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2 Monday, May 1, 2017 DT Analysis Macron versus Le Pen in clash of visions for France • AFP, Paris The battle to become France’s president comes down to a clash of two visions – Emmanuel Macron is pro-globalisation and pro-EU, while Marine Le Pen rages against both. As the rival camps celebrated reaching the decisive second round of the election, Le Pen said Sunday that voters will have “a very simple choice” on May 7. “Either we continue on the path of... off-shoring jobs, unfair foreign competition, mass immigration and free movement of terrorists... or you choose France and borders that protect,” she told her supporters. Macron, 39, had a starkly different message: “I will be... the voice of hope for our country and for Europe,” he told thousands of his followers. The photogenic former investment banker, who had never before stood for election, started his centrist movement only 12 months ago. Yet polls currently show he will easily become France’s youngest ever president, beating Le Pen by more than 20 percentage points. His meteoric rise began when President Francois Hollande chose him as an economic advisor and then parachuted him into his Socialist cabinet as economy minister. But shrewdly sensing his chance, Macron turned his back on Hollande when he quit the cabinet in August to concentrate on building up his own centrist political movement “En Marche.” Since then, he has amassed 250,000 members and confounded critics who said his appeal would not reach beyond young, urban professionals. In politics as well as his personal life, Macron has also broken traditions. The theatre and poetry lover from a middle-class family in Amiens, northeast France, fell for his secondary school drama teacher. Brigitte Trogneux, a mother of three and 25 years older than Macron, left her husband and married the young prodigy in 2007. “At the age of 17, Emmanuel said to me: ‘Whatever you do, I will marry you!’,” Trogneux told Paris Match magazine last April, summing up a story that has captivated the French media. Political school of hard knocks Unlike Macron, 48-year-old Le Pen is steeped in hard-edged politics. Her pugnacious father Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the runoff of the 2002 presidential election, but was roundly beaten by the centre-right Jacques Chirac. Fifteen years later his gravel-voiced daughter believes she can become France’s first woman president, and the first from the National Front (FN) party that her father founded. She faces an uphill task as her How their policies differ Raise net pay by cutting payroll taxes; cut corporate tax Wants a eurozone parliament with its own finance minister younger rival appears to attract a broader spectrum of voters. She also goes into the runoff with several investigations hanging over the FN and her entourage for alleged funding scandals, while she is also being probed after tweeting pictures of Islamic State atrocities. In the last presidential election in 2012 Le Pen finished third with just under 18%. She has worked assiduously to try to rid the party of its more extreme anti-Semitic edge – and kicked her father out of the party after he repeatedly described the Holocaust as a “detail of history”. Over the past six years, Le Pen’s rebranded “party of patriots” has INTO THE 2ND ROUND: MACRON VERSUS LE PEN Emmanuel Macron 20.01% Francois Fillon 19.58 Jean-Luc Melenchon Calling for Macron vote 6.36 Benoit Hamon Age 39 4.70 Nicolas Dupont- Aignan Cut number of civil servant by 120,000 Jean Lassalle 24.01% 21.3% Polls for the 2 nd round Voting intentions as a % 62 64 38 36 Ipsos Sopra Steria 1 st -round score 30% 25 20 15 La Reunion French Guiana Martinique Guadeloupe Wallis & Futuna New Caledonia French Polynesia Mayotte St.-Pierre-&-Miquelon Philippe Poutou Definitive results for the 1 st round Harris Interactive Block illegal migrants from gaining residency status Wants to quit euro currency and the Schengen open borders agreement Retirement at 60, if 40 years of payments made 1.21 1.09 0.92 0.64 0.18 Francois Asselineau Nathalie Arthaud Jacques Cheminade been propelled by the anti-globalisation, anti-establishment fury that drove Britain’s vote to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s election in the United States. Now a twice-divorced mother of three, she guards her private life zealously, in contrast to Macron. She appears rarely as a couple with her current partner, who is the FN’s vice-president Louis Aliot. Le Pen developed her flair for sharp putdowns as a lawyer defending illegal immigrants facing deportation as a state-appointed attorney. Despite that experience she blames migration – and the European Union – for France’s economic woes. Age 48 Voters 77.77% Source: Interior ministry including blanks and spoiled votes Marine Le Pen Non-voters 22.23% 2.55% Key proposals by frontrunners Centrist Emmanuel Macron and hard-right leader Marine Le Pen will contest the May 7 runoff for the French presidency, Here is a snapshot of their policy programmes: Macron: Economic ‘liberation’ Ü Cut the corporation tax rate from 33% to 25% and give bosses more flexibility to negotiate working time with staff at the company level Ü Give all workers, including the self-employed, access to unemployment benefits Ü Accelerate integration in the eurozone by giving it a central parliament, finance minister and budget. Organise democratic conventions in all EU member states to discuss reforming the bloc Ü Create tax incentives to encourage companies to hire jobseekers from underprivileged neighbourhoods Ü Introduce one month’s obligatory military service for all 18- to 21-year-olds Le Pen: France first Ü Negotiate France’s exit from the eurozone and return to the franc. Immediately suspend membership of the European passport-free Schengen area and restore border controls. Hold a “Frexit” referendum after six months of negotiations with Brussels on transforming the union into a club of nation states Ü Reduce legal immigration to 10,000 people per year, require refugees seeking asylum in France to apply in their home region, hold a referendum on reforms including introducing a French-first policy on jobs and housing Ü Impose a 35% tax on products from companies that offshore factory jobs Ü Lower the minimum retirement age from 62 to 60 and expand family subsidies Ü Pull France out of Naro’s central command and develop closer relations with Russia •
Insight 3 Monday, May 1, 2017 Trump’s first 100 days: A chaotic discovery of power • AFP, Washington, DC From his resounding setbacks in Congress to his stunning policy flipflops, Donald Trump has faced a steep learning curve in his opening months at the White House. Although the new US president has shown a capacity to change both his tone and positions, he has struggled to convey a clearly articulated worldview. With the arrival of the symbolic milestone of 100 days in power on Saturday, a cold, hard reality is setting in for the billionaire businessman who promised supporters he would “win, win, win” for them. At this stage of his presidency, Donald Trump is the least popular leader in modern US history, even if his core supporters still fully back him. The 70-year-old president, whose election victory unleashed a political shockwave around the world, is still clinging to the take-no-prisoners, unpredictable, impulsive style that made him a property mogul and reality TV star. But the onetime anti-establishment candidate who promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington appears to have recognised, with a mix of naivete and craftiness, that he has one of the most difficult jobs in the world. In just his first few weeks in office, Trump suffered some crippling blows. Federal courts halted his proposed travel ban and Congress failed to adopt health care reform. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated,” he said during his efforts to have Obamacare, his Democratic predecessor’s signature domestic policy achievement, repealed and replaced. And following talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping about North Korea, he said that “after listening for 10 minutes, I realised it’s not so easy.” Tweets-a-plenty The demands and constraints of the Oval Office, where every word uttered counts, are quite different from the daily stump speeches 100 DAYS, 959 TWEETS Tweets that characterised the start of Trump’s presidency Inauguration: Jan 20 We will follow two simple rules: BUY AMERICAN AND HIRE AMERICAN! On the travel ban: We must keep 'evil' out of our country! "What is our country coming to when a judge can halt a Homeland Security travel ban and anyone, even with bad intentions, can come into US? FAKE NEWS media (@nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People! 488 tweets Trump made on the campaign trail. Where to turn for advice? What kind of relationship to build with Congress, even when it’s controlled by his own party? How much latitude to afford the usually powerful State and Defence departments? All of his predecessors have said it: moving into the mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a shock to the system. “There’s just something about this job as president every president faces, you know, that you think one thing going in and then the pressures of the job or the realities of the world, you know, are different than you thought,” George W Bush said recently. Aside from his unwavering penchant for morning tweetstorms, often influenced by the ebb and flow Feb 4 Feb 17 Feb 3 Feb 18 of headlines on Fox News, Trump has already changed. In the choice of his teams as well as in some negotiations, a sort of “presidentialisation” seems to be unfolding, albeit haltingly. Elevated to the highest office in the United States with no prior political, diplomatic or military experience, Trump says his ever-evolving approach works. “I do change and I am flexible, and I’m proud of that flexibility,” he said shortly before authorizing air strikes against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over what Washington says was a sarin gas attack on civilians. On China, Russia and Nato, his about-faces have reassured some Americans to some extent, as well as some of Washington’s allies. US President Donald Trump points to supporters as he walks off Air Force One in Atlanta,Georgia on April 28 Don't believe the main stream (fake news) media. The White House is running VERY WELL. I inherited a MESS and am in the process of fixing it AFP April 16 Mar 4 “When a president moves from being so wrong to being so right on such important questions, the sensible response is not to carp but to celebrate, however cautiously,” The Washington Post said in an editorial, reminding readers of the harsh, dark tone of Trump’s inaugural address. But his approach also includes risks. From Syria to North Korea, what is the risk of dragging the United States into a military conflict with an unpredictable outcome, a situation Trump warned against on the campaign trail? How would the Republican president react if a major terror attack were to happen on US soil, as it did on 9/11? ‘Trumpism?’ Both style and substance reveal that Donald J Trump is an American president like no other before him. In a disconcerting interview given to Time magazine in March, in which Trump defended his controversial, far-fetched or just plain false statements one by one, he said: “What am I going to tell you? I tend to be right.” More than three months after he took office, many of his detractors still deem comments by the novelist Philip Roth in an interview with The New Yorker in late January to be on the money. He described a president “ignorant of government, of history, of Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem? We will see what happens! Mar 18 34.8k tweets 471 as president Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't voluntarily leaving the Apprentice, he was fired by his bad (pathetic) ratings Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany! Mar 17 North Korea is behaving very badly. They have been 'playing' the United States for years. China has done little to help! Mar 4 Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! DT science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognising subtlety or nuance... and wielding a vocabulary of 77 words.” Trump’s numerous policy pivots and resets also raise questions about the very definition of his fluid brand of “Trumpism”, which revolves around his ubiquitous “America First” slogan, a seemingly simple idea that is nevertheless tough to explain. The internal squabbles within the Trump White House have meanwhile not helped the president move forward with articulating his long-term vision. Within a group that includes the ultra-conservative Steve Bannon, one thing stands out: the prime positioning of his family, especially daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. The successful nomination of conservative federal judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court stands as the major success of the first 100 days of the 45th president of the United States. All too aware that he doesn’t have much to show for those days, Trump lashed out with a tweet decrying the “ridiculous standard of the first 100 days”, one his own team has repeatedly said is vital. Now Trump, who regularly talks about possibly running for re-election, has more than 1,300 days ahead of him until his first term ends. •
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1 May final World supplement

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