders
are looking a lot like the poor Americans Charles Murray described in
Coming Apart, failing not just in income and longevity but also in
family formation, mental health, and education. Their political
alienation is striking. Fewer than 2 percent of legislators in France’s
National Assembly today come from the working class, as opposed to 20
percent just after World War II.

Unlike their parents in Cold War France, the excluded have lost faith in
efforts to distribute society’s goods more equitably. Political plans
still abound to fight the "system," ranging from the 2017 Socialist
presidential candidate Benoît Hamon’s proposals for a guaranteed minimum
income to those of his rival, former economics minister Emmanuel Macron,
to make labor markets more flexible. But these programs are seen by
their intended beneficiaries as further proof of a rigged system. The
welfare state is now distrusted by those whom it is meant to help.
France’s expenditure on the heavily immigrant banlieues is already vast,
on this view; to provide yet more public housing would be to widen the
invitation to unwanted immigrants. To build any large public-works
project is to do the same. To invest in education, in turn, is to offer
more advantages to the rich, who’re best positioned to benefit from it.
In a society divided as Guilluy describes, traditional politics can find
no purchase.

The two traditional French parties—the Republicans, who once followed a
conservative program elaborated by Charles de Gaulle; and the
Socialists, who once followed socialism—still compete for votes, but
along an ever-narrowing spectrum of issues. The real divide is no longer
between the "Right" and the "Left" but between the metropoles and the
peripheries. The traditional parties thrive in the former. The National
Front (FN) is the party of the outside.

Indeed, with its opposition to free trade, open immigration, and the
European Union, the FN has established itself as the main voice of the
anti-globalizers. At regional elections in 2015, it took 55 percent of
workers’ votes. The Socialists, Republicans, Greens, and the hard Left
took 18 percent among them. In an effort to ward off the FN, the
traditional parties now collude as often as they compete. In the second
round of those regional elections, the Socialists withdrew in favor of
their Republican rivals, seeking to create a barrage républicain against
the FN. The banding together of establishment parties to defend the
system against anti-system parties is happening all over the world.
Germany has a "grand coalition" of its two largest parties, and Spain
may have one soon. In the U.S., the Trump and the Sanders candidacies
both gained much of their support from voters worried that the two major
parties were offering essentially the same package.

Guilluy has tried to clarify French politics with an original theory of
political correctness. The dominance of metropolitan elites has made it
hard even to describe the most important conflicts in France, except in
terms that conform to their way of viewing the world. In the last decade
of the twentieth century, Western statesmen sang the praises of the free
market. In our own time, they defend the "open society"—a wider concept
that embraces not just the free market but also the welcoming and
promotion of people of different races, religions, and sexualities. The
result, in terms of policy, is a number of what Guilluy calls "top-down
social movements." He doesn’t specify them, but they would surely
include the Hollande government’s legalization of gay marriage, which in
2013 and 2014 brought millions of protesters opposing the measure onto
the streets of Paris—the largest demonstrations in the country since
World War II.

French elites have convinced themselves that their social supremacy
rests not on their economic might but on their common decency. Doing so
allows them to "present the losers of globalization as embittered people
who have problems with diversity," says Guilluy. It’s not our privilege
that the French deplorables resent, the elites claim; it’s the color of
some of our employees’ skin. French elites have a thesaurus full of
colorful vocabulary for those who resist the open society:
repli("reaction"), crispation identitaire ("ethnic tension"), and
populisme (an accusation equivalent to fascism, which somehow does not
require an equivalent level of proof). One need not say anything racist
or hateful to be denounced as a member of "white, xenophobic France," or
even as a "fascist." To express mere discontent with the political
system is dangerous enough. It is to faire le jeu de ("play the game
of") the National Front.

No American will read Guilluy’s survey of contemporary France without
seeing parallels to the United States. In one respect, France’s
difficulties are, for now, more serious. When Guilluy writes of the
"criminalization of criticism of the dominant model," he is not speaking
metaphorically. France’s antiracist Pleven law, which can punish speech,
passed in 1972. In 1990, the Gayssot law criminalized denial or
"minimization" of the Holocaust and repealed parts of France’s Law of
July 29, 1881, on Freedom of the Press. Both laws are landmarks in
Europe’s retreat from defending free speech. Suits against novelists,
philosophers, and historians have proliferated.

In France, political correctness is more than a ridiculous set of
opinions; it’s also—and primarily—a tool of government coercion. Not
only does it tilt any political discussion in favor of one set of
arguments; it also gives the ruling class a doubt-expelling myth that
provides a constant boost to morale and esprit de corps, much as class
systems did in the days before democracy. People tend to snicker when
the question of political correctness is raised: its practitioners
because no one wants to be thought politically correct; and its targets
because no one wants to admit to being coerced. But it determines the
current polarity in French politics. Where you stand depends largely on
whether you believe that antiracism is a sincere response to a genuine
upsurge of public hatred or an opportunistic posture for elites seeking
to justify their rule.

Guilluy is ambivalent on the question. He sees deep historical and
economic processes at work behind the evolution of France’s residential
spaces. "There has been no plan to ‘expel the poor,’ no conspiracy," he
writes. "Just a strict application of market principles." But he is
moving toward a more politically engaged view that the rhetoric of an
"open society" is "a smokescreen meant to hide the emergence of a closed
society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes." [...]

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standardand the
author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam
and the West.

(5) Le Pen's pro-working class & anti-imperialist commitment branded
'extremist' - James Petras

From: "Diogenesquest diogenesquest@gmail.com [shamireaders]" Date: Mon,
01 May 2017 23:56:47 -0500 From: James Petras <jpetras@binghamton.edu>
Date: 5/1/17 8:06 AM (GMT-06:00)

http://petras.lahaine.org/?p=2139

http://themillenniumreport.com/2017/05/twenty-truths-about-marine-le-pen/

Twenty Truths about Marine Le Pen

James Petras

Introduction

Every day in unimaginable ways, prominent leaders from the left and the
right, from bankers to Parisian intellectuals, are fabricating stories
and pushing slogans that denigrate presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.
They obfuscate her program, substituting the label ‘extremist’ for her
pro-working class and anti-imperialist commitment. Fear and envy over
the fact that a new leader heads a popular movement has seeped into
Emmanuel "Manny" Macron’s champagne-soaked dinner parties.  He has good
reason to be afraid:  Le Pen addresses the fundamental interests of the
vast- majority of French workers, farmers, public employees, unemployed
and underemployed youth and older workers approaching retirement.

The mass media, political class and judicial as well as street
provocateurs savagely assault Le Pen, distorting her domestic and
foreign policies.  They are incensed that Le Pen pledges to remove
France from NATO’s integrated command - effectively ending its
commitment to US directed global wars.  Le Pen rejects the
oligarch-dominated European Union and its austerity programs, which have
enriched bankers and multi-national corporations.  Le Pen promises to
convoke a national referendum over the EU – to decide French submission.
  Le Pen promises to end sanctions against Russia and, instead, increase
trade.  She will end France’s intervention in Syria and establish ties
with Iran and Palestine.

Le Pen is committed to Keynesian demand-driven industrial revitalization
as opposed to Emmanuel Macron’s ultra-neoliberal supply-side agenda.

Le Pen’s program will raise taxes on banks and financial transactions
while fining capital flight in order to continue funding France’s
retirement age of 62 for women and 65 for men, keeping the 35 hour
work-week, and providing tax free overtime pay. She promises direct
state intervention to prevent factories from relocating to low wage EU
economies and firing French workers.

Le Pen is committed to increasing public spending for childcare and for
the poor and disabled.  She has pledged to protect French farmers
against subsidized, cheap imports.

Marine Le Pen supports abortion rights and gay rights.  She opposes the
death penalty. She promises to cut taxes by 10% for low-wage workers.
Marine is committed to fighting against sexism and for equal pay for women.

Marine Le Pen will reduce migration to ten thousand people and crack
down on immigrants with links to terrorists.

Emmanuel Macron:  Macro Billionaire and Micro Worker Programs

Macron has been an investment banker serving the Rothschild and Cie
Banque oligarchy, which profited from speculation and the pillage of the
public treasury.  Macron served in President Hollande’s Economy
Ministry, in charge of ‘Industry and Digital Affairs’ from 2014 through
2016.  This was when the ‘Socialist’ Hollande imposed a pro-business
agenda, which included a 40 billion-euro tax cut for the rich.

Macron is tied to the Republican Party and its allied banking and
business Confederations, whose demands include: raising the retirement
age, reducing social spending, firing tens of thousands of public
employees and facilitating the outflow of capital and the inflow of
cheap imports.

Macron is an unconditional supporter of  NATO and the Pentagon.  He
fully supports the European Union.  For their part, the EU oligarchs are
thrilled with Macron’s embrace of greater austerity for French workers,
while the generals can expect total material support for the ongoing and
future US-NATO wars on three continents.

Propaganda, Labels and Lies

Macron’s pro-war, anti-working class and ‘supply-side’ economic policies
leave us with only one conclusion:  Marine Le Pen is the only candidate
of the left.  Her program and commitments are pro-labor, not ‘hard’ or
‘far’ right – and certainly not ‘fascist’.

Macron, on the other hand is a committed rightwing extremist, certainly
no ‘centrist’, as the media and the political elite claim!  One has only
to look at his background in banking, his current supporters among the
oligarchs and his ministerial policies when he served Francois Holland.

The ‘Macronistas’ have accused Marine Le Pen of extreme ‘nationalism’,
‘fascism’, ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘anti-immigrant racism’. ‘The French
Left’, or what remains of it, has blindly swallowed the oligarchs’
campaign against Le Pen despite the malodorous source of these libels.

Le Pen is above all a ‘sovereigntist’: ‘France First’. Her fight is
against the Brussels oligarchs and for the restoration of sovereignty to
the French people.  There is an infinite irony in labeling the fight
against imperial political power as ‘hard right’.  It is insulting to
debase popular demands for domestic democratic power over basic economic
policies, fiscal spending, incomes and prices policies, budgets and
deficits as ‘extremist and far right’.

Marine Le Pen has systematically transformed the leadership, social,
economic program and direction of the National Front Party.

She expelled its anti-Semites, including her own father!  She
transformed its policy on women’s rights, abortion, gays and race.  She
won the support of young unemployed and employed factory workers, public
employees and farmers.  Young workers are three times more likely to
support her national industrial revitalization program over Macron’s
‘free market dogma’.  Le Pen has drawn support from French farmers as
well as the downwardly mobile provincial middle-class, shopkeepers,
clerks and tourism-based workers and business owners.

Despite the trends among the French masses against the oligarchs,
academics, intellectuals and political journalists have aped the elite’s
slander against Le Pen because they will not antagonize the prestigious
media and their administrators in the universities. They will not
acknowledge the profound changes that have occurred within the National
Front under Marine Le Pen.  They are masters of the ‘double discourse’ -
speaking from the left while working with the right. They confuse the
lesser evil with the greater evil.

If Macron wins this election (and nothing is guaranteed!), he will
certainly implement his ‘hard’ and ‘extreme’ neo-liberal agenda. When
the French workers go on strike and demonstrators erect barricades in
the streets in response to Macron’s austerity, the fake-left will bleat
out their inconsequential ‘critique’ of ‘impure reason’.  They will
claim that they were right all along.

If Le Pen loses this election, Macron will impose his program and ignite
popular fury.  Marine will make an even stronger candidate in the next
election... if the French oligarchs’ judiciary does not imprison her for
the crime of defending sovereignty and social justice.

(6) Macron called LePen a misinformed, corrupt, "hate-filled"
nationalist liar who "feeds off France’s misery"

http://www.atimes.com/article/emmanuel-clinton-revolt-elites/

Emmanuel Clinton and the revolt of the elites

By Pepe Escobar

May 8, 2017 9:31 PM (UTC+8)

So in the end the West was saved by the election of Emmanuel Macron as
President of France: relief in Brussels, a buoyant eurozone, rallies in
Asian markets.

That was always a no-brainer. After all, Macron was endorsed by the EU,
Goddess of the Market, and Barack Obama. And he was fully backed by the
French ruling class.

This was a referendum on the EU – and the EU, in its current set-up, won.

Cyberwar had to be part of the picture. No one knows where the
MacronLeaks came from – a last minute, massive online dump of Macron
campaign hacked emails. WikiLeaks certified the documents it had time to
review as legitimate.

That did not stop the Macron galaxy from immediately blaming it on
Russia. Le Monde, a once-great paper now owned by three influential
Macron backers, faithfully mirrored his campaign’s denunciation of RT
and Sputnik, information technology attacks and, in general, the
interference of Russia in the elections.

The Macron Russophobia in the French media-sphere also happens to
include Liberation, once the paper of Jean-Paul Sartre. Edouard de
Rothschild, the previous head of Rothschild & Cie Banque, bought a 37%
controlling stake in the paper in 2005. Three years later, an unknown
Emmanuel Macron started to rise in the mergers and acquisitions
department, soon acquiring a reputation as "the Mozart of finance."

After a brief stint at the Ministry of Finance, a movement, En Marche!
was set up for him by a network of powerful players and think tanks.
Now, the presidency. Welcome to the revolving door, Moet & Chandon-style.

See you on the barricades, babe

In the last TV face-off with Marine Le Pen, Macron did not shy from
displaying condescending/rude streaks and even raked some extra
percentage points by hammering "Marine" as a misinformed, corrupt,
"hate-filled" nationalist liar who "feeds off France’s misery" and would
precipitate "civil war."

That may in fact come back to haunt him. Macron is bound to be a carrier
of France’s internal devaluation; a champion of wage "rigor," whose
counterpoint will be a boom of under-employment; and a champion of
increasing precariousness on the road to boost competitiveness.

Big Business lauds his idea of cutting corporate tax from 33% to 25%
(the European average). But overall, what Macron has sold is a recipe
for a "see you on the barricades" scenario: severe cuts in health
spending, unemployment benefits and local government budgets; at least
120,000 layoffs from the public sector; and abrogation of some key
workers’ rights. He wants to advance the "reform" of the French work
code – opposed by 67% of French voters – ruling by decree.

On Europe, the only thing "Marine" said during the campaign that was
closer to the truth was that "France will be led by a woman, either me
or Mrs Merkel."

Macron is more likely to be the new Tony Blair or, in a more disastrous
vein, the new [former Italian PM Matteo] Renzi.

The real game starts now. Only 4 in 10 voters backed him. Abstention
reached 25% – about one-third if spoilt ballots are counted. It will be
virtually impossible for Macron to come up with a parliamentary majority
in the upcoming elections.

France is now viciously divided into five blocks – with very little
uniting them: Macron’s En Marche! movement; Marine Le Pen’s National
Front, which will be recomposed and expanded; Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s
Disobedient France, which is bound to lead a New Left; the shattered
Republicans, or the traditional French Right, which badly needs a new
leader after the François Fillon debacle; and the virtually destroyed
Socialists post-Hollande. An Orwellian shock of the new

Contrary to global perceptions, the biggest issue in this election was
not immigration, it was actually deep resentment towards the French deep
state (police, justice, administration) – perceived as oppressive,
corrupt and even violent. [...]

(7) Marine Le Pen’s nationalism meets the unrepentant globalism of
Emmanuel Macron - The Economist

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21719806-marine-le-pens-nationalism-meets-unrepentant-globalism-emmanuel-macron-frances-presidential

France’s presidential race is a clash of worldviews

Marine Le Pen’s nationalism meets the unrepentant globalism of Emmanuel
Macron

 From the print edition | Europe

Mar 30th 2017

PARIS

WHAT did Marine Le Pen, the head of France’s National Front, expect to
gain by visiting Moscow on March 24th? Her core supporters relished
seeing her with Vladimir Putin, a strong woman standing next to a
strongman. Ms Le Pen came away claiming that the world now belongs to
nationalist populists such as Mr Putin, Donald Trump, India’s Narendra
Modi and, implicitly, herself. Interestingly, the visit did not seem
aimed at the usual goal of candidates who go abroad: reassuring voters
that they can safely be trusted with foreign policy. [...]

Most French voters are not fond of Russia. In a Pew survey in 2015, 70%
said they viewed Russia unfavourably and 85% did not trust Mr Putin. So
Mr Macron is in the mainstream in calling Ms Le Pen’s fascination with
him "toxic". Her bet, however, is that by celebrating Brexit and
hobnobbing with the Russian autocrat, she can present herself as part of
a glorious worldwide march of nationalists, who are destined to defeat
pusillanimous globalisers such as Mr Macron. She told industrialists in
Paris this week that as a "big country", France does not need others to
prosper. She wants to limit foreign trade and migration, reinvigorate
ties with France’s former African colonies and withdraw from the EU. She
depicts Mr Macron, a former Rothschild banker, as a privileged child of
finance in thrall to a crumbling EU "empire".

François Heisbourg, a foreign-policy expert who has advised Mr Macron,
worries that such a strategy could prove effective, especially in the
second-round run-off. Public opinion is "hardly enamoured with
globalisation", he notes. Matthew Goodwin of the University of Kent sees
Ms Le Pen’s outreach to other populist leaders as an attempt to
associate herself with "an alternative world order".

Maybe so, but it is a scary one. A strategist for Ms Le Pen’s team
recently travelled to London to tell investors that her plan to quit the
euro and hold a referendum on EU withdrawal need be no more disruptive
than Brexit. That would hardly be reassuring even if it were true, which
it is not.

Ms Le Pen says that what matters is not whether you are left or right,
but whether you are a nationalist or a globalist. Mr Macron agrees. This
week he told businessfolk in Paris that Brexit will prove a lamentable
and costly error. He also flew 9,400km (5,840 miles) to the island of
Réunion, a French territory in the Indian Ocean. Globalisation is a
fact, he said; the answer is limited, "intelligent regulation". Plenty
of French bigwigs agree, too. A Socialist former prime minister, Manuel
Valls, endorsed Mr Macron this week, as did several centre-right senators.

Yet some 40% of voters remain undecided. If, as polls currently suggest,
the contest comes down to Mr Macron and Ms Le Pen in the second-round
run-off, they will not be able to complain that they were not offered a
clear choice.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under
the headline "Beyond the Hexagon"

(8) Facebook Shut Downs pro Le Pen accounts before Election

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-14/facebook-scrambles-shut-down-pro-le-pen-accounts-election

Facebook Scrambles to Shut Down Pro Le Pen Accounts Before Election

by The_Real_Fly

Apr 14, 2017 4:50 PM

The first round of French elections will be held on April 23rd,
prompting Facebook to shut down pro Le Pen accounts, which they deem to
be 'fake.'

In an effort to fight 'fake news' or misinformation, Facebook has
targeted 30,000 'fake accounts' in order to control the information that
its users consume.

In a statement to AFP, the company said they were trying to "reduce the
spread of material generated through inauthentic activity, including
spam, misinformation, or other deceptive content that is often shared by
creators of fake accounts."

They are targeting accounts with the highest amount of traffic -- since
they pose a grave threat to the croissant eating frog lovers in France.

In addition to outright bans, the company, in conjunction with French
media, are running 'fact checking' programs -- designed to fight 'fake
news', heightening their efforts around the elections -- which spans
from 4/23-5/7.

All of this hysteria happened after Hillary Clinton lost to Donald
Trump's twitter account this past November -- prompting officials to
pressure Facebook and Twitter to do something about the brazen
belittling and subversion of the main stream media. Last week, the
company launched a tool to help its users identify 'fake news' in 14
countries -- including the U.S., France and Germany.

About a month ago, Facebook disabled our Facebook account, after we
posted a picture of Chuck Schumer with Vlad Putin. This was a widely
circulated news story at the time, which involved zero deception or any
of the hallmarks that could be construed as being 'fake news.'
Nevertheless, we lost access to the account and have ceased using the
platform since then.

For those who publish independently and rely upon the 'socials' for
traffic, heed the warnings given by Matt Drudge, founder of the Drudge
Report, who compared them to ghettos -- corporate controlled denizens of
propaganda.

(9) Facebook disabled iBankCoin’s account after photo of Schumer with Putin

http://ibankcoin.com/flyblog/2017/03/05/posting-picture-schumer-putin-facebook-diabled-ibankcoins-account-without-warning/

After Posting This Picture of Schumer with Putin, Facebook Disabled
iBankCoin’s Account, Without Warning

Dr. Fly Sun Mar 5, 2017 6:43pm EST 38 Comments views5284

I’ve been blogging about stocks here since 2007 and never paid any
attention to Facebook, until 2014. We’ve never had a lot of traffic
coming from Facebook, with the majority of it coming directly from user
bookmarks and Twitter. Our organic growth in traffic has been
impressive, especially over the past 6 months — at a time when other
finance sites have been struggling — because we’ve delved into politics
and news events.

According to Google Analytics, Facebook was our #2 social network last
year, in terms of traffic referrals, and was, by far, our fastest
growing (+455%). I was very excited to see some progress on the
platform, especially since it was new to us and distributed our brand of
content to brand new audiences. During the election season, several of
our posts went viral on the platform and was driving impressive traffic
stats for us — a small site headquartered in the liberal bastion of
Princeton, NJ.

Today I tried to log into our Facebook page and was met with this
rebuttal: ‘Account Disabled’.

We emailed the company and are awaiting their response. Our last post,
which might’ve pissed off a Schumer fan at $FB, was this.

Ironically, even though I lean to the right of center in politics, my
family is democratic and has been friends with Schumer since the 70’s.
We both hail from the same parts of Brooklyn, NY.

Is this a case of censorship because iBankCoin has been discussing
politics over the past 6 months and has been very critical of
establishment shills in the media and in government? I don’t see how we
can assume anything but that. The platform never gave me an issue when I
provided fellow money managers, or pundits in the financial media, with
EMERGENCY ASSHAT AWARDS — cussing and screaming away at my black heart’s
delight. But the second I post a picture with Chucky Schumer and Vlad
Putin, I get the fucking banhammer.

Sad! Not nice!

Is it a coincidence that we’ve been driven off the platform at the same
time when the company proposed new rules to combat ‘Fake News’?

     Facebook started testing related features and promised updates
similar to what debuted this week in December. The solution to the
spread of misinformation put the onus on Facebook users, not Facebook,
to identify false stories. Third-party fact-checkers must agree to a
fact-checking code of ethics.

     Now it seems the tool’s been made available to more users. Facebook
added a section on "disputed" news to its help tools. Users can see why
stories were marked as disputed.

     Facebook is flagging links to fake sites now, looks like:
pic.twitter.com/N7xaWDkdYA

     — Anna Merlan (@annamerlan) March 3, 2017

Highly unlikely.

Signing off, Fake News Operator, Former Wall Streeter, Le Fly

(10) 'Fake News' can now be "disputed" on Facebook

http://mashable.com/2017/03/04/facebook-fake-news-rollout/

Facebook has quietly rolled out its long-awaited solution to fake news

News can now be "disputed" on Facebook

By Emma Hinchliffe

Mar 05, 2017

Since people first started complaining about "fake news" on Facebook,
the phrase has evolved—from a useful way to identify
false-information-masquerading-as-traditional-news, to a term that means
basically nothing, now wielded by President Donald Trump against stories
he doesn't like, and also, drunk people in bars screaming about things
and/or sports results they disagree with.

But the original problem still genuinely exists. And Facebook finally
came out with its long-awaited response to beginning to cut away at the
issue.

Spotted on Twitter on Friday night, the tool identifies links to sites
known to produce misinformation. The tool cites third-party
fact-checking organizations like Snopes and Politifact—the kind of sites
that Trump supporters also like to dispute.

     Facebook is flagging links to fake sites now, looks like:
pic.twitter.com/N7xaWDkdYA

     — Anna Merlan (@annamerlan) March 3, 2017

Facebook started testing related features and promised updates similar
to what debuted this week in December. The solution to the spread of
misinformation put the onus on Facebook users, not Facebook, to identify
false stories. Third-party fact-checkers must agree to a fact-checking
code of ethics.

Now it seems the tool's been made available to more users. Facebook
added a section on "disputed" news to its help tools. Users can see why
stories were marked as disputed.

Image: screenshot/facebook

Facebook also added information about how to flag a story as fake:

Image: screenshot/facebook

As Facebook said, the tool isn't available to every user yet, but once
it is, get ready to see some "disputed news" on your newsfeed. And then,
be ready for the disputes over that.

(11) Marine Le Pen interview with Financial Times

https://www.ft.com/content/21c43558-c32e-11e4-ac3d-00144feab7de

Marine Le Pen lays out radical vision to govern France

Financial Times

by: Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Roula Khalaf in Paris

March 6, 2015

She calls for the collapse of the EU and talks about nationalising
banks. She sees the US as a purveyor of dangerous policies and Russia as
a more suitable friend. She wants to bring an end to immigration and
believes the republic is under Islamist assault.

Radical as Marine Le Pen’s vision for France may be, the prospect of her
National Front (FN) policies becoming reality is no longer pure fantasy.

"It’s the Front’s moment," Ms Le Pen declares in an interview with the
Financial Times.

Two months after the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the French
satirical magazine and a Jewish supermarket in Paris, the far-right
party has cemented its standing as the most dynamic political force in a
frightened and frustrated country; its 46-year-old leader now regarded
as a possible winner of the presidency in 2017. Polls place the FN ahead
of the centre-right UMP and ruling Socialist parties in the first round
of this month’s local elections, with one giving it about 33 per cent of
the vote.

The soaring popularity of a party that for decades seemed consigned to
the fringes has raised alarm bells across the political spectrum.
President François Hollande spoke this week of the need to "snatch"
voters back from the FN, calling its rise, in an interview with Le
Parisien, "a collective failure".

Much of the credit for the FN’s political momentum goes to Ms Le Pen’s
deliberate efforts to enlarge her base since taking over the party in
2011, but also to the malaise afflicting a France in which the economy
has stagnated for the past three years while unemployment has risen
above 10 per cent.

Ultimately, quitting the euro is the only solution, she says. "We are
told it’s going to be catastrophic, that it will rain frogs, that the
Seine will turn into a river of blood," she says. "There aren’t that
many practical problems."

To detoxify the FN’s brand, she has distanced herself from anti-semitic
comments made by her father and party founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who
has described the gas chambers as "a detail" of the second world war.
There are times, she says, when she and her father disagree. "But I am
the president of the National Front and he’s the honorary president. I
determine the . . . line."

In a small office in a nondescript modern building in the Paris suburb
of Nanterre, the fast-talking Ms Le Pen comes across as a single-minded
politician, at ease with every subject while glossing over challenges or
contradictions in her policies. "I’m not here to run a boutique. I’m
here to reach power and to return it to the French people," she says.
"That’s my role." Constantly in motion, and seemingly in a rush, she
tends to sit on the edge of her seat, fiddles with her pen, combs her
fingers through her blond hair or inhales on her electronic cigarette.

Much of the political class still considers the FN a xenophobic party
that spreads the politics of fear and has sanitised its façade but not
its substance. A new book, Marine Le Pen Prise Aux Mots (Marine Le Pen
taken at her word), questions whether the updating of her vocabulary
amounts to real change at the FN.

What is clear is that Ms Le Pen’s promise of simple solutions to
seemingly intractable social and economic problems is striking a chord
with a disenchanted public. [...]