France, Europe, Putin, Ukraine, what's next ?
Danger ahead !
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We aim here to bring you regular updates on factors and events impacting financial markets in the Middle East and North Africa region with an accent on foreign exchange and rates.
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Yes everybody was seeing the far right making gains in this weekend's elections for the European Parliament.
Yes it was expected that Macron's party would get trashed as Olaf Scholz in Germany and Georgia Meloni of Italy would get stronger.
What was not expected was for Macron to dissolve the lower house and call for elections in a few weeks of time. He is going to have to compete though with the Euro football championship .
Some demonstrations yesterday in Paris in opposition to the extreme right peril as we regularly see in those circumstances like after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan but they remain circumscribed to the big cities and Paris.
What if France would vote in Marine Le Pen ! Marine Le Pen and Marion Marechal ( born Le Pen) have been discussing an alliance . Although history is always much more complicated, Jean Marie Le Pen, father of Marine and founder of the party, holocaust denier, enrolled in the paratroopers as a young officer, fought in Indochina and Algeria , to keep both part of the French “empire”, a few years after having spent close to 5 under Nazi occupation. The French army couldn’t fight the Nazi but wanted to fight under equipped Vietnamese and Algerian soldiers to retain its “ trophies”. Before passing away at the end of WW2, US President Roosevelt was well irritated by the desires of England ( they hadn’t been vanquished) and the French ( they had been occupied) to recover their colonies.” We didn’t fight against tyranny to reconstitute colonial empires” . At the end, the French expeditionary corp , equipped by the Americans, lost to the Vietnamese in a stupidly thought battle ( never occupy a valley surrounded by hills ) and evacuated Algeria 8 years later after a bloody war that is still poisoning relationships between the two countries and has helped maintained a dictatorship in Alger since 1962. Jean Marie Le Pen was fed on these two lost wars, on the betrayals of various politicians and political parties.
Those anticipated elections are a monumental bet for Macron that could backfire massively . Much more than for Rishi Sunak in England unless the polls can get it wrong by over 20 %. A far right, xenophobic, racist government in France. I would rather have Boris Johnson..
Can't quite call them fascist though as they don't seem to have a big ideological baggage underpinning their movement except that they are against everything. There is not that cult of personality, that towering of the State above the individual, that militarism that we often see in fascist regime.
True , Georgia Meloni's party ( Brothers of Italy) hails from Mussolini but she has moderated her speech and has been a supporter of European policies ( even more so when you receive 200 bn euros of financial support ). Unlike Berlusconi who was a party buddy of Putin, Mrs Meloni has strongly supported Ukraine.
Some European extremist parties ( and in particular Marine Le Pen) have taken funding from Russian interest and they don't hide their sympathies for him.
Putin is claiming domestically to fight Ukraine to eradicate its fascist-nazi regime ( led by Pdt Zelensky, Jewish). Ukraine's government has many faults but is certainly not fascist. Yes it is corrupt but its different Oligarchs have been competing against each others allowing for a continued democratic process. Yes there has been some groups of ultranationalists bordering fascists who fought Poles in the west of what is now Ukraine (1945) and also fought the Red Army and NKVD well into the mid 50's.A unit, called the Azoz battalion was also seen during the Maidan protests but were quickly marginalized as not to give weight to Putin’s early accusations.
So a bit of contradiction for Putin ( not the first time ) of claiming to fight a war against a fascist regime ( which it isn't ) and have ( unwritten ) alliances with parties that are extreme right, share many of his core ideologies ( anti, anti..) and are closer to his fascist footprint. But if you can claim ,staring at cameras, that those little green men in arms fighting in the Donbass or Crimea who look and smell like Russians are not Russian soldiers .. until they are then everything is possible.
That Europe continues to steer further right is a very welcome news for Putin.
There is more resistance to the extreme in eastern European countries, they are more aware of Putin's risk.
French foreign policy and defence will continue to be Macron's prerogative but his term ends in 27.. Maybe the danger doesn’t come from outside ( Trump or Putin) but from inside ! At least for France !