Let me remind you....
We become so used to Politics being seen as a Left-Right divide that we overlook other often more pertinent factors that differentiate us. The Good-Evil dimension for instance. The Moral-Immoral dimension and the Religious-Atheist one. Some people deny morality altogether. They lump all religions together into the same basket and throw them all out. They are so blind as to see, for example, Islam and Christianity as being 'equally bad'.
The 'Right' and 'Left' are imagined to have 'extremes' Oddly, those who are moral people and Christian get lumped in with the 'Far Right', whatever that is. Usually the big bogeyman of the right is described as 'Nazi', despite Nazi being the short-form of National Socialist. Ie 'Left'. It shows a curious blindness or perhaps bloody-mindedness of some on the left that they do not recognise even their own left hands.
The current malaise du jour is Islam and its mayhem all over Europe and the middle east. People forget that the last time Islam invaded the west it was Catholics who pushed them back. Not 'christians', but Catholics. And the current influx of those same violent islamists is causing the Catholics to regroup again and to gear for the fight.
It is most noticeable in France.
And we were reminded of that by several voices in the Tavern. Christine Niles started the ball rolling. Nice gal Christine:
RISE OF THE CATHOLIC RIGHT IN FRANCE
After years of abortion, gay "marriage" and migrant violence, French Catholics have had enough
 |
| Christine Niles - Anchor-woman for Church Militant |
In a recent shock poll, Le Pen came out on top over her rivals at 28 points, a full eight points ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of France.
And in the first round of primaries for Les Républicains, Sarkozy's party, another conservative Catholic came out way ahead:
Fillon — father of five, married to his wife of 30 years, and a practicing Catholic.
Once trailing behind in the polls, Fillon has emerged as the frontrunner to represent Les Républicains in its run against Le Pen's Front National in France's presidential elections in May 2017. He is enjoying his highest scores in the most strongly Catholic regions of France, particularly Brittany and Pays de la Loire.
With at least 3.5 million votes cast and turnout exceeding expectations in the French Right's first ever round of primaries on November 20, Fillon won 44.2 percent of the vote, a full 16 points ahead of his nearest rival Alain Juppé, who only gained 28.4 percent, while Sarkozy, who had hoped to re-emerge as France's president, came in last at 20.7 percent of the vote.
Fillon is by far the most conservative among the three. He voted against gay marriage when it was initially proposed, has vowed to fight adoption rights for same-sex couples, has voted against IVF babies for single mothers and lesbians, and has fought against radical Islam, supporting a ban on burkinis and speaking out on behalf of persecuted Christians in the Middle East.
A large chunk of Fillon's supporters come from La Manif Pour Tous ("Demonstration for All"), a secular initiative begun in 2013 as a reaction to French legislators' decision to ram through same-sex marriage, contrary to the will of the people.
 |
| France has held the largest - and unreported - protests against gay marriage and abortion. |
The Manif's purpose is to defend the right of children to both a mother and a father, and its annual rallies are some of the largest pro-family gatherings in Europe, with numbers reaching well over a million (although they are consistently underreported in the secular press). Each year, atheists march alongside Catholics, Protestants and Muslims in protest against what they see as French legislators' destruction of the family.
The wildly popular Manif gave rise to a traditional Catholic political movement, Sens Commun ("Common Sense"), which has backed Fillon from the beginning.
Juppé ran on a more centrist platform, deriding Fillon as too traditionalist and out of touch. "I'm the most open to modernism and I feel closer to the Pope than Sens Commun or La Manif pour tous," Juppé said.
But Fillon responded in Le Parisien, "Alain Juppé has presented a program that seems to me out of step with the center of gravity of the Right, but also the country, which is more right-wing than it ever has been."
In the populist wake of Brexit and Donald Trump's historic win, Fillon is being proven right.
French Catholics are rejecting the compromise represented by Juppé in favor of a more traditionally conservative platform.
And the wider French populace is roundly opposed to the socialist vision of current French president Franćois Hollande, suffering the lowest approval ratings in the country's history. Leftwing leaders are asking that Hollande not seek re-election in order to allow other leftist and socialist politicians to seek the candidacy.
Trump's win shocked the French world, with Le Pen declaring triumphantly the next day, "Nothing is immutable. What has happened this night is not the end of the world, it's the end of a world."
"The political and media elites that were heavily chastised this morning can no longer ignore it," she said," The French referendum (against the EU constitutional treaty) in 2005, the Greek one in 2015, the recent electoral successes of patriots in different European countries, the massive vote by the British in favour of Brexit and now Donald Trump — all are democratic choices that bury the old order and stepping stones to building tomorrow's world."
The second round of primaries for Les Républicains will take place November 27 to determine who will represent the party going into next year's presidential elections.
Christine's assessment deserves a long, cool drink. Note though how the Catholic resurgence, a Conservative urge, is being seen as 'Far Right'.
Will Kirby was on hand to tell of European reaction to this French movement to the Good, the Moral and the Religious. As you can imagine, the EU bureaucrats are frantically holding committee meetings and producing regulations.
EUROPE TREMBLES: Brussels in crisis as Le Pen storms into shock poll lead over rivalsBRUSSELS was facing a growing political crisis today as polls showed French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has stormed into a shock lead over her presidential rivals.A series of bombshell surveys suggested that the Front National chief will wallop all of the conservative candidates in the first round of the race to become the next leader of France.
Eurosceptic Ms Le Pen, who has vowed to lead the country out of the EU, scored between four and nine per cent higher than either of the two centre-right politicians she is expected to battle for the keys to the Elysee Palace.
Hmmm. One wonders how much of that is wishful thinking and how much is the left-leaning MSM.However, she still faces an uphill task to clinch the top job because of the nature of France’s voting system, which requires candidates to win more than 50 per cent of the electorate over a two-round process.Polling conducted earlier this year indicates that the controversial FN chief will eventually lose out to whichever conservative candidate she comes up against by a comfortable margin in the second part of the contest.
Regardless, the fact that a third or more of French voters are now prepared to back a candidate who openly advocates dismantling the EU project will send shivers down the spine of a Brussels elite struggling to comprehend the surging populist tide on its doorstep.
After the results were released, Ms Le Pen tweeted: “I am the patriotic candidate, I’m fighting in the name of the people. That is the meaning of my bid for the presidency.”And some political commentators are already drawing comparisons with Donald Trump’s shock run to the White House as France’s centre-right party prepares to choose between two tired establishment stalwarts for its presidential candidate.The conservatives will pick either Francois Fillon or Alain Juppé - both former prime ministers with less than scandal-free reputations - after controversial ex president Nicolas Sarkozy dropped out of the race to represent the party.Either man will present a certain risk, with Ms Le Pen bound to pounce on their chequered records in office and engage in the same anti-establishment rhetoric which served Mr Trump and the Brexit campaign so well.And the shock surveys released this week show that, in the first round of voting, the anti-immigration politician would beat Mr Fillon by 29 per cent to 20 per cent, and Mr Juppé by a narrower margin of 30 per cent to 26 per cent.However, experts have warned that shock events like Mr Trump’s election and the Brexit vote, which caught the establishment totally by surprise, show how surveys are now likely to be hugely underestimating levels of support for radical candidates.
If the leftists in France (and Europe) are like the American ones - and let's face it, some lead and some follow, some are far worse and some still pussycats - we can expect them to show a violent side. They will blame the 'far right' of course, but that is in their philosophy, very like the Islamists.A poll published immediately after the US elections showed that French voters overwhelmingly believe that the FN leader has the most to gain from the Republican’s stunning victory earlier this month which seriously rocked Brussels.And in a sign of the growing panic gripping the EU project, the current French prime minister Manuel Valls has admitted for the first time that a Le Pen victory is “possible”.Mr Valls said: “If she does make it to the second round she will face either a candidate of the left or the right. This means that the balance of politics will change completely.”Earlier this year bureaucrat Martin Selmayr, the right-hand man of Brussels chief Jean-Claude Juncker, summed up the EU’s feeling towards the FN leader and other eurosceptics when he tweeted that her election would be a “horror scenario”.Last week Le Pen appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show and reaffirmed her belief that global anti-establishment sentiments could boost her chances of becoming France’s next president.She said that Trump’s victory “made possible what had previously been presented as impossible".She added: “This is really the victory of the people against the elites."During the last French elections in 2012, Le Pen came third behind Mr Sarkozy and eventual winner Francois Hollande, who has gone on to become the most unpopular president in the country’s history.
A peaceful and orderly transition in politics is what democracies are supposed to be about.
Democracy has had a pretty good run so far, but all good things come to and end.
Pay for Peace.
Pax.
European politics has been moving leftwards since the 1940s. In that climate, it might be fair to say that what was one the catholic middle-ground is now the far right: not because of a catholic, or even Catholic, change but because of the progressive invasion of private life by state and at the same time the paradoxical push for 'anything goes'.
ReplyDeleteThe French votes rejecting the European Constitution referendum in 2005 were less than 55% of votes cast. The "massive vote by the British in favour of Brexit" was less than 52%. The "democratic choice" for Donald Trump actually had him getting less votes than Clinton and only winning because of the USA's strange concept of democracy. If we are to be honest when drawing trends from this, there is no reason to think the world is about to be revolting.
Fillon has won the primaries but unlike Hilary Clinton Fillon is likely to romp home with the Presidency unless his campaign goes badly wrong. Le Pen has vowed to take France out of the EU, so it will be interesting to see if the Fillon campaign decide to neutralise that election grouping by also vowing to exit the EU, or to gather the opposition and promising to stay in the EU.
For the EU as a whole, France's position becomes a vital matter. Without France or Britain, the EU will be so clearly a German-led powerhouse that Germany will either have to start making the concessions in the EU that Denmark, Italy, Netherlands and France (and Britain) want, or see the entire EU, or Germany, collapse. It is even possible, if France exists next year, that Britain and France will kick-start their own version of a European Common Market, with the few other non-EU countries in Europe that want to have a shared market but not a shared political and cultural future.
Interesting observations and analysis, Doug. Ref that almost last bit.... Britain really dropped the ball back in 1946. OK, it was devastated, but..... The French asked the British Cabinet to consider France becoming a member of the British Commonwealth with the Queen the French Head of State as she was everywhere in the Commonwealth. Britain and France could have jointly rebuilt europe together. But the British rejected the idea. That was very likely due to American pressure. But the 'common market' could have started with France and Britain rather than with France and Germany.
Delete1946 was a complex time. In 1940, France broke a mutual defence pact with Britain, then they formed an enemy-sympathising government, then threatened the entire war effort by not only not surrendering their fleet to Britain but not even scuppering it, then de Gaulle almost ignored Brtain's role in keeping France alive as a country and in freeing their nation in 1944. In short, the French nation had a while to go to earn Britain's trust.
DeleteAnyway, I think you are confused (too much imbibing at the tavern?) as de Gaulle was never interested in links with Britain and would have kept the UK out of the EC (what was to become the EEC, then EU) if he could have. The closest Britain and France got to becoming united since the 13th(?) century was at the time of the Suez Crisis, which was in the mid-50s sometime. Even then, I don't think it would have come to anything had either the French or British been asked.
Read the Cabinet Papers from 1946 with a 60 year embargo The French PM was trying an end- run past the President.
Delete