by Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog and cross-posted with PressTV
The re-election of Emmanuel Macron is being celebrated by Brussels, high finance and his “bourgeois bloc” of core French supporters, but Macron’s record shows that Muslims and Muslim nations anticipate little reason to celebrate.
After Macron’s victory the Iranian foreign ministry called for face-to-face talks to resume on the JCPOA pact on Iran’s nuclear energy program “as soon as possible”. The talks were paused on March 11 due to the unrest in Ukraine, but Iranians would be mistaken to imagine that a second term of Macron will lead to less Western-dominated policies from him.
Just to show how far Macron is willing to go in order to defend the interests of Brussels and Washington, simply look at his position on Russia: He is completely on board with years of sanctions on Moscow no matter how badly they bankrupt the average French individual, household or business. His stance is designed to benefit supranational interests, not French ones.
In a race which was a dead heat two weeks ago Macron’s stance seemed like electoral suicide. Marine Le Pen took the opposite tack – she insisted that Russia sanctions not encompass energy imports nor negatively impact the average French voter.
It was even revealed just several days before the second round vote that Brussels was waiting for the French election to finish in order to announce a total ban on Russian energy imports. Mere days before the runoff France’s Foreign Minister was forced to admit that Macron was indeed in favor of such a ban. There was no hiding it: if French voters were voting with their pocketbooks Macron was going to cost them, and for years.
Macron was truly willing to lose his re-election in order to put Western globalist interests in front of France’s well-being.
However, in between the first and second rounds of voting any criticism of Macron’s policies or record in office was pathetically shouted down as “support for fascism”. Macron won a 58-42 victory, though the total masks the same problem as his 66-34 win in 2017: the obvious lack of a clear mandate for his proposals.
So if Macron is not going to stand up for France as regards to Russia, why would he do so for Iran?
His record on the JCPOA is already clear: five years of stalling, refusal to go against Washington and the clear failure to uphold France’s side of the deal.
Now that he’s re-elected the man who inspired the phrase “liberal strongman” will feel bolder, stronger and more willing to violently forge a tighter-knit Europe, not less willing. Untethered from re-election concerns the rabid Europhile Macron now has even less incentive to look out for the average person’s well-being. So no matter how much ending the sanction war on Iran would benefit France it must be understood that this is simply not a major factor in Macron’s political calculations.
Iran is forced to rely a lot on the French president to influence the West. Macron’s role has been to play the “good cop” to the “bad cop” of Washington and London, who are unable to conceal their anger for Iranian Islamic revolutionaries. Berlin silently holds its purse while Brussels insists that their pragmatic politicians are always just on the cusp of finding a solution to all things – of course they never have. The other JCPOA signatories – China and Russia – are not the problem to finding diplomatic solutions, of course.
Like with Donald Trump, nobody is really sure what Marine Le Pen would actually do if she ever took office, but at least there was hope that there could, maybe, possibly, perhaps be a voice in Paris for sovereign rights and mutually-beneficial cooperation. But the idea that Macron is going to turn into Charles De Gaulle and stand up to Washington and London is worse than wishful thinking. It’s definitely not based on his record, ideology or stated desires.
So don’t be surprised if Macron starts his second term with strong demands on Tehran.
The question is: how long will Iran put up with even more waiting for the West to fulfil their side of the JCPOA? Macron probably doesn’t realise that patience across all of Iran wore out at the end of February. If Macron thinks he can engage in his usual ineffectual diplomacy for another year before he has to get serious, he’d be quite wrong – Iran’s patience with the JCPOA is at an end.
Unlike with the US in 2020 there was no change in power so there’s no justifiable reason for any delays. Macron better get to Vienna immediately or his record thus far on the JCOPA will become etched in stone: failure.
Macron has been the most pro-Zionist French president in recent memory. He passed a bill which falsely and shamefully equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, something which epitomises the lack of intellectual rigour and duplicity in Macronian politics. The former Rothschild banker has been routinely described as out of his depth in international affairs, and he has always relied on more experienced advisors. He shuttles diplomatically because that’s the longtime role of Paris in Western international affairs – Macron, who married his high school drama teacher, is playing his assigned role.
Domestically, Macron has done things which Marine Le Pen would simply have never gotten away with. A stunning (but rarely reported) fact is that Macron’s government ministers openly criticised Le Pen for being “soft on Islam”. That was from the right-wing of Macron’s government – the less reactionary members of his cabinet regularly railed against the alleged perils of “Islamo-leftism”. Macron is against any leftism, of course.
Macron immediately took Francois Hollande’s multiyear state of emergency and legalised it, with Muslims the clear targets.
How did that affect Islamophobia in France? I can’t tell you, because in 2020 Macron forced the French Collective Against Islamophobia, an essential NGO for the nation, into exile in Belgium.
His so-called “anti-separatist law” of 2021 tried to ban the hijab for minors, and yet Macron hypocritically scored international points by opposing Le Pen’s proposed (and unenforceable) ban on the hijab in public spaces. I argue (and not at all to defend a Marine Le Pen who has gotten even worse than in 2017) that Le Pen had to go to these absurd lengths simply to appear as the more anti-Islam candidate opposite the extremely Islamophobic Emmanuel Macron.
But this is the first week of Macron’s second term – if we can’t be optimistic now, when can we be?
Russia, domestic Islamophobia and everything else aside: Macron needs to know that Iran is not waiting hardly any longer for positive and concrete steps on on the JCPOA. Tehran is close to making the decision for everyone.
Ramin Mazaheri (@RaminMazaheri2 on Twitter) is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. His new book is ‘France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values’. He is also the author of ‘ Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.
Pepe Escobar’s final conclusion, right next door:
“Islamophobia will not dissolve into a mellow woke rainbow. On the contrary: it will be instrumentalized as the perfect scapegoat for serial Macronist incompetence and corruption.”
Man… I don’t know what’s left for them to do, LOL? Macron did a lot.
I wanted to write a more complete vote wrap-up for The Saker, but simply too many things going on right now. Hopefully this Iran/Muslim-focused one satisfies some appetites for French news, and like Escobar’s it has quite a bit on Russia, too.
I’ll get a complete one up soon.
I wish my currently-being-serially published book’s chapter damning review of the Macron era (“To Yellow Vests He’s the Radical: Macron and ‘Neither Right nor Left but the Bourgeois Bloc’”) had been published just before the vote, but I didn’t quite make it there.
@Ramin Mazaheri
As a political journalist you have wasted a few years going round and round the EU$A sinkhole – France, U$A, again France. How about reporting from some positive countries again? If PressTV won’t assign you to an interesting part of the world, why not write about progressive social policies like you did on Iran and China way back? I remember your informative articles, and both countries have made their mark since then.
After a few decades of bourgeois stagnation and “end of history” fresh currents are stirring in the world. You and Pepe are among the few journalists with enough sense of political history to trace their course. I hope I am wrong but, much as I love France, I do not think Les Gilets Jaunes are stirring fresh currents; because they do not dance the Carmagnole, and the sound of their singing in the streets does not send a shiver down the spine of the parasite in the Elysee.
As many analysts have already mentioned, the vote for MLP in territories, eg Guadalupe, where voters did not have Dominion voting machines, ran from the 50%’s to the 70%’s for MLP.
Given the use of military grade weapons against unarmed civilian protesters in the Yellow Vests movement (and it is a movement) Macron is widely despised.
The unrest in France, starting in 2015 with Charlie Hebdo, Nice truck attack & other terrorist atrocities followed the French Parliament voting to recognize the statehood of Palestine. Clearly from the pictures we saw at the time Hollande was vulnerable to blackmail & had to go along with what was being done to his country, eventually being replaced by ex-Rothschild bankster Macron in 2017.
As Macron centralized power, even constitutional changes were made. Witness Article 49 which determines that the executive branch of government doesnt have to heed rulings made in the (legislative) National Assembly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_49_of_the_French_Constitution
In spite of its own national interest, France, as a fully-occupied government, continues its role supporting globalism (the domination by one entity, the US-UK over the world’s 207 other countries).
So much for self-determination!
If you’ve seen any of the many videos on FB of rioting in Paris after Macron’s ‘win’, it will be very interesting to see what results from the Assemblée Nationale election which must be held by June this year.
More unrest for what was once a civilized nation, now in its death throes.
A NATO war with Russia as is escalating now according to some reports involving France will in fact trigger Macron’s removal.
French Military will have to remove him over that as they face annihilation and also due to the high degree of election fraud that happened last weekend which he will be behind.
Macron has tried to make out he is de Gaulle reincarnated but he is nothing like him at all.
Charles de Gaulle would have him arrested and shot.
France will not be free or back to its old glory days until Macroon and his backers are removed permanently.
US regimes don’t want any European countries to be independent. Any country that strives for it will see unrest and all sorts of problems.
France is dying, so let it. Seems that’s its wish.
How does a divided society create a government?
To me, the first thing that has to go is this old feudal idea of one leader. The flaws with this are obvious in France, as they are in America. Macron had the support of, IIRC, 27% of the French people. Yet, now, he is given a huge amount of power. And, no matter who ‘won’ the election, the same result would still have been true. The top 3 really had the support of 27%, 23%, 22%. The ‘leader’ picked by such a system does not have the support of the people.
The ‘west’ has been going back towards such ‘imperial’ forms of rule. In America, of which I am most familiar, we have seen a steady trend that this one person who is ‘in power’ has more and more power at his disposal. We’ve seen the growth of the ‘Imperial Presidency’ since the term came into being with President Nixon and Chief of Staff Cheney. Each President holds more power than the previous. Things done by Bush/Obama/Trump would have been unheard of under Johnson/Nixon/Carter. Sanctions by executive order are just one example.
And yet, America now also has three or four main defined parties … the Right under Trump, the Progressives behind Bernie, and currently mainstream Republican and mainstream Democrat which both compete for being the party of Wall Street (and which I think will eventually merge into something similar to Putin’s United Russia). The winner of such a system can not possibly represent the whole. And will undoubtedly be hated by something like 2/3rds of the people (the last two Presidents achieve a steady-state approval rating of 40%).
Somebody has to come up with something better. And it would seem to involve decreasing, not increasing, the power held by these unpopular leaders. Decentralize power both among layers of governments and among people at the top. But the last thing this world seems to need is more unpopular Jupiters.
Anne two things can be done.
One is a revival of the concept of separation of powers (a European concept, I believe…wasn’t it Montesquieu?). Look at the US as an example. The imperial presidency goes back further….to the WWII period and immediately after. When was the last time the congress actually declared war? WWII!!! But in Korea et.al. over 100,000 US soldiers have died. Congress intentionally writes incomprehensible legislative monstrosities and then places blame on the Judiciary for “legislating from the bench.” The courts, for their part of the insane triad, issue decisions and suspensions of national legislation while their districts are a mere fraction of the nation.
The other is the concept of Federalism, long dead in Europe but (thanks to our Second Amendment) experiencing a revival in America. In our constitution, the Federal Government has enumerated powers. But its powers—especially its regulatory powers—have approached fascist levels, and the only in-office intellectual trying to ELIMINATE (not merely TRIM) that power is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. But since he is not a White Man’s (removed language,MOD), he doesn’t get any media support.
Unless the US and (good luck) European countries rediscover this concept, civil war is inevitable. Here in America gun ownership will lead to a new expression: political harvesting (in contrast to ballot harvesting.) See the writing of Thomas Jefferson (“the tree of democracy……”) on this concept.
Ramin please check Alastair Crooke’s piece here :
https://thealtworld.com/alastair_crooke/war-it-is-and-escalation-is-coming
“he last thing wanted by the European establishment is a ‘European Spring’ (as a counterpoint to the Arab Spring).”
Is Yellow Vest a European Spring?
MACRON was never elected, not 2022 nor in 2017, like 2020 USA election , it was a total fraud. He was installed by the criminal worldwide cabal.
He does not speak for but a tiny minority of the rich elite french oligarchs.
They do these frauds so openly now they seem to begging for another french revolution complete with brand new soon to be very used GUILLOTINES!