Judging by American newspaper commentators, who may express the views of only 25% of the population, for whom ‘socialist’ means genocidal anti-capitalist demon-worshipper, I would accept that as an articulated true belief.
However, M. Macron does not seem to have enough articulated beliefs to be a lunatic.
And they are? On what evidence?
(Latest polls, btw, seem to have settled for the last few days at 60/40 in Macron’s favour, more or less what they were indicating from the outset of the campaign.
Maybe he’s a lunatic in the Tony Blair sense - a delusional messianic complex hidden in plain sight behind lots of plausible statements. Fwiw, I can’t see it.
It’s a terrible choice though; the Blairite corporate, investment banker vs. a protectionist-nationalist. It’s not as if abstaining helps.
Is she any more right than the President of the USA?
Seems to be a mixed bag:
To the extent that she knows what she’s going to say before she says it, and how it fits into her strategy and tactics, rather than a bundle of ad hoc reactions and prejudices: yes.
The Guardian has an interesting article on how Macron’s first-round win was engineered and how he might yet lose to Le Pen.
Right, they’ve been at it before the thunderstike of Brexit and Trump, they just knew.
Bullshit.
Just out of interest, how exactly does some conspiracy of intellectuals and mainstream politicians “engineer” a President’s inability to persuade anyone to support his re-election, and both major parties’ inability to come up with an appealing alternative in their primaries? Recognising, even a year or more ago, that Macron might have more personal appeal than any of the likely alternatives other than Le Pen, especially if not tied to any of the existing political vehicles, doesn’t seem more than the bleedin’ obvious: as indeed was the possibility that, without someone like him, Le Pen might actually walk it anyway?
You’ll have to ask the author.
Fwiw, the piece you link to from The Guardian is an opinion. The writer is a lecturer n modern languages.
And your point is? I found it interesting; I thought - actually, I still do think - Dopers might too. I don’t know enough to agree or disagree.
My point is there is a distinction in digital media between what you called an “article” by The Guardian, and daily ‘talking points’ provided by random contributors under the umbrella of Opinion.
One has the weight of the publisher behind it, the other benefits from a provided platform.
As for LePen reaching for Brexit and the US election for comfort, the reality was that on Brexit the polls were too close, and in the American one also, but the polls got the popular vote more or less, the biggest error was with the state polls.
Le Pen does not have the closeness of Brexit nor an electoral vote escape hatch like Trump had.
The entire media is against Le Pen. I doubt you can trust the polls either.
Lots can happen; as HRC knows there’s a decent space between saying you favor a candidate and getting them into a voting booth. Le Pen won’t have trouble getting her vote out. Will the pro-EU, pro-globalisation former Rothschild’s banker …
I suspect things are more interesting than they are portrayed.
Entirely possible, BUT…
Even the pollsters who predicted Hillary would win thought the race would be close. (And, as liberals like to remind us, she DID win the popular vote.)
And even the pollsters who predicted Brexit would fail said the vote would be close.
In a close race, a small shift can change things. If polls said Marine LePen was trailing by 3%, she’d be very confident and rightly so. But even the worst pollsters are never off by 21%- and that’s how much she trails by, with just 5 days to go.
From the rumblings I’m hearing, this is shaping up to be a Le Pen blow out victory.
It’s safe to say the clock has struck 11:59 on the E.U. and the globalists’ dream of worldwide power and control.
Fwiw, I do think we will see unusual levels of conscientious abstention*, but we’re in new territory with all this so …
*I just coined that 
I very much doubt this, but then again im hopeless at predicting individual elections. Macron will probably win this time around. Having said that I am firmly of the belief that the FN will win a Presidential election in the near future. In fact I find it difficult to see any way of them *not *winning either the next Presidential election or the one after that.
Reports indicate otherwise. The French have a track record of giving those in power a good scare by voting for the FN in the first round. Then they vote sensibly in the second. The FN only got a bit over 20% in the first round this time.
Agree with this. I also like your coinage.
I think though that it’s *probably *not enough to swing it to FN. It is good that the election is soon; if it had another couple months to run we’d really be biting our nails in nervous anticipation.
Certainly the error bars on predictability this time are waay up. Rather as we saw in the recent US elections. When large fractions of the populace often don’t bother to vote, those people represent a “hidden” reservoir of votes that can appear out of relative nowhere and overwhelm what’s otherwise a rather finely balanced left/right tradeoff.
In many countries around the world the next 10-40 years of politics will be about locating and motivating these “dark pools” of potential voters to swing elections. Many of whom have some pretty dark desires vis-à-vis ordinary politics-as-usual.