The second round of the presidential primary organized by the right wing and center parties in France, elected François Fillon as their 2017 Presidential candidate with a whopping majority: 65.5% against Alain Juppé’s 32.5%. The vote result, however, represents 4 million votes, a small sample of the French political spectrum, composed essentially of wealthy and elderly voters. If Fillon wants to win in the general election, he will have to expand his voter base, something difficult to do with the program he is defending.

As a leading member of Les Républicains and former Prime Minister of Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12), he faces a very complicated task, because he wants to incarnate both Gaullist and Thatcherite policies.

On foreign policy he wants to re-establish a certain independence of France. He considers the U.S. France’s main ally, but he wants to free France from “the too strong dependency on the United States” and thought Sarkozy’s decision to bring France back into NATO was “stupidity.” He is open to collaborating with Russia to resolve the Southwest Asia wars and wants to lift the sanctions. He developed a close contact to Putin when they were both Prime Ministers, and since then he has attended the Valdai Discussion Club meetings. There is a, however, dose of “realism” in his thinking, towards Russia but also China. As he stated, “Russia is a dangerous country, full of nuclear weapons; it must not be pushed to make diplomatic mistakes, to harden up, to isolate itself, and to turn towards China.”

While this change is a relief for all those who feared that Hollande’s submission to the Anglo-American elites was leading France straight into a new world war, Fillon’s economic “shock therapy,” explicitly modeled on Thatcher’s policies, is no solution to the existential crisis in the trans-Atlantic zone and can only create conflict with a majority of the French population. Fillon has not once addressed the issue of a needed financial reform, not a word about Glass-Steagall, nor of a Roosevelt-modeled reconstruction. He is proposing the elimination of 500,000 public employee jobs (10% of the public workforce), replacing the 35-hour workweek with 39 hours, at lower pay; extending retirement age from 62 currently to 65 years. He thinks his ” fiscal shock” will restart the economy: EU40 billion in “social costs” paid by employers (social security and other social contributions); EU10 billion in tax cuts; elimination of the tax on fortunes (ISF), the 75% tax on fortunes of more than EU1 million per year; a reduction of taxes on companies from 35% currently to 25%.

On European questions, he is not for a full reform. Fillon calls for creating a Eurozone government, which however would not be run by the EU Commission, but by a secretariat made of member states. He will maintain the Maastricht criteria — 3% ceiling on national deficit to adopt the euro currency — but calls for the ECB mission to be enlarged from mere defense of the currency to promoting economic development. Fillion also calls for the construction of a European defense for necessary cost sharing, and concerning the problem of mass immigration, he calls on Europe to set up guards at its borders, to stop migrants from coming in.

Running Sans Perspective

His Thatcherite conversion occurred in London in 2014. At that time he complained to the Daily Telegraph that “since the end of Second World War, France has never had its Thatcherian revolution.” A former minister of Les Républicains who views himself as a Gaullist, Henri Guaino, commented that Fillon’s statement that “de Gaulle was a liberal on economics,” had a “hallucinated version of history” and called his policies “a program of devastation of national solidarity which will create great difficulties, if applied, to all those who want to rebuild the nation, reinforce social cohesion and restart the economy.”

Fillon’s primary win, while a big surprise for the media and polls, cannot be really seen as part of the ongoing wave of international change that started since Brexit, the Trump election, in that, the people voting for him are not the middle classes or working poor who are questioning the paradigm of globalization and want to go for industrial and infrastructure reconstruction of their countries. Fillon’s electorate is essentially wealthy and retired people, of conservative religious values. In fact, Fillon got a large part of the vote of “Sens Commun,” the Catholic traditionalist organization which opposed Hollande’s gay marriage law.

Because of its nature, Fillon’s candidacy could reshuffle all the cards of the presidential campaign. Until now, the polls were predicting a first round of the Presidential vote as being between Sarkozy or Hollande, and Marine Le Pen, and a second round being won by Sarkozy or Hollande, against Marine Le Pen, benefitting from a national mobilization to stop Le Pen.

Fillon’s rabid “shock therapy” policies will have the opposite effect, of strengthening the Socialist Party, which is today almost dead. That is already happening. Following Fillon’s victory, Hollande’s Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, more popular than Hollande, told the media that he would be willing to participate in the left-wing presidential primary, even if Hollande decides to run.

The Front National (FN) will also be affected in its drive for power. Fillon’s call for greater independence, his alliance with the conservative traditionalist right, and his pro-Putin stance, will drain a fair part of support that had contributed to FN’s recent rise. Marine Le Pen is left with no other choice than to go for the vote of the forgotten men and women of France. Last night she denounced “the social destruction” that that policy would create. But in that task, the Front National will have to confront France’s equivalent of Die Linke, the Communists led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

The flight forward of all these actors into the extremes, none of whom has any perspective, for the future will lead to chaos in France. In this context, Cheminade’s own candidacy defending a strong Glass-Steagall Act reform, and policies of peace through mutual development with Russia and China’s New Silk Road, are crucial for the future of France.

In an interview with Sputnik Christine Bierre, Chief Editor of Nouvelle Solidarite, the newspaper of the French political party Solidarite & Progres, formulated Cheminade’s views on the victory of François Fillon of the right wing primaries preceding the April 2017 French presidential elections.

The good news is that “François Fillon’s foreign policies would be a break with those of François Hollande, which have been, with very few exceptions, practically dictated by Obama and his British allies. A regular participant to the Valdai Club meetings and favorable to a healthy, if not uncritical collaboration, with Vladimir Putin, Fillon announced already he will act to lift the sanctions against Russia and collaborate with President Putin to re-establish stability in Syria with president Bashar al-Assad and eliminate ISIS [daesh],” Bierre emphasized.

The bad news is the fact that at the same time, Fillon’s economic policies “will not make it easy for him to win,” the journalist pointed out. The crux of the matter is that Fillon, dubbed by The Telegraph as “the first truly Thatcherite leader of the Right,” is pushing ahead with radical economic reforms. “Fillon wants to eliminate 500,000 public jobs during his tenure! No less than 10 percent of all public workers. He will reduce the ‘social’ charges paid by companies (covering for costs of unemployment, retirement, public health insurance, social security, etc.), by 50 billion and scrap the tax on large fortunes (ISF) and the 75 percent tax on revenues exceeding one million euros, and extend retirement age to 65 years,” Bierre highlighted. These tough policies will undoubtedly provoke an upsurge on the part of left-wing forces, playing into the Socialist Party’s hands, the journalist noted. “Whether he will be able to rally a majority of the country to those ultra-liberal policies with his present policies is yet to be seen…” she said.

What are Fillon and Le Pen’s strengths and weaknesses? “Their strength from the standpoint of world politics, is that they both want peace with Russia and a France which recovers its traditional independence from the Western powers,” Bierre emphasized.”Their weakness is that neither has the economic policies to break France loose from the Western oligarchy, i.e. the top financial powers operating out of Wall Street and the City of London, which define the policies of the West, including its hawkish attitude against Russia,” she stressed.

The journalist highlighted that neither Fillon, nor Le Pen is calling for a financial reform which will bring an end to pumping trillions of euros into “Too big to fail” banks since the 2008 crisis. “Deutsche bank is virtually bankrupt, the Italian banking sector, according to the Italian government, has 200 to 400 billion euros of bad loans,” the journalist pointed out, warning that the implosion of the West’s financial system is just round the corner. “So long as this is not solved, no President elect will be able to do anything, because those banks are unable to lend for investment, and totally dependent on liquidity injections (quantitative easing), in the trillions of euros, from the European Central Bank (ECB), monthly or yearly, which they use strictly for speculation, in order to survive,” Bierre observed.

In contrast to Fillon and Le Pen, Jacques Cheminade, the Solidarité & Progrès party’s presidential candidate, calls for “for a strict separation between useful banks (deposits and credit to the economy) and investment banks (speculation),” she emphasized drawing parallels between Cheminade’s concept and the US’ Glass-Steagall Act. “Following such a reorganization, a re-industrialization policy will be urgently needed to restart the economies,” Cheminade says, as quoted by Bierre. For his part, Fillon “wants to change the orientations of the ECB from its current function — which is only to fight against inflation — to being a Bank promoting investment in productive activities. This amounts to try to cook a new soup with the same ingredients,” she elaborated.”M. Fillon does not say it, but all this requires a complete overhaul of different treaties going back to the ‘Maastricht Treaty’ (1992) which set up the ECB as an autonomous bank with only one responsibility: ensuring the stability of the currency,” the French journalist continued. “The statutes of the ECB explicitly forbid it from extending loans to governments for investment in infrastructure or whatever other needs,” she highlighted.

Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen promised that she will organize a referendum on whether to remain in the EU. However, “her proposals for a follow-up are totally unfounded,” Bierre believes. “[Le Pen’s] economic and financial plan for the 2012 presidential elections which is still valid, proposed to go back to the French Franc, and called for the Banque de France to issue the equivalent of 100 billion francs debt per year, of which 90 percent would go to in advance down payment of the totality of the French debt, and only 10 percent to new investment projects!” the French journalist noted. “During that period the same policy of ‘fiscal rigor’ which we have now, would apply to French citizens,” Bierre warns.

For his part, Cheminade proposes to re-establish Europe’s original central banks and return to their original currencies, while keeping the euro as a common currency. He is calling “for pulling out of the Euro and of the EU treaty (1992 — 2017), and rebuilding Europe around the core nations that founded Europe,” the journalist emphasized highlighting the importance of European nations taking over control of their monetary policies. “In order to free themselves from the grip of the Western predatory financial centers, France and Europe, says M. Cheminade, should orient towards the BRICS and support the strong dynamic created by China and Russia in particular, in the last years, to create the credit institutions of a new world economic order (AIIB, NDB, Silk Road funds, etc.),” Bierre stressed.”His approach, if compared to that of Russian economists, is based ‘on the issuance of public credit for research and industrial development, of the type promoted by [Russian economist] Sergei Glaziev,'” the French journalist underscored.