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France Presidential Campaign
Update on Jacques Cheminade Campaign
19 March 2012
Friday March 16, was the last day for candidates to file pledges of mayors at the Constitutional Council to acquire ballot status for the April 22 French presidential election. Over 20 putative candidates filed signatures but so far only 10 have declared they filed the required 500 signatures. Among them Jacques Cheminade, whose candidacy is increasingly getting attention from both the voters who reportedly are already “annoyed” with the worn outspeeches of the main candidates, as well as from large sections of the French media. A wire of Reuters, picked up by many international media all over the planet (even the Chicago Sun) reports that “Electoral authorities are due to publish a final list of candidates on Monday. Villepin’s fall means there are likely to be around 10 candidates, including two Trotskyists, a Green, an anti-euro sovereignist, and maverick Jacques Cheminade, an associate of U.S. conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche.” The rage is tremendous that this ever was allowed to happen. Today, in Le Parisien, Brice Teinturier, the director general of the polling bureau, Ipsos, underlines again that “the system has a read defect which results in the candidacy of Cheminade and the absence of a De Villepin. It is somewhat strange.” Repeating the same line, xenophobic Marine Le Pen, for whom Solidarité & Progrès and the Trotskysts party Lutte Ouvrière, “are cults,” declared that it was a shame that Cheminade got the signatures while former PM Dominique de Villepin failed to do so. As a result, the websites of mayor media, such as Europe 1 or the Journal du Dimanche, have created a specific web interface, as for all candidates, for Cheminade indicating his websites, his facebook page and twitter account as well as all articles they ran before covering his campaign. Quite excellent was a lengthy interview with Cheminade already posted on the Journal du Dimanche today titled “Cheminade: I’m inspiring the debate”. While the interview deserves to be translated entirely, here go some quotes: Asked if there exists a debate about solutions for the crisis, Cheminade answers: “Not really, since nobody talks about a policy of great projects. While Europe is failing, the banks prosper in Frankfurt and a garrotte is imposed on Greece. This is a pseudo-Europe which has to be reconstructed. And nobody talks about that.” Question: Sarkozy wants to reform the Shengen agreement to fight illegal immigration. What’s your comment? JC: In stead of worrying about migratory fluxes, it would be better to take care about financial fluxes. He promised to do so in his Toulon speech of 2008 but didn’t do anything since. That gives you the measure of his character. (…) Question: You refuse budgetary rigor? JC: No, I want a bet on the future, i.e. a credit on the long term. Look to Germany in 1932 and its policy of budgetary rigor, which allowed the rise of Hitler into power, backed by some circles in the United States… If Europe continues like this, it will create monsters. It will be Viktor Orban in Hungary; it will be Marine Le Pen… We are creating the conditions of a conflict.” Regional press especially is very interested to cover Cheminade when in their region. Ouest France presented Cheminade while visiting the Nuclear reprocessing plant of La Hague while the company, initially okay to allow the candidate to speak to the workforce entering the cafeteria which is outside the plant, forbid the candidate to do so. Cheminade denounced Areva for its despicable policy of secrecy so typical for nucleocrats. Later in the day, the candidate spoke at a local event organized by the socialist Mayor of Flamenville, who signed for Cheminade as reported by the press. In Lille, France 3 showed a Cheminade team of organizers explaining calmly that France would not survive by returning producing Barbie dolls currently produced in China. Space exploration on the contrary, could revive both R&D and well paid jobs in industry. In various locations, spokespersons of the Cheminade campaign will also increasingly represent Cheminade in public debates. At a debate with candidate’s spokesmen on Agriculture at the Paris Science Po linked think tank Cedipov, while Cheminade was not officially invited, a Cheminade spokesman could present Cheminade’s policy to overcome the world food crisis by scrapping the green paradigm. While much of the media coverage is straight but limited, a tiny but very influential specific network known to many in France for being the absolute bloodhounds of “the system” are really letting it all hang out, especially because they realize Cheminade is provoking big attention of some of the mayor forces of the nation. When they go after Cheminade, considered wrongly an isolated person unprotected by their masters, brutality has no limits. This overkill reaction is backfiring rapidly since many normal citizens, in general mistreated in their lives by the oppression of the current system, identify with Cheminade and the treatment he gets. The latest media stunts are really “95 on steroids”. First was an interview by Pascale Clark, a journalist known for her “natural” aggressiveness. Political commentator Bruno-Roger Petit, on his blog at the Nouvel Observateur outlined that “the method employed by Pascale Clark against Cheminade is redoubtable. Each question comes with an implicit subtext addressed to the cortex of the listener. Examples: “Did 911 really happen? Was the death of Bin Laden a montage? Obama is Hitler? You still owe money to the French State?” “Those listening to these questions translate immediately that Cheminade is a 911 conspiracy theorist, an anti-american paranoid, a liar whose cheating to get his pledges and close to a crook. (…) Illustrating the famous saying that the questions count more than the answers…” Second came Friday mornings four minutes raving stream of slanders again on France Inter from Caroline Fourest, an intellectual and author that shifts political orientations and went from lefty to neo-con to socialist. Cheminade’s program to “colonize” Mars is of course a nightmare for any Cartesian living in the sublunar world. The main problem they see with Cheminade is that he is only a puppet of millionaire LaRouche and nothing more. Another carload of reworked old quotes and jokes taken out of context from LaRouche was dumped in an article of today in Rue89 by Julien Giry, a conspiracy theory specialist at the University of Rennes. Giry’s conclusion: “By the worldview he stands and his political alliances, Jacques Cheminade is in no way a candidate as the others. He is, without contest, in the 2012 French presidential elections, the candidate of Lyndon LaRouche.” Of course, presenting Cheminade as a cult or as a mere agent of a foreign power trying to meddle into national politics is a deliberate strategy to create a context and a suspicion where campaign financing of Cheminade can be targeted, called into question and eventually taken away. Also today’s Le Figaro, consecrates its entire second page (!), including a very large picture, to “this strange M. Cheminade.” The article, written by one Marie-Amélie Lombard Latune (“la tune” in French means “the cash”), is specialist in crime stories, aims to prove Cheminade is insignificant. But why then spend a page to prove so? Of course, she doesn’t say a word on the crimes of Chirac, Balladur and Dumas for rigging the 1995 presidential election, as it was on the contrary, thoroughly documented by Les Inrockuptibles. Meanwhile, Cheminade now gets invitations to top debates with layers of industry, military, media, think-tanks and everything in France that’s still willing to imagine a future. With the Cheminade campaign, France is one of the rare countries were reality has the right to “go prime time.” |