Le Pen – praag.org

Marine le Pen: We must resist corporations

Leader of France’s National Front party, Marine Le Pen, has launched a month-long blitz against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – a proposed EU-US treaty, which has been criticized for secretiveness and lack of accountability.

“It is vital that the French people know about TTIP’s content and its motivations in order to be able to fight it. Because our fellow countrymen must have the choice of their future, because they should impose a model for society that suits them, and not forced by multinational companies eager for profits, Brussels technocrats sold to the lobbies, politicians from the UMP [party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy], who are subservient to these technocrats,” Le Pen said during a press conference in Paris.

Since 2013, open-ended negotiations between Washington and Brussels have drawn up the framework for the agreement, intended to standardize legislation and bring down trade barriers between them.

As per US practice, the contents of all economic treaties are classified. The EU has recently set up reading rooms throughout Europe for officials with clearance – but only a few thousand people have had access to the working documents.

Le Pen hit out at the secrecy of the negotiations, which have featured mostly bureaucrats from the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, and nebulous “stakeholders” from businesses and public organizations. As a member of the European parliament, she forwarded a motion for greater transparency in negotiations last year. Le Pen’s motion was defeated.

She is now hoping for grassroots support.

“I am convinced that we can push back the TTIP if the peoples are informed of its content, and if they decide themselves to join us in order to express their disagreement concerning this treaty,” Le Pen told journalists.

Both of France’s leading parties have endorsed the treaty, but Le Pen is relying on strong the anti-European sentiment that propelled her party to first place in last year’s elections for the European parliament.

While TTIP’s authors promise that the treaty will bring an extra 0.5 percent GDP to Europe and the US, figures across the political spectrum have expressed concern.

US President Barack Obama, who is also negotiating a similar treaty with Asia, was defeated by his own party in the Senate last week when he asked for fast-track approval to handle negotiations. Additional votes will be required if the proposed legislation is not to be bogged down in the US chambers of Congress.

Meanwhile, European legislators have raised a host of issues, in particular concerning the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism outlined in the treaty. The controversy centers on the proposed special economic tribunal, which would operate outside the traditional legal system and allow corporations to challenge governments.

In April, thousands took to the streets of Brussels, Madrid, Berlin and Helsinki to protest against the secretive deal.

Front National at the gates of power

Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, reminded his bedraggled Socialist Party in September last year of the obvious: “The Front National is at the gates of power” as the Left tries to avert the electoral catastrophe with the usual mantras: “racism, antisemitism and homophobia“.

But the public is no longer impressed and could not care less, just like the when East-Germans no longer believed in the slogans of their lefties and started to chant: ‘we are the people’.

A low turn out today in France’s local council elections will probably play into the hands of the nationalists. The socialists are demoralized, like everywhere in Europe. Their globalist world view is collapsing. Polls predict that the National Front will be in the lead.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, already has 18 council seats, and in the European Parliament in Brussels, the party has 23 MEPs.

EU funds just reinforce the dictatorship of Brussels and impoverish the downtrodden rural and small-town folk of the region, the terror of the French establishment says. “I have to remind people ad nauseam that this is not European money. It’s part of French taxpayers’ money that transits through Brussels with the rest going to pay for central and eastern Europe,” Le Pen sighs.

Le Pen is tilling the fertile electoral soil of taxes and immigration for a run at the Élysée Palace in two years’ time.

The pro-American elite is terrified of a President Le Pen since 2002 when Jean-Marie, Marine’s father and the founder of the Front, as it is known, featured in the run-off for the presidency. He was defeated by Jacques Chirac when voters rallied to block the pariah.

With his blonde daughter now in charge of the family firm, prospects for the right look brighter.

As the New Statesman eloquently puts it:

The country is in a foul mood. The sense of dispossession at the hands of a hostile world is feeding contempt for la France d’en haut – the governing caste. President François Hollande and his Parti Socialiste (PS) have been disowned by many of their disappointed voters, discredited by scandal and economic failure.

Marine Le Pen, 46, the youngest of the 86-year-old patriarch’s three daughters, is gliding above this desolate landscape, a protective Joan of Arc.

Le Pen is amused by the left’s indignation over the way that she has broadened her attraction, softening the anti-immigration rhetoric and adding Socialist voters to the party’s hard-right faithful, says Charles Bremner who interviewed her many times.

Charles de Gaulle, whom Le Pen admires, was accused of being both a fascist and a Bolshevik she says. “France is neither on the right nor the left – it’s just France . . . I don’t have the feeling that I tell patriots on the left different things from what I say to patriots of the right.”

When she was eight, a bomb destroyed the family flat. No one was ever arrested for the crime. Her father, an ex-parabat, soldiered on.

Also part of the family is Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, 24, one of the Front’s three MPs, and the daughter of Yann, Marine’s second sister. She is said to be closer to the patriarch than Marine because she opposes gay marriage, while Marine tolerates it.

CIA torture: France should exit NATO says Le Pen

NATO is an opportunity for the United States to extend its influence

The shocking revelations of CIA torture techniques give France a reason to exit NATO, National Front party leader Marine Le Pen said on Saturday. The report on the CIA’s former interrogation practices has drawn wide criticism since its release.

“If indeed everyone is outraged by the tortures used by the US then, let’s leave NATO,” Le Pen said during an interview with Europe 1 radio channel. She wrote the same statement on her Twitter account.

The US Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA “torture report,” which details the CIA’s use of torture on prisoners in the wake of 9/11, was released by the Senate on Tuesday.

Le Pen has previously criticized French President Francois Hollande’s close ties with the US and called on France to leave NATO.

Speaking to RT’s Sophie Shevardnadze in June, Le Pen said that NATO is an opportunity for the United States to extend its influence.

At a cost of over $40 million, the findings unveiled the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or EITs, used within the walls of covert, overseas prisons by the CIA.

The report raised serious questions over controversial tactics which included sleep deprivation, waterboarding, rectal feeding, and others. Dianne Feinstein, the committee chair, admitted that the techniques were “torture,” though the word was never used in the report.

The findings also revealed that the CIA’s treatment breached the body’s legal mandate, as investigators said they found evidence of the intelligence agency’s systematic deception of Congress. Despite the methods used, the agency failed to gather information that foiled subsequent threats to US national security, the report found.

Since the report’s release, prominent human rights groups have demanded to prosecute the responsible US officials listed in the document.

Despite widespread criticism and a wave of outrage sparked by the results of the Senate investigation, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said on Wednesday that it will not be pursuing charges against those involved in the interrogations.

Le Pen a growing threat to mainstream politicians

The growing threat to France’s mainstream political leaders posed by Marine Le Pen, head of France’s National Front, has been underscored by an opinion poll putting her in the lead for the first time in the race for the next presidential election.

The charismatic Ms Le Pen has overtaken former centre-right president Nicolas Sarkozy in voting intentions if the first round of the election were held today, with socialist incumbent François Hollande trailing in third, according to the Ifop poll.

Ms Le Pen scored 26 per cent in the poll, up from 24 per cent in the last sounding taken in April, while Mr Sarkozy, widely expected to announce a political comeback in September, slipped six points to 25 per cent following court accusations of corruption levelled against him in early July.

The FN has been on the rise since Ms Le Pen took over leadership of the party from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2011. She came third behind Mr Hollande and Mr Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential election with 18 per cent of the vote and the party has since grown as Mr Hollande’s popularity has slumped in the face of recession and rising unemployment.

In May’s European parliamentary elections, the FN won a nationwide vote for the first time, easily defeating both Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party and the socialists with a score of 25 per cent.

The latest poll, for the magazine Marianne, appeared to confirm the damage caused to Mr Sarkozy and the UMP by financial scandals and internal leadership wrangling that have sapped its ability to present a coherent opposition to Mr Hollande’s government, despite the president’s record-low personal approval ratings.

Mr Sarkozy was questioned under arrest and then placed under formal investigation on July 2 on suspicion of corruption, influence peddling and a breach of professional secrecy linked to a separate probe into his election campaign financing in 2007.

The UMP is also under investigation over allegations of covering up millions of euros in spending above legal limits in Mr Sarkozy’s 2012 campaign.

The Ifop poll underlined growing fears on both the mainstream left and right that Ms Le Pen is set to repeat the feat of her father in 2002 when he reached the second round of the presidential election by coming second, knocking out the then socialist candidate Lionel Jospin.

Most analysts continue to believe she would then be defeated in the run-off by whichever candidate she faced, as mainstream voters rallied to defeat her. The Ifop poll did not test second round voting intentions, but earlier polls have shown a narrower margin of defeat than the 82-18 per cent loss suffered by her father against Jacques Chirac in 2002, especially if her opponent were Mr Hollande.

Concerns that Mr Hollande is already heading for defeat have prompted speculation that the Socialist party might opt for another candidate. But the Ifop poll showed neither of the two likeliest alternatives, Manuel Valls, the reformist prime minister, nor Arnaud Montebourg, the leftwing economy minister, doing any better.

Source: FT

Le Pen causes stir with Ebola and migration comments

Dutch politician Geert Wilders on Thursday dismissed a comment by his political ally Jean-Marie Le Pen that the ebola virus could address Europe’s immigration problem.

At a cocktail party before an election rally in Marseille on Tuesday evening in which the FN is leading the polls in France, Le Pen spoke of the “demographic explosion” in the world.

“Monseigneur Ebola could sort that out in three months,” he said in front of journalists.

“I think it was a silly remark,” the platinum-haired Dutch anti-immigration politician said shortly after casting his ballot in European parliamentary elections in a Hague suburb.

The quote was widely picked up by French media to embarrass Marine Le Pen, the current head of the FN.

Wilders reminded journalists that Marine Le Pen was in charge of the FN.

Jean-Marie Le Pen on Wednesday downplayed the comment. He is the honorary president of the National Front and is standing in this week’s European parliamentary elections.

Mr Le Pen, who will celebrate his 86th birthday on 20 June, said he did not see “how it is possible to argue about this.” “I say France must prepare itself for a shock, for a flood of migration caused by the ongoing growth of the world’s population,” the politician said.

Le Pen said later he wasn’t calling for an epidemic; his daughter’s chief of staff said his words had been misinterpreted.

Wilders and Le Pen late last year announced a historic alliance to fight the European elections and form a bloc in Brussels.

In developing her anti-euro platform, Marine Le Pen has also exchanged notes with Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Northern League.

British anti-EU and anti-immigration leader Nigel Farage, who leads the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has ruled out joining the group though, saying the FN was too tainted by “anti-Semitism”.

In the Czech Republic the Workers’ Party (DS) and National Party (NS) have stood up for Mr Le Pen on their official websites. Czech voters will be electing new MEPs this coming Friday and Saturday.

Voters among the more than 380 million Europeans in 28 countries will choose a total of 751 new MEPs.

Le Pen unknowingly joins Paul Ehrlich’s predictions. Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist famous for his book “The Population Bomb,” doubled down on his climate change and overpopulation fears with HuffPost Live on May 21.

Ehrlich’s co-author Michael Tobias praised Ehrlich’s older predictions and said they underestimated the problem.

Ehrlich told the interviewer humans must soon begin contemplating “eat[ing] the bodies of your dead” after resources are depleted.

Ehrlich claimed that scarcity of resources will get so bad that humans will need to drastically change our eating habits and agriculture. Instead, we will soon begin asking “is it perfectly okay to eat the bodies of your dead because we’re all so hungry?” He added that humanity is “moving in that direction with a ridiculous speed.”