PARIS, France, April 26, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — The first round of the French presidential election has come and gone, leaving the country in a quandary.
Out of 11 contenders, no candidate received a majority, leaving the finalists for a May 7 run-off as the indefinable Emmanuel Macron (24.01 percent) and nationalist Marine Le Pen (21.3 percent).
Mainstream right-wing candidate François Fillon (20.01 percent) and Communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon (19.58 percent) fell short.
The vote was incredibly close, with a large proportion of voters remaining undecided practically up to the last day. What makes the situation difficult is that Le Pen, who represents a lesser evil from the pro-life point of view and who also stands for the protection of France’s frontiers and identity, will be hard pressed to obtain a majority against Macron. He already has the support of Fillon and can count on votes from the political left and center – even though many Fillon voters will probably prefer Marine to Macron.
Macron was in fact so certain of reaching the Elysée palace – the French president’s official Paris residence – after the first round of voting that his election night address was for all intents and purposes a victory speech. It is indeed the likeliest scenario, but stranger things have happened.
What’s certain is that the election of Macron would leave France firmly on the rails established by the outgoing president, socialist François Hollande, under whose reign same-sex “marriage” was made legal, abortion “rights” were reinforced and euthanasia by stealth became a right for all in the form of terminal sedation.
Far from being an outsider standing up for renewal, as the mainstream press presented him, Macron is an establishment figure through and through. Hollande gave Macron, a former Economy minister in Hollande's government, his discreet support during the campaign while the official socialist party candidate, Benoît Hamon, was dropped by many of his colleagues in favor of Macron. Hamon ended up with a miserable 6.36 percent last Sunday night.
Macron himself has followed the well-worn track to power in France, studying at the School of Political Science and – like Hollande – obtaining his diploma from the “Ecole nationale d’administration,” which prepares brilliant students for the highest offices of the government. He also worked for several years as a well-paid investment banker for Rothschild before joining Hollande’s inner circle in 2012. Last year, Macron formed his own party that blends left and right policies.
Macron has always been close to Jacques Attali, a left-wing economist who has counseled French presidents or future presidents since 1973, including socialist François Mitterrand, liberal Nicolas Sarkozy, and Hollande. Macron invited Attali to a private dinner with his closest collaborators last Sunday after his first-round win.
Attali is a proponent of “unisex humanity,” calling the legalization of same-sex “marriage” an “anecdote of no importance” and announcing that humanity is slowly advancing toward a state where “men and women will be equal in all aspects, including that of procreation that will no longer be the privilege, or the burden of women.” And babies, he says, will be made “alone or with others, without physical relations, without anyone carrying them.” In 1981, he wrote: “Euthanasia will be a key instrument of our future societies.”
What Attali whispers in Macron’s ear is crucially important, because on many points Macron seems to have no thoughts at all, or at least he didn’t express them clearly during his presidential campaign. Its vacuity was a talking point in social media and appears to have found an echo in the minds of many after years of indoctrination in state-controlled schools and in the mainstream media.
Macron does stand clearly for abortion “rights,” “gay” marriage and LGBT rights as well as artificial procreation for lesbian couples. He is ambiguous about surrogate motherhood, which he might ban in France, but without taking measures to prevent couples from “importing” babies from countries where it is legal. He even wants to make sure the procedure is not “badly paid” instead of promoting an international ban on this modern form of slavery.
Macron has no opinion on euthanasia, except that it is urgent in his view to fully implement the present stealth law. As to parental rights and education, his “participative” platform says little. He speaks only of the public schools whose common core promotes “Green” values, abortion and contraception, and leaves high school students clueless as to the course of history and often incapable of reading and writing correctly.
Macron has made it clear on the other hand that he favors immigration at a time when France, like the rest of the European Union, is being flooded with mostly Islamic African and Middle-Eastern migrants. He is also the most compliant candidate in regard to the globalist agenda, having promised to make the implementation of the COP 21 Paris Agreement a mainstay of France’s international politics, bowing to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and their demands for “reproductive rights.”
It must be said that of the 11 candidates, not one has adopted a completely coherent pro-family and pro-life stance. Le Pen, besides wanting to protect France’s identity, frontiers and security, is the only candidate willing to abolish same-sex “marriage,” albeit by “improving” civil unions for same-sex couples. On the issues of artificial procreation, surrogate motherhood and euthanasia, she has one of the better platforms, but she is not willing to protect life, having called abortion a “woman’s right” that she will not abolish.
From a personal point of view, neither candidate is in a regular marriage. Marine Le Pen, twice married and divorced, has a partner who is currently a vice president of the National Front of which she is the figurehead. Macron, while attending a Jesuit school in Amiens, fell in love with his French literature teacher, Brigitte Trogneux, when he was 16. She was 40, married and a mother to three children. Macron married her in 2007 at age 30 – she was then 54 – after having maintained a relationship with her since high school.
But perhaps the most troublesome aspect of Macron’s personality was revealed in an interview he gave about environmental issues to the World Wildlife Fund a few months ago. He referred to “the planet that made us” and called politics “a form of magic.”
“I have always taken up the vertical, transcendental dimension, but at the same time it must be anchored in complete immanence, in materiality,” he said. “I do not believe in ethereal transcendence. … I do not separate God from the rest. I make the connection between transcendence and immanence.”
It is no wonder that many voters have no idea what his political program really contains. But if words mean anything, he is a spiritualist environmentalist who fits in perfectly with the modern idolatry of “Mother Earth.” Perhaps that is the reason this improbable candidate gained so much media and political support, wiping away the French people’s discontent with socialism, their desire to protect the country from globalism and uncontrolled immigration, and hoping to render the promise held by the Manif pour tous that put millions on the streets against “gay marriage” powerless.