Emmanuel Macron: the weakling autocrat brought to power by American meddling
Yesterday’s edition of ‘Highlights’ on Press TV, Iran focused on the ongoing political and street fighting in France over President Emmanuel Macron’s use of article 49.3 in the French constitution to pass a highly contested law reforming the pension age without putting it to a vote in the lower house of the legislature.
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My fellow panelist, Moustafa Praori, an academic and political commentator in Paris, provided a succinct explanation of how the presidential system functions in France and why, at the end of the day, most likely everyone will go back to their jobs without there being any big changes in political life. He went on to opine what a pity it was that French voters ignored alternative candidates to Macron on the Left in the last election. Had they chosen candidate Jean-Luc Mélanchon instead of Macron, they would have been spared the present conflict.
I am delighted that our host allowed me to put the issue of why and how Macron came to power in the broader context that I first set out four years ago: namely that over the past decade or more massive American meddling in the French presidential campaigns has delivered to power in Paris the CIA’s choice for the job by eliminating from the races the most capable candidates.
I refer readers to an essay entitled “Emmanuel Macron’s Speech to the Joint Session of Congress, 25 April 2018” in my collection A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs (2019). The concluding section of that lengthy essay, dealing with “How Macron came to power: US meddling in French politics,” takes the story back to the French presidential race of 2012, when the United States intelligence agencies effectively knocked out of the race the leading candidate of France’s Socialist Party, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was succeeded as standard-bearer by the nonentity, the utter nincompoop François Hollande. As we know Hollande won the presidency and oversaw the unrelenting decline of France as a European and world power. His time in office was a time of economic stagnation and a weak France following timidly in the footsteps of the more dynamic Angela Merkel.
From the perspective of today’s number one international issue, the war in Ukraine and how the Minsk Accords were betrayed precisely by its signatories Merkel and Hollande, it bears mention that the ‘dynamic’ Merkel was herself subject to personal control from Washington. There was the possibility of blackmailing her over indiscretions in her personal telephone conversations that the CIA was listening to, and in particular over her sexual orientation, about which there was titillating speculation at the time.
How Strauss-Kahn was removed, we all know. He was arrested in a New York hotel on charges of attempted rape of a chamber maid. There can be little doubt that this was a well-prepared case of politically-motivated entrapment. The lurid details of this escapade appeared immediately in the American and world media, together with pitiful images of Strauss-Kahn, in handcuffs, being arraigned in a New York court. This absolutely finished his political career.
And why was Strauss-Kahn removed? The reasons were in the public domain at the time. In his exercise of his then position as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund operating from offices in Washington, D.C., Strauss-Kahn was known for his anti-American views and in particular for his advocacy of dethroning the US dollar as the global reserve currency in favor of an abstraction not tied to one country, the Special Drawing Rights. I add, parenthetically, that at present, the question of staving off de-dollarization by removing Strauss-Kahn from international politics in 2011-2012 looks quaint given the way Washington has itself done more than anyone could ever imagine to dethrone the dollar by its own unprecedented action, freezing Russia’s state reserves on deposit in America last spring within the context of Ukraine war related sanctions.
Now, to return to Mr. Macron. His election was made possible when US intelligence agencies intervened in the French presidential race of 2016-2017. At the time, the Republicans, the centrist party of Nicolas Sarcozy, on 20 November 2016 had voted in a primary election to put forward as its candidate François Fillon, Sarkozy’s prime minister from 2007-2012. Fillon was experienced, competent and a self-declared economic reformer. In that sense, he was a strong candidate to go up against the extreme Right candidate Marine Le Pen, a Putin sympathizer and opponent of NATO whom Washington abhorred.
Unfortunately for him, Fillon was also not liked across the Atlantic, where he was known as a ‘friend’ of Vladimir Putin. On the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2015, Fillon had appeared on television advocating accommodation with Russia and had publicly opposed the U.S. sanctions on Russia that followed from the Magnitsky Act of 2012. His election, like the election of the leading candidate from the Right, Marine Le Pen, would create a transatlantic duo working against the existing strategic direction of U.S. policy, which was to bait the Russian bear.
Thus, it came as no surprise to those of us with an understanding of the ways and means of U.S. intelligence operatives that Fillon’s candidacy was derailed just weeks before the first round of presidential elections when he was charged with embezzlement amidst allegations that he had put his wife on the public payroll for little or no work.
With Fillon publicly discredited, the anti-Le Pen torch passed to the dark horse candidate Emmanuel Macron, who was running on an anti-corruption platform that was in its own way ‘populist,’ though safely friendly to the existing World Order. The rest, as they say, is history.
Finally, I note that the issues by which the US agencies might later blackmail Macron to keep him in line once to took power are discussed at length in my aforementioned article.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023