Stephen Lendmanl,

Establishment favorite Emmanuel Macron is heavily favored to win. He supports continuity, dirty business as usual.

French aristocracy love him. Its power elites back him against Le Pen, wanting national sovereignty regained from Brussels control, including over its monetary and fiscal policies.

According to Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies director Timofey Bordachev, Macron, if elected, “will adhere to the Euro-Atlantic course…pursued by the current political mainstream.”

He’s close to Berlin, Brussels and Washington. Deplorable French policies will continue unchanged if he’s France’s next president - including its complicity with US aggression.

Overwhelmingly despised outgoing French President Francois Hollande urged his ministers to go all-out for Macron.

His spokesman Stephane Le Foll said he wants Le Pen assured of “the lowest possible result.” Ministers must be “totally mobilized” to defeat her.

EU elites oppose her. So do French banking, other corporate interests, and Western media scoundrels.

On France 2 television, Le Pen said “Macron goes into the second round on a carpet of rose petals with almost total support from the French mainstream media, elites, trade union organizations, entrepreneurs. But it’s OK. I prefer to be supported by the French people.”

On Wednesday in Amiens, his hometown, residents booed and jeered Macron. On an unexpected visit, Le Pen was welcomed with cheers and hugs - the campaign stop by both candidates covered on French television.

Le Pen’s anti-globalization message resonates with France’s working class, struggling with factory closures and job losses, along with punishing austerity - a scheme to enrich French business interests and wealthy households more than already.

In 2012, Hollande was elected on a promise of change, hope and renewal. Instead, he accelerated transformation of the French Socialist Party into a vehicle for banking and other corporate interests, enforced with police state harshness - why he’s so widely despised.

Macron supports the same agenda, including labor law reforms, assuring higher unemployment than currently.

Le Pen wants French jobs saved, not lost, or offshored to cheap labor countries. She’ll discourage it with a 35% import tax on products from plants displacing French workers, she said.

Amiens Whirlpool plant workers are striking against planned closure. Le Pen praised their resistance, adding:

“When I heard that Emmanuel Macron was coming here and that he didn’t plan to meet the workers, that he didn’t plan to come to the picket line, but that he was going to shelter in some room at the chamber of commerce to meet two or three handpicked people, I considered that it was such a sign of contempt for what the Whirlpool workers are going through that I decided to leave my strategic council and come see you.”

Macron said she’d fix “nothing,” claiming if elected she’ll destroy jobs, not create them, adding she’s “making a political use” of Whirlpool workers - then said he’d visit the plant.

He was greeted with protests, burning tires and chants of “Marine for president!” “Why didn’t you come before!” “You are in favor of (jobs-destroying) globalization!”

One protester called him a “copy-paste” of Hollande - new face, same deplorable agenda. Globalism doesn’t go down well with unemployed and underemployed workers.

On May 7, voters will choose France’s next president. Who could have imagined the Alfred Hitchcock ending to America’s 2016 election?

Does a night to remember await Le Pen, another surprise ending? Given polls showing Macron way ahead, it’s unlikely even the “master of suspense” could arrange a favorable Hitchcock ending for her.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at http://www.sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.