‘Macron product of French establishment’

French centrist politician, Emmanuel Macron, has secured a crushing victory over far-right right-winger, Marine Le Pen. Press TV has asked John Mason, a professor of comparative politics at the William Paterson University, and Joe Quinn, senior editor of sott.net, to present their views of the presidential election results in France.

John Mason said that Macron is a representative of the French establishment because he represents “center right and center left.”

“He is a pure product of the French establishment elite recruit system,” the professor said.

“Macron may be a new liberal,” but he is not a German kind of new liberal, and “he has given the new liberal a new look,” Mason noted, adding that the president-elect will be “supportive of the European Union.”

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According to the academic, the abstention rate was not as high as anticipated and “something like seven million blank ballots were cast.”

The commentator also argued that part of Sunday’s vote for Macron was a vote against Marine Le Pen’s anti-EU anti-immigration “Communist Party.” 

Mason agreed that Le Pen has made considerable progress in the last two presidential elections, saying, “Marine Le Pen has improved her score considerably from 2012. She got over 10 million votes. She did not cross the 35 percent barrier. She did not get close to 40 percent.”

Le Pen has announced a sort of “new division and new cleavage in France politics,” Mason explained, forecasting her return in the 2022 presidential election.

“She is widely perceived as being the representative of a party which until quite recently was fascist” and “has its roots in the Algerian war,” he pointed out.

He further pointed to the impact of the French mass media on Le Pen’s defeat, noting, “She got 18.8 percent of the vote in 2012. This time, she went up to 35. She got over 10 million votes in this election. So, obviously whatever they (media outlets) were trying to do did not immunize about a third of French voters.”

Joe Quinn, the other panelist, told Press TV’s Debate program, “The high number of abstentions in this election was all because of Macron. People abstained because they did not like Macron.”

The analyst believes “the entire French election has been effectively a farce, a joke and a mockery of democracy because the media has used its influence to completely sideline Le Pen and to effectively force all French people to vote for Macron.”

Quinn said, “This is the establishment who put Macron forward,” because the candidate was unknown and had no popularity to get the majority of votes.

Macron has been presented as an “anti-establishment” figure but that is a “joke” because he is a candidate of the French establishment, Quinn opined.

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