Difference between revisions of "Emmanuel Macron"

Revision as of 03:56, March 6, 2019

Emmanuel Macron (born December 21, 1977) is an elitist liberal and globalist French politician and a former Banker of the Rothschild & Cie Banque.^[1] On May 7, 2017, he won the French Presidential election, defeating right-wing populist Marine Le Pen, with 66.1% of the vote, and he became the 25th president of the French Republic a week later. Macron is a europhile who strongly supports the socialist and globalist European Union, as well as the War on Sovereignty. Macron is an agnostic.^[2]

Biography

Macron was born on December 21, 1977, in Amiens, he studied on the Jésuites de la Providence and later philosophy on the Paris Nanterre University.

He began a relationship with Brigitte, his (married) teacher in high school, once he turned 18 (the French age of majority; the two first met when he was 15 and she was 39). His parents attempted to end the relationship by sending him away for his final year of school, but the two reconnected and married after her divorce from her first husband (and father of her three children) was final. The couple has no children of their own.

Business career

Macron worked for the Inspection générale des finances, a financial administrative body in France. He left this company with a transfer of €50.000.^[3] After that he worked in a high rank at the Banque Rothschild & Cie.

En Marche! and the 2017 French presidential election

Macron hit in the face with an egg during the 2017 election.

Macron was a member of the French Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste) in the past, in 2016 he founded the party En Marche! a leftist liberal party which supports, or is at least friendly towards, a federal European Union, anti-Israel policies, and mass-immigration policies which continue after five years by President Hollande.^[4]

Former United States President Barack Obama spoke with Macron, indicating his support for the candidate in the 2017 French presidential election.^[5] After the first round, Obama explicitly endorsed Macron's candidacy.^[6] By contrast, incumbent U.S. President Donald Trump called his opponent, the euroskeptic Marine Le Pen, the strongest of the presidential candidates, particularly on borders and security;^[7] and British politician and radio talk show host Nigel Farage endorsed Le Pen.^[8]

During the last days of the campaign, Macron stated that terrorism would be "part of our daily lives for the years to come."^[9] He voiced opposition to arresting and deporting the known radical Islamists in France due to "intelligence" purposes.^[10]

Macron won first place in the first round of the election, advancing to the runoff along with Le Pen.^[11]

During the election runoff, a socially conservative group which promotes family values, Manif pour Tous ("Protest for everyone"), strongly urged voters not to vote for Macron due to his extreme socially leftist and anti-family policies.^[12]

The media was desperate to influence the election outcome and framed Macron in a flattering light. They called Macron an independent centrist.^[13] Yet he is a left-wing liberal (by US standards) who openly and strongly supports globalism, extreme European integration and the EU, the politically socialist status quo, and left-wing former U.S. President Barack Obama. Macron is not much different from the current French president Hollande on social issues although on economic issues he is more pragmatic. Critics condider him a globalist toady.

In April 2017, Macron refused to communicate and denied press access to the Russian state channel RT, which his campaign accused of spreading fake news and disinformation.^[14][15] This measure is comparable to President Trump's decision to refuse several liberal media outlets, such as CNN, from his press meetings, where there was much criticism about this "press ban" as opposed to the little criticism over Macron's actions, which exposes the further hypocrisy by liberals.^[16]

In a speech later in the campaign, Macron called the Le Pen voters/supporters "hateful cowards", "anti-France" and "true enemies", displaying his liberal values.^[17] This was seen as similar to Hillary Clinton's "deplorable" statement.^[17]

About nine gigabytes of data of emails from the campaign of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron were posted online^[18][19] by a user called EMLEAKS to Pastebin on Friday the fifth of May. The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and coordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information." the statement said.^[20]

French president

Macron's first phone call as president-elect was to Angela Merkel.^[21] He assumed office on May 14, 2017,^[22] and immediately set to lobbying additional EU centralization.^[23] Despite inviting U.S. climate scientists to move to France during the campaign, none had accepted his request by his early presidency.^[24] He received criticism for attempting to control media coverage over his administration,^[25] and by 2018, his proposed reforms had stalled and his support had deeply fallen.^[26]

Macron, a liberal elite, chose an authoritarian and elitist governing style, and his administration's officials stated he would not hold question-answer press conferences because his thinking was too "complex" for journalists to understand.^[27] He has been criticized for having an arrogant personality.^[28] In his first three months in office, Macron spent €26,000 (around $30,000) in makup-related expenses.^[29][30][31] In July 2018, he came under criticism for spending hundreds of thousands of euros of taxpayer money on lavish expenses, such as a swimming pool and replacing tableware with individually-decorated dishes.^[32]

Rather than contemplate France's and Europe's historically low birth rates and population loss, Macron (who himself has no children) criticized Africans for having "seven or eight children per woman", which he said explains the continent's poor condition.^[33] In August 2018, he criticized his own country as being "Gauls who are resistant to change."^[34]

Abortion and other social issues

Macron praised a May 2018 referendum in Ireland that legalized abortions in the country, calling it "an essential symbol for women’s freedom."^[35][36]

In September 2018, Macron falsely claimed that it's impossible to find a "perfectly educated" woman with "seven, eight, nine children," despite many examples to the contrary.^[37]

The French parliament, under Macron's party, voted to restrict parental rights protected under Napoleon by symbolically banning spanking.^[38]

Environmental policies

See also: Yellow vest movement

In attempting to adhere to the Paris climate agreement, which Macron strongly supported, the Macron Administration stopped granting licenses for oil and gas exploration in France and its territories,^[39] and it set a goal of ending the sale of gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2040 in its effort to comply with the agreement's carbon reduction goals.^[40][41][42]

In an attack on U.S. President Donald Trump's climate policies, Macron announced he would host a contest for American climate change scientists and award "Make Our Planet Great Again" grants to the winners.^[43] By December 2017, 13 climate scientists accepted his offer.^[44]

In November and December 2018, Macron's proposal to raise fuel taxes – which he proposed to help end fossil fuel consumption in France – was met with heavy protests in Paris^[45] which were overwhelmingly supported by the Franch public.^[46][47] Though most protesters were peaceful, Macron implied that most were violent because of a small number of violent incidents.^[48] The protests were the worst since the May 1968 riots, and Macron considered declaring a state of emergency.^[49] Eventually, Macron's government delayed the tax increase by six months,^[50] and shortly afterward, his government announced it would permanently abandon the tax increase.^[51] Later, however, Macron lashed out at the protestors, claiming they were a "hateful crowd."^[52]

Free speech and political correctness

In November 2017, Macron proposed making "gender-based insults" illegal in France, a politically correct move that would lead to the further reduction of free speech rights in the country.^[53] In an April 2018 speech in front of the U.S. Congress, Macron called for media censorship in order to combat what he called "fake news."^[54]

European Union

During his 2017 presidential campaign, Macron frequently flew the EU flag, and as president in 2017, France officially recognized the European Union's flag and anthem.^[55] In his new year address, Macron broke from tradition by addressing his "fellow citizens" of the EU rather than of just France, and he called on them to resist "nationalists and [Euro]sceptics" in 2018.^[56] In February 2019, Macron's government passed a law requiring the EU flag, with the French flag, to be displayed in all classrooms.^[57]

At a speech at the European Parliament in April 2018, Macron called for "European sovereignty", meaning increased European integration, and called for a purge of populism.^[58] In June 2018, he referred to populism and Euroskepticism as a "leprosy" that must be fought, rather than criticizing his own government.^[59][60]

In a speech in August 2018, Macron again called for a European superstate, and stated that Europe should become "the model for a humanist refoundation of globalisation." He vowed to defeat nationalistic and patriotic forces and compared nationalists to "those who advocate hate speech," claiming that France is "an enemy of nationalism, of the politics of hatred," in addition to calling Viktor Orbán's pro-Christianity speeches "anti-European."^[61] He claimed that "the 'true Dane' [or true Frenchman] does not exist — he is a European."^[34] He has criticized the Visegrád nations for taking a pro-national sovereignty approach.^[62] In a speech in November 2018, Macron called for "shar[ing] decision making on policies, migration policies, development policies, and share our fiscal resources," and he stated that "we must have common defence, turn the euro into an international currency with a budget, and create a European asylum office."^[63]

Macron has criticized European countries for purchasing American-British weaponry, ironically stating that "Europe won’t be strong unless it is truly sovereign and knows how to protect itself."^[64] He has called for a European army to, among other goals, protect the EU from the United States.^[65] France led the push for a united EU army.^[66]

Macron reportedly sought to punish Italy for pursuing right-wing populist policies, including pushing for sanctions behind the scenes.^[67] He attacked the United Kingdom for voting for Brexit.^[68][69]

In January 2019, Macron and Germany's Merkel prepared to sign a treaty further eroding the national sovereignty of both countries and tying them closer together.^[70]

Immigration

In April 2018, Macron stated that a "historic" and "unprecedented" age of mass migration was beginning in Europe, and that "Europe has its destiny bound with Africa."^[71] Also in April 2018, Macron stated that mass migration was "not linked" to the high crime rates for migrants in Europe and that Europeans actually were to blame for them.^[72] When the media leaked comments the French ambassador to Hungary, Eric Fournier, made defending Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán's conservative immigration policies, Macron sharply rebuked him^[73] and fired him shortly afterward.^[74]

Despite lecturing conservatives and other European countries on the importance of supporting mass migration, Macron himself turned away migrants at France's borders, as Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini pointed out.^[75]

Foreign policy

Macron failed to stand up for Western values as France's president,^[76] and he advocated for globalist policies.

At the 2017 United Nations meeting, Macron gave a speech directly opposed to U.S. President Donald Trump's speech, with the latter supporting nationalist policies.^[77] On April 25, 2018, Macron gave a speech to the U.S. Congress in which he again spoke out against Trump's nationalist, America First policies, as well as nationalism in general, favoring globalism and expressing a belief in the Idea of Progress.^[78] In that speech, Macron misattributed a famous phrase used by Ronald Reagan to Theodore Roosevelt.^[79] In March 2018 Macron called President Trump's decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem an 'error'.^[80] On May 31, 2018, Macron called steel and aluminum tariffs imposed by Trump "illegal."^[81][82][83] On September 25, 2018, Macron attacked nationalism at the UN General Assembly, criticizing President Trump's positions that he articulated shortly prior.^[84] In a speech in front of world leaders on November 11, 2018, Macron again attacked nationalism and President Trump's America First policies, claiming that "nationalism is treason."^[85] Days after Macron's public comments, 200,000 French protesters took to the streets in anti-Macron protests. 1 person was killed, and 227 arrested.^[86]

When France conducted airstrikes on Syria along with the UK and the U.S. in April 2018, Macron stated they were "for the honor of the international community."^[87]

In November 2018, Macron criticized President Trump, claiming that his policies were "done to the detriment of his allies."^[88] He threatened to veto an EU–Mercosur trade deal if conservative Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro withdrew from the Paris agreement.^[89]

Approval ratings

Macron's approval ratings fell deeply in his first three months in office,^[90] and they continued to collapse.^[91] Most commentators attributed this to his authoritarian tendencies and aggressive media self-promotion.^[92] By the first 100-day mark of his presidency, Macron's approval ratings were at 36%, 10% lower than his predecessor's was at the same point in his presidency.^[93] It was noted that Macron's approval rating fell even lower than U.S. President Donald Trump,^[94][95][96] who the mainstream media noted had low poll numbers himself. By July 2018, Macron's approval rating had fallen to 32%.^[97] In September 2018, Macron's approval ratings fell below 20%.^[98] An Ifop poll in November 2018 reported that Macron's approval rating was at 25%,^[99] and a BVA poll later that month found Macron's approval ratings to be lower than Marine Le Pen, who he defeated in 2017.^[100] A poll conducted by Paris Match and Sud Radio found that Macron had only a 23% approval rating.^[101]

An Ifop-Fiducial poll taken in April 2018 found that 58% of French voters were unhappy with Macron, and 73% described him as authoritarian.^[102] In response to his low approval ratings, Macron attacked conservative populist-nationalism.^[103]

References