Shocking Foreign Interference in France’s Electoral Process

Never, ever in contemporary political history, have foreign powers explicitly given voting instructions in a foreign electoral process. Even less by incumbent heads of state. Interference, in the definition of Larousse, consists of “the intervention of a State in the policy of another”. Is there anything more political than the election of a free people to define to whom they will entrust the next mandate?

The tribune begins in its title by asking the French to consider that the interests which would be theirs come after the needs of Spain, Portugal and Germany. “We need a France that defends our common values,” they write.

Marine Le Pen is described as the “candidate who openly sides with those who threaten our freedom and democracy”. Just that. All terms of the proposal are subject to question. What do these proxies mean by “openly”? Where, when and in what terms did they hear Marine Le Pen “side” with someone who would threaten our democracy? This forum is an anthological case of defamation, if not a gigantic fake used in the context of a precedent of interference never seen before.

But even more, what lesson of democracy can a Pedro Sanchez give to the French people in terms of democracy? All decisions that the Spanish socialist has taken within the framework of Covid management have been systematically invalidated by the Supreme Court of that country. Never before has anyone in the history of post-Franco Spain done so much to suppress the guarantees of the rule of law and been so scolded about the limits of executive power.

Invested with what legitimacy does Sanchez arrogate to himself the right to infantilize the French and to give voting instructions, he who came to power by taking advantage of a constitutional loophole to organize a kind of parliamentary coup, allying itself with the most extreme nationalist groups in Spain.

During the last presidential election in the United States, the mainstream press made the fantasy of Russian interference a central issue, prompting a double investigation by Congress and the FBI, from which nothing emerged that did not prove these allegations. But if there was interference, it would have been on the order of abstruse, secret, occult operations. Here, it is about heads of state who, losing all sense of modesty, interfere, all shame drunk, in the most sacred moment of the democratic life of a nation: that of the vote.

A deputy from a foreign nation may express opinions about a candidate in a third nation, but a head of state giving voting instructions opens the door to the desecration of national sovereignty. Do you have to get used to that too? Were they to do so with an African or Latin American nation, it would almost become, if not a casus belli, at least a diplomatic incident of extraordinary gravity.

In the tribune of friends Sanchez, Costa and Scholz, there’s not a word about the Macron government’s subjugation to the American firm McKinsey. In this case, however, the French have indeed been “openly” “sided” with those who have not only threatened, but very directly undermined their freedom and their democracy. Because the real Defense Council which has marked time over the past two years and decided how the French should live to the very depths of their physical integrity, from their right to medical secrecy to the way in which they intended to educate their children, is none other than the McKinsey company.

In addition to the interference in itself, this platform responds to an act of lobbying in favor of community clientelism for the bad governments of southern Europe, and of the continuity of French subjugation to the interests of Germany, of which France could not highlight a single example of recognition or loyalty for thirty years.