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The French vote was a win for the West — and a loss for Putin
By Ralph Peters
April 24, 2017 | 8:17pm | Updated

Even in today’s embittered, conflict-ridden world, the news is sometimes plain good. That was the case after Sunday’s first-round vote for president in France. Of the top four contenders, only one, Emmanuel Macron, has been pro-NATO, pro-European Union, pro-US and anti-Putin. He also had the audacity to tell the French they actually have to work, if they want a stronger economy.

And he won.

After the second-round vote is held May 7, Macron will become the next president of France’s Fifth Republic, which a number of his opponents hoped to destroy. For five more years, the West will maintain a united front against barbarism.

Macron’s 23.7 percent of the first-round vote won’t sound impressive to Americans, especially given that pro-Putin, anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-NATO, anti-EU bigot Marine Le Pen of the National Front placed second, with 21.7 percent of the vote. But there were 11 candidates running, with four front-runners and a dark horse in fifth place.

The overall stunner was that the traditional parties both were shut out of the final round for the first time in generations. Their party machines guaranteed a die-hard, first-round vote for their candidates but were left to throw their remaining weight behind Macron.

The upstart challenger will defeat Le Pen in a landslide May 7. A banker who’d never before led a campaign and who briefly served in the current French cabinet, Macron’s the real outsider — a man still without a party, only a movement. Le Pen, whose outsider act is aging badly, leads the second generation of her family to run on fear and hatred. She’s the new old guard.

Some American conservatives have been duped into believing that Madame Le Pen is their kind of gal, because of her tough stances on immigrants and Islam. Yet she’s not only the favored candidate of Vladimir Putin but preferred by terrorists, as well: She shares the Islamist conviction that Muslims must not integrate into Western societies.

As for the Putin connection, Le Pen chooses Moscow over Manhattan. A loan of over €9 million to her party from a Moscow-based bank is a matter of record, while Russian disinformation — insidious “fake news” — pulled out all the stops to back her campaign. In turn, she publicly praises Putin’s stumbling, bumbling, oligarch-addled economy as a “role model” for France.

That spooks French voters. Contrary to American misperceptions, immigration and security are secondary issues in this election. The French vote on the economy — always — and the French economy is stagnant. Even the extreme-left candidate, hoary old Commie Jean-Luc Mélenchon, didn’t suggest that Putin has the answer to French unemployment. (Mélenchon takes his Trotsky straight, no chaser.)

And while Le Pen’s railing against the EU played well with her supporters, even those who like hate speech don’t want to lose their subsidies from Brussels.

Le Pen did manage to grab second place, but that’s misleading. Politically homeless voters will turn overwhelmingly to Macron, not to her National Front. And she goes into the next race with a limp (that happens when you shoot yourself in the foot): After years of smoothing over her dad’s Holocaust denials, she recently dismissed the collaboration of France’s Vichy government in the arrest of French Jews and their deportation to Nazi death camps as not really France’s fault.

It wasn’t a gaffe. It was a sales pitch.

And it didn’t work.

The real loser in this election has been Vladimir Putin, though. France was going to be his grand prize, his lever to break NATO and the European Union. In Germany, he might hope for a more sympathetic government, but he wouldn’t get one that was openly pro-Moscow and anti-US. France looked like Europe’s weak link. The world-champion poker player bet big — and lost his stake.

Is this election a turning point? Putin’s had a terrible spring, suffering one reversal after another. His rebuffs began in late winter with the defeat of a pro-Putin party in Bulgaria and fury in Montenegro over a Russian coup plot, but that didn’t echo on this side of the Atlantic.

The real body blows began with President Trump’s order to punish Syrian butcher Bashar al-Assad for using poison gas on his own people. Putin, the master bluffer, had no means to stop or reply to our cruise missiles. Then the leading EU powers refused to lift sanctions imposed over Putin’s invasions of Ukraine. And — to its great credit — the Trump administration last week refused to grant a sanctions waiver to ExxonMobil to rescue the Russian economy.

So where are we as we wait for the May 7 run-off? The one reassuring candidate looks set to occupy the Elysée Palace. Europe will emerge stronger and markets will rise. The trans-Atlantic relationship will endure. And Putin just hit the limits of his campaign to subvert our democracies.

Viva la France!

Ralph Peters is Fox News’ strategic analyst.

http://nypost.com/2017/04/24/the-french-vote-was-a-win-for-the-west-and-a-loss-for-putin/