The Oh, Hello and

welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Today Sebastian Budgen

analyzes the French election and so Fia Japarizar reports on how

NGOs have turned the country of Georgia into an impoverished

Libertarian Laboratory.

First, France.

On April 23rd, France held an election to choose the successor to the disastrous President

Hollande. Hollande, a nominal socialist, managed to alienate nearly everyone,

earning some of the lowest approval ratings of any politician of the world.

The initial field consisted of 11 candidates.

Under French law, if no one gains a majority in the first round, there's a second runoff election between the top two candidates held two weeks after the first.

Neither candidate of the two previously dominant parties, the socialists on the

center left and the Republicans on the center right qualified.

The winners were Emmanuel Macron and investment banker with little

political experience and Maureen Le Penn of the partly renovated

far-right party, the National Front.

The National Front was co-founded by Marine Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie,

as an explicitly neo-fascist operation nostalgic for the days of Nazi-occupied France. He was expelled from the party in

2015 by his daughter who'd taken it over and tried to sanitize its image. The big

surprise of the first round was the strong performance of a serious leftist Jean-Luc Melanchon who came in less than two points behind La Penn.

Here's Sebastian Budgen, a senior editor at Verso and a member of the editorial board of historical materialism with more.

It looks like France is going to experience a similar blackmail, of one we've heard

...