1er mai

1941, le Maréchal Philippe Pétain instaure le 1er mai comme « la fête du Travail et de la Concorde sociale »
Le 24 avril 1941, le Maréchal Philippe Pétain instaure officiellement par la loi Belin le 1er mai comme « la fête du Travail et de la Concorde sociale », appliquant ainsi la devise Travail, Famille, Patrie : par son refus à la fois du capitalisme et du socialisme, l’État français recherche une troisième voie fondée sur le corporatisme, débaptisant « la fête des travailleurs » qui faisait référence à la lutte des classes.   Le jour devient férié, chômé et payé.  Le 1^er mai coïncide aussi avec la fête du saint patron du maréchal, Saint Philippe.

Patrick J. Buchanan : Is Macron the EU’s Last Best Hope?

Is Macron the EU’s Last Best Hope?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

For the French establishment, Sunday’s presidential election came close to a near-death experience. As the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, it was a “damn near-run thing.”
Neither candidate of the two major parties that have ruled France since Charles De Gaulle even made it into the runoff, an astonishing repudiation of France’s national elite.

Marine Le Pen of the National Front ran second with 21.5 percent of the vote. Emmanuel Macron of the new party En Marche! won 23.8 percent.
Macron is a heavy favorite on May 7. The Republicans’ Francois Fillon, who got 20 percent, and the Socialists’ Benoit Hamon, who got less than 7 percent, both have urged their supporters to save France by backing Macron.
Ominously for U.S. ties, 61 percent of French voters chose Le Pen, Fillon or radical Socialist Jean-Luc Melenchon. All favor looser ties to America and repairing relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Le Pen has a mountain to climb to win, but she is clearly the favorite of the president of Russia, and perhaps of the president of the United States. Last week, Donald Trump volunteered:
“She’s the strongest on borders, and she’s the strongest on what’s been going on in France. … Whoever is the toughest on radical Islamic terrorism, and whoever is the toughest at the borders, will do well in the election.”

As an indicator of historic trends in France, Le Pen seems likely to win twice the 18 percent her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, won in 2002, when he lost in the runoff to Jacques Chirac.

The campaign between now and May 7, however, could make the Trump-Clinton race look like an altarpiece of democratic decorum.

Not only are the differences between the candidates stark, Le Pen has every incentive to attack to solidify her base and lay down a predicate for the future failure of a Macron government.

And Macron is vulnerable. He won because he is fresh, young, 39, and appealed to French youth as the anti-Le Pen. A personification of Robert Redford in “The Candidate.”
But he has no established party behind him to take over the government, and he is an ex-Rothschild banker in a populist environment where bankers are as welcome as hedge-fund managers at a Bernie Sanders rally.
He is a pro-EU, open-borders transnationalist who welcomes new immigrants and suggests that acts of Islamist terrorism may be the price France must pay for a multiethnic and multicultural society.
Macron was for a year economic minister to President Francois Hollande who has presided over a 10 percent unemployment rate and a growth rate that is among the most anemic in the entire European Union.
He is offering corporate tax cuts and a reduction in the size of a government that consumes 56 percent of GDP, and presents himself as the “president of patriots to face the threat of nationalists.”
His campaign is as much “us vs. them” as Le Pen’s.
And elite enthusiasm for Macron seems less rooted in any anticipation of future greatness than in the desperate hope he can save the French establishment from the dreaded prospect of Marine.
But if Macron is the present, who owns the future?
Across Europe, as in France, center-left and center-right parties that have been on the scene since World War II appear to be emptying out like dying churches. The enthusiasm and energy seem to be in the new parties of left and right, of secessionism and nationalism.
The problem for those who believe the populist movements of Europe have passed their apogee, with losses in Holland, Austria and, soon, France, that the fever has broken, is that the causes of the discontent that spawned these parties are growing stronger.

What are those causes?
A growing desire by peoples everywhere to reclaim their national sovereignty and identity, and remain who they are. And the threats to ethnic and national identity are not receding, but growing.
The tide of refugees from the Middle East and Africa has not abated. Weekly, we read of hundreds drowning in sunken boats that tried to reach Europe. Thousands make it. But the assimilation of Third World peoples in Europe is not proceeding. It seems to have halted.
Second-generation Muslims who have lived all their lives in Europe are turning up among the suicide bombers and terrorists.
Fifteen years ago, al-Qaida seemed confined to Afghanistan. Now it is all over the Middle East, as is ISIS, and calls for Islamists in Europe to murder Europeans inundate social media.
As the numbers of native-born Europeans begin to fall, with their anemic fertility rates, will the aging Europeans become more magnanimous toward destitute newcomers who do not speak the national language or assimilate into the national culture, but consume its benefits?

If a referendum were held across Europe today, asking whether the mass migrations from the former colonies of Africa and the Middle East have on balance made Europe a happier and better place to live in in recent decades, what would that secret ballot reveal?
Does Macron really represent the future of France, or is he perhaps one of the last men of yesterday?


 http://buchanan.org/blog/macron-eus-last-best-hope-126852
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Patrick J. Buchanan : The Rise of the Generals

The Rise of the Generals

Friday - April 28, 2017 at 2:10 am

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Has President Donald Trump outsourced foreign policy to the generals?
So it would seem. Candidate Trump held out his hand to Vladimir Putin. He rejected further U.S. intervention in Syria other than to smash ISIS.
He spoke of getting out and staying out of the misbegotten Middle East wars into which Presidents Bush II and Obama had plunged the country.
President Trump’s seeming renunciation of an anti-interventionist foreign policy is the great surprise of the first 100 days, and the most ominous. For any new war could vitiate the Trump mandate and consume his presidency.
Trump no longer calls NATO “obsolete,” but moves U.S. troops toward Russia in the Baltic and eastern Balkans. Rex Tillerson, holder of Russia’s Order of Friendship, now warns that the U.S. will not lift sanctions on Russia until she gets out of Ukraine.
If Tillerson is not bluffing, that would rule out any rapprochement in the Trump presidency. For neither Putin, nor any successor, could surrender Crimea and survive.

What happened to the Trump of 2016?
When did Kiev’s claim to Crimea become more crucial to us than a cooperative relationship with a nuclear-armed Russia? In 1991, Bush I and Secretary of State James Baker thought the very idea of Ukraine’s independence was the product of a “suicidal nationalism.”
Where do we think this demonization of Putin and ostracism of Russia is going to lead?
To get Xi Jinping to help with our Pyongyang problem, Trump has dropped all talk of befriending Taiwan, backed off Tillerson’s warning to Beijing to vacate its fortified reefs in the South China Sea, and held out promises of major concessions to Beijing in future trade deals.
“I like (Xi Jinping) and I believe he likes me a lot,” Trump said this week. One recalls FDR admonishing Churchill, “I think I can personally handle Stalin better than … your Foreign Office … Stalin hates the guts of all your people. He thinks he likes me better.”
FDR did not live to see what a fool Stalin had made of him.

Among the achievements celebrated in Trump’s first 100 days are the 59 cruise missiles launched at the Syrian airfield from which the gas attack on civilians allegedly came, and the dropping of the 22,000-pound MOAB bomb in Afghanistan.

But what did these bombings accomplish?
The War Party seems again ascendant. John McCain and Lindsey Graham are happy campers. In Afghanistan, the U.S. commander is calling for thousands more U.S. troops to assist the 8,500 still there, to stabilize an Afghan regime and army that is steadily losing ground to the Taliban.

Iran is back on the front burner. While Tillerson concedes that Tehran is in compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, Trump says it is violating “the spirit of the agreement.”

How so? Says Tillerson, Iran is “destabilizing” the region, and threatening U.S. interests in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon.

But Iran is an ally of Syria and was invited in to help the U.N.-recognized government put down an insurrection that contains elements of al-Qaida and ISIS. It is we, the Turks, Saudis and Gulf Arabs who have been backing the rebels seeking to overthrow the regime.

In Yemen, Houthi rebels overthrew and expelled a Saudi satrap. The bombing, blockading and intervention with troops is being done by Saudi and Sunni Arabs, assisted by the U.S. Navy and Air Force.

It is we and the Saudis who are talking of closing the Yemeni port of Hodeida, which could bring on widespread starvation.

It was not Iran, but the U.S. that invaded Iraq, overthrew the Baghdad regime and occupied the country. It was not Iran that overthrew Col. Gadhafi and created the current disaster in Libya.

Monday, the USS Mahan fired a flare to warn off an Iranian patrol boat, 1,000 meters away. Supposedly, this was a provocation. But Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif had a point when he tweeted:
“Breaking: Our Navy operates in — yes, correct — the Persian Gulf, not the Gulf of Mexico. Question is what US Navy doing 7,500 miles from home.”

Who is behind the seeming conversion of Trump to hawk?
The generals, Bibi Netanyahu and the neocons, Congressional hawks with Cold War mindsets, the Saudi royal family and the Gulf Arabs — they are winning the battle for the president’s mind.

And their agenda for America?
We are to recognize that our true enemy in the Mideast is not al-Qaida or ISIS, but Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, Assad’s Syria and his patron, Putin. And until Hezbollah is eviscerated, Assad is gone, and Iran is smashed the way we did Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, the flowering of Middle East democracy that we all seek cannot truly begin.
But before President Trump proceeds along the path laid out for him by his generals, brave and patriotic men that they are, he should discover if any of them opposed any of the idiotic wars of the last 15 years, beginning with that greatest of strategic blunders — George Bush’s invasion of Iraq.


 http://buchanan.org/blog/the-rise-of-the-generals-126882
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Hungary's Orban defends education law in Brussels, calling EU outrage 'absurd'

Hungary's prime minister lashed out at George Soros, founder of the embattled Central European University. The PM's remarks came after the EU Commission sent a "letter of formal notice" to the Hungarian government.

In a speech given to European parliamentarians in Brussels on Wednesday, Orban insisted Hungary remained committed to the European Union, describing his nation's membership as "not questionable" but simultaneously expressing discontent with the bloc and a desire for EU reform of its "mistakes."
The Hungarian prime minsiter's appearence in the European Parliament came hours after the European Commission began legal action against the country in light of a recently passed controversial education law perceived as targeting George Soros' Central European University (CEU).

EU launches legal action against Hungary

EU sends Orban a letter

European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said on Wednesday that "a letter of formal notice" had been sent to Orban's government. According to Dombrovskis, the decision to begin the legal action was made after an "in-depth legal assessment" concluded the new Hungarian law allegedly breaches EU laws regarding freedoms for businesses, services and academia.
The letter is the first step of the EU's so-called infringement proceedings, whereby Brussels demands legal explanations from a member state on a particular issue. The Hungarian government has one month to respond to the letter. Brussels will then consider if any further steps are warranted. These could include referral to the European Court of Justice and possible financial penalties.

Orban criticizes EU criticism

Orban called the accusations against Hungary "absurd."
Standing before European lawmakers, Orban described the contested law as a "minor amendment" that applies to 28 universities and not just to the CEU. He described the flare-up around the law as "absurd," likening it to a pre-emptive murder conviction, given that the CEU continues to operate normally at present.
"It's almost like someone being accused of murder, then he's convicted, while the alleged victim is alive and kicking, moreover, pointing fingers at the convicted, crying: 'Murderer!'," Orban said.

Orban attacks Soros

George Soros' Central European University faces possible closure

Orban had even stronger words for CEU founder George Soros. He labeled the American-Hungarian billionare a "financial speculator" who was "attacking" Hungary.
Orban also painted Soros as detrimental to Europe as a whole, claiming Soros had "destroyed the lives of millions of Europeans with his financial speculations" and describing Soros as "an open enemy of the euro." The Hungarian leader also said the businessman wanted to open Europe's borders to millions of migrants.
Orban went on to criticize the EU for its warmth towards the billionare. On Thursday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is scheduled to meet with Soros.

Soros' CEU lies at the center of the controversy. The Univerisity has a campus in Budapest.

CEU at the center of controversy
The EU's formal letter focuses on the law passed on April 4 that requires foreign universities operating in Hungary also have a campus in their home country. The law is seen as aimed squarely at Central European University, which has been operating in Budapest since 1993. Despite being accredited in the US state of New York, the university does not have a campus in the United States.
Orban has accused the university of maintaining an unfair advantage over other Hungarian institutions because it confers degrees that are recognized in both Hungary and the United States, However, he denied wanting to shut it down.

DW exclusive: Central European University rector, Michael Ignatieff

Critics of the right-wing head of government have decried the law, taking to the streets in protest at what they described as a targeted attack on an institution that promotes liberal values Orban is seeking to repress.
Should an agreement cease to materialize, CEU may be forced to cease enrolling new students as of January 2018.
"My institution has a gun pointed to its head," CEU President Michael Ignatieff told EU parliamentarians on Tuesday.
Showdown between Brussels and Budapest
The launch of legal action has raised the temperature on an already fiery relationship between Orban and the EU.
The EU-skeptic Orban has claimed the supranational bloc threatens Hungary's sovereignty and has launched a "Let's Stop Brussels!" questionnaire asking the opinion of Hungarian households on how to respond to alleged EU interference in Hungarian independence.
Hungarian legislation regarding systematic detention of asylum seekers and the proposed required registration of NGOs that received international funds have also drawn criticisms from the EU.

http://www.dw.com/en/hungarys-orban-defends-education-law-in-brussels-calling-eu-outrage-absurd/a-38599683

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