(1) The French Working Class vote for Marine Le Pen & her radical Left policies (1st round) (2) Globalist parties tactically withdraw to defeat Le Pen patriots (2nd round) (3) Socialist Party withdrew candidates, supported Sarkozy to keep Le Pen out (4) French Court Acquits Marine Le Pen of Hate Speech (5) Dieudonné sentenced to 2 Months Jail in Belgium for Anti-Semitism (6) Editor fined for saying France's highest court is 'a Rabbinical Court' (1) The French Working Class vote for Marine Le Pen & her radical Left policies (1st round) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/12038100/Euro-regime-is-working-like-a-charm-for-Frances-Marine-Le-Pen.html Euro regime is working like a charm for France's Marine Le Pen Marine Le Pen swept 55pc of the working class vote, stealing the Socialist base from under their noses with radical Left policies {photo} Front National leader Marine Le Pen has ditched the free market view of her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, embracing radical Left policies Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES {end} By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 8:30PM GMT 07 Dec 2015 France is trapped in an economic slump that is hauntingly reminiscent of the inter-war years from 1929 to 1936 under the Gold Standard. Each tentative rebound proves to be a false dawn. The unemployment rate has continued to climb since the Lehman crisis, in stark contrast to Germany, Britain and the US. It jumped by 42,000 in October to an 18-year high of 10. c. The delayed political fuse has finally detonated. Marine Le Pen’s Front National – these days a blend of nationalist-Right and welfare-Left – swept half the communes of France in the first round of regional elections over the weekend. The Front won 55pc of voters classified as workers (ouvriers). The Socialist Party was reduced to 15pc of what was once its core constituency, and can no longer make any plausible claim to be the voice of the French working class. “Nothing has been done about unemployment despite all the promises. Nobody has been listening to the distress,” said Professor Brigitte Granville, from Queen Mary University of London. Mrs Le Pen has filled the vacuum. She has abandoned the free-market views of her father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, who once espoused "Reaganomics" and vowed to shrink the state. She is eating into the Socialist base from the Left, vowing to defend the French welfare model against the “neo-liberals” and to defeat the “dictatorship of the markets”. She calls globalisation the “law of the jungle” that allows multinationals to play off cheap labour in China against French labour Her plans include a national industrial strategy that swats aside EU competition law, as well as a cut in the retirement age to 60, and a “realignment of taxation against capital and in favour of workers”. Pierre Gattaz, head of the employers federation MEDEF, calls it a radical agenda stolen from the Left that would destroy France. Yet it clearly makes a heady brew for voters when mixed with nationalist identity politics. Mrs Le Pen once told The Telegraph that her first act in the Elysee Palace would be to order the treasury to draw up plans for a restoration of the French franc. “The euro ceases to exist the moment that France leaves. What are they going to do about it, send in tanks?" she said. Professor Jacques Sapir, from l'École des hautes études (EHESS) in Paris, says the Front National made its biggest strides in regions that have suffered the full force of de-industrialisation and the “globalisation shock”. Many of these areas are in the centre of the country, or in Burgundy and Lorraine, or parts of Normandy and Picardy, that are not key battlegrounds of France’s immigration and culture wars. Prof Sapir said French industry is slowly being hollowed out. It is a drip-drip effect of closures - typically hitting 150 or 200 workers at a time – that slips below the radar screen of the national press. “These are the regions of rural misery,” he said. Prof Granville said there is no doubt that France’s problems are home-grown. It is entangled in a thicket of unworkable laws. There are 383 taxes, of which 50 cost more to enforce than they yield. The labour code is more than 3,000 pages, acting as a gale-force headwind against job creation. Yet monetary union has played its part, too. The eurozone’s twin policies of fiscal and monetary contraction from 2011 to 2014 aborted the recovery and led to a deep recession that went on long enough to cause lasting economic damage through labour "hysteresis". Prof Granville said there is another twist. France and Germany moved in radically different directions after the launch of the euro. While Paris introduced the 35-hour working week, Berlin pushed through the Hartz IV wage squeeze and an internal devaluation within EMU - a beggar-thy-neighbour strategy. The result is that France has lost 20pc in labour cost competitiveness. It had a current account surplus of 2.5pc of GDP at the start of the last decade. It is now bleeding national wealth slowly - as is Britain, for different reasons - with a cyclically-adjusted deficit of 1.5pc. She compared it to the slow torture France endured in the early 1930s under the Gold Standard, stoically accepting the "500 deflation decrees" of premier Pierre Laval. The dam broke in 1936 with the election of spurned outsiders, then the Front Populaire. France cannot easily pursue an internal devaluation of its own in the current zero-inflation climate because this would cause the debt ratio – already 97.3pc of GDP - to spiral higher. It would, in any case, perpetuate the slump. Even in the current benign conditions of cheap oil and easy money, the Bank of France says growth will be just 1.2pc this year and 1.4pc next year, and the global cycle is ageing. “It is very hard to see how the country can restore competitiveness within the strait-jacket of the euro,” she said. Simon Tilford, from the Centre for European Reform, said President Francois Hollande is almost certain to ditch EU fiscal targets after the weekend shock. “There is not going to any fiscal tightening before the elections,” he said. “The Germans are not going to press for it either. They are terrified of doing anything that would further bolster Le Pen. They know she poses an existential threat to the Franco-German axis,” he said. France’s Leviathan state has ballooned to 57pc of GDP, a Nordic level without Nordic labour flexibility and free markets. This bloated public sector acted as stabilizing force during the Lehman crisis but is now holding back recovery. Little is being done about the underlying pathologies. The OECD says a quarter of French aged 60-64 are in work – compared with 40pc for the OECD average – chiefly because of early retirement incentives. They can expect to live for 25 years after retiring, compared to 20 in the UK. Public pensions gobble up 14pc of GDP. Professor Charles Wyplosz, from Geneva University, said France is still not ready to face the truth. “Hollande is a vintage 1970s socialist, and the 2012 election was an exercise in day-dreaming,” he said. “He never told voters there was a crisis on the way, and now has no mandate to deal with that crisis. He is doing a little labour market reform, [but] it’s a tiny fraction of what is needed. “Everybody knows what has to be done. There have been hundreds of reports written. But no politician has the stomach to do anything. The political establishment has simply failed to rise to the occasion." (2) Globalist parties tactically withdraw to defeat Le Pen patriots (2nd round) http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-politics-idUSKBN0TW00320151214 World | Mon Dec 14, 2015 10:36am EST French far-right fails to win any regions in upset for Le Pen PARIS | By Ingrid Melander and Michel Rose Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front did not win any region in French elections on Sunday, in a setback to her hopes of being a serious presidential contender in 2017. The regional election run-off, in which the conservatives won seven constituencies and the Socialists five, was no real victory for either of these two mainstream parties, shaken by the far-right's growing appeal to disillusioned voters. Boosted by fears about security and immigration after the Islamist militant attacks in Paris a month ago that killed 130 people, the National Front (FN) had won more votes than any other party nationally in last week's first round. Although it won no region on Sunday after the Socialists pulled out of its key target regions and urged their supporters to back the conservatives of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, the FN still recorded its best showing in its history. "Tonight, there is no place for relief or triumphalism," Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls said. "The danger posed by the far right has not gone away; far from it." Sarkozy struck a similar theme, calling the strong FN showing a "warning sent to all politicians, ourselves included, in the first round". "We now have to take the time for in-depth debates about what worries the French, who expect strong and precise answers," he said, citing Europe, unemployment, security and national identity issues. Le Pen, who had hoped to use regional power as a springboard to boost her chances in 2017 presidential elections, lost by a huge margin in northern France on Sunday, where she led her party's ticket, attracting 42.8 percent of the votes in the run-off vs 57.2 percent for the conservatives. "RAMPART" Long content with attracting protest votes, the FN has changed strategy since Le Pen took the party over from her father Jean-Marie in 2011, seeking to build a base of locally elected officials to target the top levels of power. But while it has been winning more and more votes in each election since then, its isolation in France's politics means it cannot strike the alliances it would need to win major constituencies. So it failed once more on Sunday to turn growing popularity into power. In the southeast, another FN target where Le Pen's niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen was the FN's lead candidate, the conservatives scored 53.7 percent and the FN 46.2 percent, official results based on 84 percent of the votes said. "There are victories that shame the winners," Marechal-Le Pen said, slamming the Socialists' decision to pull out of the race for the run-off. [...] (3) Socialist Party withdrew candidates, supported Sarkozy to keep Le Pen out http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/front-national-frances-broken-political-system-fuelling-rise-marine-le-pens-far-right-party-1533675 Front National: France's broken political system fuelling the rise of Marine Le Pen's far-right party By Alice de la Chapelle December 16, 2015 16:25 GMT Front National's (FN) loss in the regional elections on 13 December didn't just leave a bitter taste in Marine Le Pen's mouth. Despite leading the polls after the first round of voting and obtaining 27.36% of the vote nationally, the anti-immigration, anti-Europe, far-right party failed to win a single region in the election. Following the results of the first round, which was the best achieved by the Front National in its history, the Socialist Party withdrew its candidates in the north, where FN leader Marine Le Pen was the main candidate, and in the south-east, where her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen was running, urging its supporters to vote for former president Nicolas Sarkozy's Republican party in a bid to keep the far right from getting into power. The tactical move worked. Sarkozy's The Republicans and centre-right allies took 57.5% of the votes in the northern region, where Le Pen was standing, against her 42.5%. Such tactical voting, coupled with the lack of representation for FN, led to many in France to question how democratic the country's political system is. Same parties, same mistakes When IBTimes UK spoke to residents in the French city of Lille, part of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region where Marine Le Pen lost, many complained of disenchantment with the current political establishment. "We always elect the same people, the same parties. It will go on and on, always the same mistakes," said Agnès. "They keep their seats, their salaries, their advantages, whilst not caring at all about our interests," adds Michael. "Those are nice seats. And they want to keep them. They have been there for such a long time," said Maurice. "The politicians are telling us: 'We need professionals in politics'. Let's do the assesment since the end of the Second World War until now. Can we say that thanks to the professionalism of our politicians, our top politicians, France is doing well? No, not at all, France is not doing well," observed Raymond. Political elite The disillusionment with France's political system comes from the elite background of many of the country's politicians, a world away from the average French voter. Many study at the country's top universities before attending l'école nationale d'administration, one of the world's best graduate schools. 1980's Promotion Voltaire at l'ecole nationale d'administration. Francois Hollande and Segolene Royal (third row-left) (ENA) Three of the last seven presidents (Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Jacques Chirac and François Hollande) as well as seven of the last 12 prime ministers (Michel Rocard, Edouard Balladur, Alain Juppé, Lionel Jospin, Jacques Chirac, Laurent Fabius and Dominique de Villepin) came from this school. The graduating class of 1980 alone was attended by French President François Hollande, his former partner and onetime presidential candidate Segolène Royal, and former Republican Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. With well-paying salaries, on average of ?154k (£112k), many French politicians also stick around for a long time, even after suffering a major loss. It all means that despite how people vote, the same faces end up in power again and again. François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy faced off as rival presidential candidates during the election of 2012, but first debated each other on television nationally 21 years before that. Sarkozy lost his re-election in 2012, but is now leader of the Republican party again. Running against Hollande, whose approval ratings are the lowest for any French president in 50 years, Sarkozy is currently the favourite to win the presidency in 2017. Nicolas Sarkozy is the favourite for the Presidential elections in 2017 (Getty) With the same unpopular politicians dominating the political landscape, more and more people are being drawn to outsiders like Marine Le Pen's Front National. Change on the horizon After Le Pen's loss in the regional elections in the northern region, her supporters told IBTimes UK they strongly believed she was the only one to bring change to France. "We are behind her for the presidential election now. She will be President," said one. "It will change. People will change and understand eventually that it's not possible any longer. One time, Socialists, one time, Republicans, and together they block us," another added. "She is the only one who can bring change. Because the other parties, well, we've seen what they are capable of," noted another. Last year an opinion poll showed that 62% of French people are in favour of a new political and electoral system that would give less power to the President and more to the Parliament. Whilst this is unlikely, both supporters of Marine Le Pen and the general public agree a drastic change is needed in French politics. (4) French Court Acquits Marine Le Pen of Hate Speech http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/world/europe/french-court-acquits-marine-le-pen-of-hate-speech.html By AURELIEN BREEDENDEC. 15, 2015 PARIS — A French court on Tuesday acquitted the far-right leader Marine Le Pen of charges that she incited religious hatred against Muslims with comments made in 2010. Ms. Le Pen, now the president of the National Front party, was on trial for comparing Muslims praying in the street to the German occupation of France during World War II at a rally in Lyon, comments that prompted anti-racism and Muslim-rights groups to file complaints. She was facing a fine of 45,000 euros, or about $50,000, and a sentence of up to a year in prison. But judges in Lyon, in southeastern France, followed the state prosecutor’s recommendation that Ms. Le Pen be acquitted of charges of “inciting discrimination, violence or hatred toward a group of people based on their religious beliefs.” During the trial held in October, the state prosecutor, Bernard Reynaud, argued that Ms. Le Pen was only exercising her right to free speech because she was not targeting all Muslims in France, only a portion of them. Ms. Le Pen reacted to the ruling with a post on her official Twitter account. “Five years of aspersions, one acquittal… And now how many slanderers will apologize?” she wrote. Ms. Le Pen was campaigning for control of the National Front when she made the comments about Muslims praying in the streets, which was mostly the result of insufficient mosque space, at the 2010 rally in Lyon. “If you want to talk about the occupation, let’s talk about that, by the way, because here we are talking about the occupation of our space,” she said during the rally. “It’s an occupation of entire stretches of territory, of neighborhoods where religious law is applied. This is an occupation. Sure, there are no armored vehicles, no soldiers, but it’s still an occupation, and it weighs on the inhabitants.” Ms. Le Pen ultimately won the National Front’s presidency, and has striven ever since to shed the party’s anti-Semitic and racist legacy left by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, one of its founders. The party expelled Mr. Le Pen in August. The National Front failed to win any contests in the second and final round of regional elections held on Sunday, but its anti-immigrant, anti-European Union and anti-Muslim positions have still garnered strong support from a segment of the French electorate. Ms. Le Pen used the trial, held just six weeks before the first round of the elections, as a platform to defend those positions, describing her 2010 comments as an “exhortation to respect the law” on behalf of “those who have been abandoned, the forgotten ones.” Matthieu Hénon, a lawyer for the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples, one of the groups that filed a complaint, said by telephone that he was surprised by the court’s ruling Tuesday. “The court’s reasoning was that Marine Le Pen’s comments did not target the Muslim community as a whole,” Mr. Hénon said. “But we believe that comparing the German occupation with Muslims who are forced to pray in the street incites fear, incites hatred.” The Collective Against Islamophobia in France, another group that had filed a complaint against Ms. Le Pen, said in a statement that it was studying the ruling and considering its next steps. The plaintiffs have 10 days to appeal the judges’ decision. “This acquittal shows, once again, the legitimization and normalization of Islamophobia and of the hate speech that conveys it,” the organization said in the statement. Get news and analysis from Europe and around the world delivered to your inbox every day with the Today’s Headlines: European Morning newsletter. Sign up here. A version of this article appears in print on December 16, 2015, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: World Briefing | Europe; France: Court Acquits Le Pen of Inciting Hatred. (5) Dieudonné sentenced to 2 Months Jail in Belgium for Anti-Semitism https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2015/11/25/dieudonne-sentenced-to-2-months-in-gaol-in-belgium-for-anti-semitism-will-his-peace-concert-go-ahead/ Dieudonné Sentenced to 2 Months in Gaol in Belgium for Anti-Semitism: Will his ‘Peace’ Concert go ahead? Brussels (AFP) – A Belgian court sentenced controversial French comedian Dieudonne Wednesday to two months in jail for incitement to hatred over alleged racist and anti-Semitic comments he made during a show in Belgium, a lawyer said. Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala, who has faced similar court cases in France, was also fined 9,000 euros ($9,500) by the court in the eastern city of Liege, said Eric Lemmens, a lawyer for Belgium’s Jewish organisations. He was not in court for the verdict. The judgement “says that all the accusations against Dieudonne were established — both incitement to hatred and hate speech but also Holocaust denial” relating to a show in Liege in 2012, Lemmens told AFP. “For me this is more than satisfying, this is a major victory,” he said. Earlier this month the European Court of Human Rights ruled against Dieudonne in a separate case, deciding that freedom of speech did not protect “racist and anti-Semitic performances”. Dieudonne was protesting a fine he received from a French court in 2009 for inviting a Holocaust-denier on stage. He was fined 10,000 euros ($11,000) for what that court referred to as “racist insults”. In March, a French court also handed Dieudonne a two months suspended sentence and fined him heavily for anti-Semitic remarks after he caused uproar by suggesting he sympathised with the attacks against satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris. “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly,” he wrote on Facebook, a play on the slogan “Je suis Charlie” that became a global rallying cry against extremism and Amedy Coulibaly, one of the attackers. The performer, who made his name in a double act with Jewish comedian Elie Semoun, is infamous for his trademark “quenelle” hand gesture that looks like an inverted Nazi salute but which he insists is merely anti-establishment. French courts have hauled him up over a string of comments which opponents say are bluntly racist while supporters champion his right to free speech. Dieudonne, who can appeal the decision, was not immediately reachable for comment. Le Monde gives recent background, including other convictions for anti-semitism and his expulsion from his theatrical base at Saint-Denis. “In July 2008, Jean-Marie Le Pen became godfather to Dieudonné’s third child. Philippe Laguérie, a traditionalist Catholic priest, officiated at the baptism, which was held in the Saint-Éloi congregation in Bordeaux.[59] On 26 December 2008, at an event at the Parc de la Villette in Paris, Dieudonné awarded the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson an “insolent outcast” prize [prix de l’infréquentabilité et de l’insolence]. The award was presented by one of Dieudonné’s assistants, Jacky, dressed in a concentration camp uniform with a yellow badge. This caused a scandal[60] and earned him his sixth court conviction to date. On 29 January 2009, he celebrated the 80th birthday of Faurisson in his theater, in the midst of a representative gathering of Holocaust deniers, right-wing radicals, and radical Shiites.[61] Dieudonné and Faurisson further appeared together in a video making fun of the Holocaust and its commemoration.” Dieudonné remains popular amongst a wide range of people. Some, including the writer of this Blog, do not think that the law is the best way to deal with him or his admirers’ racism. Whether his participation in this Concert for Peace will go ahead is unclear. (6) Editor fined for saying France's highest court is 'a Rabbinical Court' http://rehmat1.com/2015/11/29/editor-french-live-under-full-jewish-tyrany/ Editor: French live under full Jewish Tyrany Posted on November 29, 2015 On November 24, 2015, a Paris court of appeal doubled a fine, 4000 Euros, levied against Fabrice Bourban, editor Le journal Rivarol for inciting hatred toward Jews. Last year, the French Jewish Lobby CRIF accused Bourban for posting an article, entitled, The unacceptable Jewish thought police, in which he criticized French government-run highest judicial authority, Council of State, for denying ‘freedom of speech’ rights to French comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala. He called the Council of State as a Rabbinical Court, and claimed that French people were living under full Jewish tyranny. Was Fabrice Bourban wrong? Are French authors Paul-Eric Blanrue and Alain Soral wrong for agreeing with Fabrice Bourban over Jewish power which controls not only France but also the rest of the Western world? On March 19, 2014, then French interior minister and current prime minister Manuel Valls (married to a Jewish woman) told a Jewish gathering attended by French Jewish Defense League members and Sarkozy’s friend Bernard-Henri Levy: “The Jews of France are more than ever at the vanguard of the Republic.” Bernard-Henri Levi, an Israeli handler, ran anti-Qaddafi, anti-Assad campaign, and fabricated Sakineh scandal against Ahmadinejad, and published anti-Pakistan articles in support of Indian insurgency in 1970. French Jews make less than 1% of country’s population, but control all three political parties. Half of country’s 500 millionaires are Jewish. The mainstream media including the anti-Muslim Charlie Hebdo is owned by Jews. France has its own ADL aka International League Against Racism and Antisemitism (LICRA) which acts as “thought control Mafia”. -- Peter Myers Australia website: http://mailstar.net/index.html |
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