The French Presidential Election: Macron - LePen

I watched Wednesday's debate on C-SPAN and they had English-speaking men to translate. It was interesting and the moderators let it flow. Their time-keeping method is a bit different than in America and I think that contributed to a flowing conversation.

The content of the debate seemed to be LePen attacking and alleging things and Macron talking about policy and asking LePen to stop interrupting him.

I was amazed how much LePen sounds like Donald Trump and how much they both sound like Vladimir Putin.

In Putin's world he wants Russia to be independent and strong and he hates gays, women, foreigners, and challengers to his power. In the world of Trump or LePen they are supposedly Independents (new "kids" on the block), but they are connected to the dominant Right Party. They are also anti-foreigners and anyone who opposes them. Trump is anti-women, but LePen is female, so we don't see that. The key thing with Trump and LePen is that they are connected to Putin at the hip (LePen's party actually received campaign contributions and loans from Putin and Russian banks) and their policy to make The United States or France independent would make those countries weaker -- "ripping France from the EU" as LePen put it or taking the U.S. out of NATO as Trump put it. Trump has since changed his mind about NATO, but I haven't heard any comment from LePen about it. During the debate she suggested that removing the Euro as their standard currency would be important to "free" France. Macron, who is an economist, laughed at that suggestion and pointed to ways it would be catastrophic.

It's clear France and the U.S. and other Western countries need to eliminate foreign contributions to political campaigns.

On the "fake news" front, it appears someone is spreading false stories already. After the masked-rioters of last week it appears obvious to me that it is Putin's people (little green men) at work.

Here is one story about the French government trying to track down the false news story authors/distributors. Apparently they have a law forbidding those fake stories.

Here is another story which apparently was reported just a minute ago. It's about stolen e-mails being leaked. Sound familiar? These are the same techniques used during the U.S. election campaign and they are all attributable to Putin. I haven't ready this story yet, so...