France Goes To The Polls to Save The Western World As We Know It

The French head to the polls today to vote in an election that could unravel the post-war Western world as we know it. Only a few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine that one election in France could be described in such a manner but autocracy and nativist, racist populism is on the rise and threatens the Western alliances that have prevailed since the end of World War II.

The election of Marine Le Pen, the head of the racist, xenophobic, nativist, anti-EU National Front, could threaten the very existence of the European Union and the potential disintegration of NATO. Her opponent, Emmanuel Macron has come out of nowhere to reach the final run-off  as voters rejected both of France's traditional parties. He is strongly pro-EU and a typical neoliberal believer in the need for "structural reform" which means giving more power to business and weakening workers' protections, leaving the left with no one to vote for. So, in many ways, as it is in many elections, the election will be a choice between to far less than ideal options. But it looks like the fear and disgust with Le Pen will be the determining factor. But we thought the same about Donald Trump, until James Comey intervened.

Macron was up in the polls by an enormous margin, over 20 points, in the latest polls. But just before the blackout period on Friday night which forbids campaigning and election coverage, an enormous dump of material hacked from the Macron campaign was dumped to the public. According to the Macron campaign, much of the material is legitimate but sprinkled in among that data are bogus documents intended to put the campaign in a bad light. Macron has correctly called this hack an attack upon French democracy and it is widely believed the Russians are once again behind it.

The venality of dumping this material at the last minute is that it will reverberate around social media, but, because of the press blackout, it will be very difficult for Macron to refute on a wide public platform that the French press would provide. According to one source, just 5% of the #MacronGate user Twitter accounts accounted to over 40% of the tweets on that hashtag, signaling a concerted and organized effort to push the meme.

Obviously, with Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise a far right nativist, racist autocrats in Europe and elsewhere, a victory for Le Pen in France, one of the pillars of the Western alliance, would shake the West to its core. We will have a clear winner sometime tonight and know at least the short term outlook for the future of Europe. It's not only amazing that we have reached this point but that we are also actually having to rely on the French.