ELECTIONS TODAY: the predictable rigging suspects in pursuit of the unpredictable electorates

Establishment change is occurring on a grand scale. Some of it is being manipulated into existence by loosely-allied élites, and some of it by previously accepting citizens led to doubt the ongoing cultural narrative. As this process unfolds, infuriating predictability exists alongside disturbingly unexpected policy reversal. What are we to make of it?

Consider the following realities:

1. The UK voted for Brexit, but a General Election there has been called by a Prime Minister who voted to remain in the EU.
2. The US voted for Trump as the man to give an even break to the forgotten ordinary citizen…but within weeks, all his electoral promises have been reversed by “events” and “intelligence”.
3. The French were all set to vote for pro-EU, pro-neocon Fillon, but he was felled by accusations of using public money to enrich his family. In the light of that, En Marche and Macron have been fuelled by mysterious money to provide a pro-EU pro-neocon winning candidate to keep Marine LePen at bay, and boost confidence in the markets and the euro.
4. For the first time in the history of the French Fifth Republic, neither of the Establishment Right and Left Parties will compete for the Presidency.
5. Donald Trump became US President without genuine support from either Establishment Party. He hijacked the GOP to get elected as an Independent President – whose independence balls now look to have been sliced off by unelected forces.
6. For the first time in British history – 315 years – both England/Wales on the one hand and Scotland on the other are likely to emerge from the General Election as One Party matriarchies.
7. Four Western elections in a row – in the US, the UK and France – have now seen the traditional LibLeft social democrats marginalised, over the space of just over one year.

Whatever these “results” seem to tell us, the overwhelming popular current throughout the US and the EU has been a rise in extremes of either nationalism or socialism. Little or nothing of that, however, has been converted into real political power: the unlistening and unelected movers and shakers remain in control. Thus both Tsipras in Greece and Trump in the US “won”, but then were not allowed to carry out their programmes. In Britain, the Brexit vote “won”, but the Brexit trigger such voters wanted was unaccountably delayed….and the British government remains not just packed with Remain voters, but also now engaged in a General Election – called ostensibly to give it a “stronger hand” with Brussels….which it palpably does not need.

Now we see an election in France where the banking and EU backed candidate Emmanuel Macron forms a Party and takes a commanding electoral position within a matter of months – from nothing and nowhere.

However, perhaps we need to think more deeply about who the Establishment now is, and what aftermath it is still in the process of creating.

My take on this new breed of elections is that three things are happening: traditional Parties are being weakened, ‘new’ Party confections are being created, and genuinely populist waves are being quietly sidelined.  In short, real Opposition from The People is being divided and neutered.

I can easily exemplify the three trends. First, in America the GOP has the White House, but the President was forced upon it – and the POTUS himself now comes across as the prisoner of his largely corporate advisers; while in the UK, a Labour Party with an overwhelmingly member-elected leader remains under attack from a wing of the Party largely associated with media spin, acceptance of the status quo, and powerful globalist/banker connections. And in France, neither established Left/Right Party got through to the second round.

Second – also in France – Macron’s Party En Marche didn’t exist a year ago….yet somehow found the vast funds required to sweep it’s relatively minor political ‘founder’ to within a few millimetres of becoming President. You may think it’s the first time this has been tried, but you’d be wrong: during the last Greek general election won easily by Tsipras, a brand new Party – To Potami – at first created massive interest, but then fell back to lie fourth in the eventual contest – ahead of both KKE and ANEL, the Communists and Nationalists. It describes itself as ‘centrist, social democrat and pro EU’ – or, put another way, En Marche. To Potami’s ‘founder’ Stavros Theodorakis is a media personality, and if you read this 2014 piece at Open Democracy, you could be reading the same guff handed out by those around Macron in France today.

Third, the genuine populist movements find themselves today in a siding. The British Party UKIP was founded decades ago by Nigel Farage: it “won” the Brexit debate, but the power to negotiate that break with the EU has passed to an increasingly unopposed Tory Party – one which is far from having the same vision of self-determination for the UK that drove Farage and those around him. Today’s Conservative Party is unavowedly in the Globalist camp, relying almost entirely on the City and corporate donations for its election war chest. And again in France, the National Front has been a force in politics whose sole power – in the face of non-stop media attacks upon it – has been the instinctive and strongly-held support for it among those outside the bubble and on the streets. The first round results having been declared in 2017, the appeal from all Parties and media in France for voters to support Macron and stop her has been universal. (I must stress that I am not a Le Pen supporter: but such an “anyone but Le Pen” war-cry does not smack to me of a healthy and confident liberal democracy.

On two bases – making established national Parties seem irrelevant, and replacing genuine grass-roots movements with ersatz ground-swells led by cardboard characters – the supra-nationalists and globalists are diluting national sentiment and creating division. (The attempt to do this in Hungary has so far failed, thanks to the sound sense of its citizens, and the messianic leadership of Viktor Orban). The one-worlders need both in order to push their mad vision of the Global Village, but an accompanying trend is also acting as a catalyst to the process.

Identity politics are, by their very nature, divisive. Group-identification within a population solely through defining the Self cannot be anything else. Being gay, transsexual, black, feminist or Islamic is not enough reason per se to demand this, that and every other thing from the host community. It is a very sad person indeed who wants to be solely defined by the self-imposed straitjacket of sexuality, ethnicity, gender or religious belief.

Such thinking finds its strongest support among the socio-politically Leftliberal and ideologically multicultural movements in society. And it explains why – against all the odds and most common sense – its adherents find themselves more and more at one with globalists, neocons, Texan energy hawks, Wall Street, and above all, George Soros. Soros actively funds any and all such causes (through international organisations positioned as “progressive”) but all the Big is Best promoters try on the same suit: Microsoft with its data-protective cloud and mosquito DNA advertising, the White Helmets in the Middle East, or HSBC and its “local” cultural understanding – they’re all at it.

Always there is the motive, and always the ‘good guys’ rationale: destabilising Ukraine in the cause of ‘democracy’, attacking Hungary to fight ‘fascism’, bombing Iraq to destroy WOMD, and attacking Assad in Syria on humanitarian grounds. The strategy is always regime change and and political control; the objective is always the same: access to energy and the steady advance of globalist business unhindered by national culture or community needs.

The fact that this is the perfect antithesis of mutual communitarianism explains who so many people find me hard to “read”. I deplore neocon One World insanity and jingoistic nationalism because they are both equally dangerous and unnatural. I deplore Leftwing labelling and the socialists’ geopolitical naivety – Peace bonus, Arab Spring, the EU as a force for peace – because they are so obviously and serially cases of sloppy, misplaced idealism. And I fear global trade mercantilism because it breeds paranoid suspicion and military ambition.

I prefer the idea of small entrepreneurial self-supporting communal freedom and risk discovery because that’s where we came from as a species, and why (at our best) a talent for competition within and cooperation between is what gives us the best hope.

All of this the forces of big process money and immediate returns – at the expense of people and their communities – are working to eradicate. There is no one conspiratorial plan – their egos are far too engorged to organise that. But there is manipulation by the haves, with a blindness and division among the Resistance…and it is showing itself now every time a political class with no interest in the ordinary voter turns to that citizen in search of a rubber stamp.