Macron in Neoliberal Political Endgame

Emmanuel Macron's agenda has always been straightforward.  Make the rich richer, and make the ordinary folk work longer and for less money. 

Now that the bloom is off that rose (what took them so long), Macron is adopting the anti-immigrant policies of the far-right National Rally Party. (Formerly the National Front)

It's pretty clear that he sees Marine Le Pen as his most worrying political threat, and he is adopting her policies in an attempt to neutralize her.

Here is hoping that it does not work, and that Le Pen does not make it to the runoff this time around:

The French government is facing a political crisis after the health minister Aurélien Rousseau offered his resignation in protest over a hardline immigration bill.

Emmanuel Macron’s ruling centrist party was divided and soul-searching on Wednesday after a strict new immigration law was approved by parliament but contained so many hardline measures that the far-right Marine Le Pen claimed it as an “ideological victory” for her own anti-immigration platform.

………

His interior minister Gérald Darmanin had argued that the bill “protected the French”, saying the government had to take tough measures on immigration in order to stem the rise of Le Pen’s anti-immigration far-right National Rally, which is now the single biggest opposition party in parliament and polling in first position ahead of next year’s European elections.

But after opposition parties refused to even debate the immigration bill in parliament last week, a compromise text was swiftly drawn up by a special parliamentary committee. As a result, the centrist government put forward a much tougher, right-wing bill which reduced access to welfare benefits for foreigners, toughened rules for foreign students, introduced migration quotas, made it harder for the children of non-nationals born in France to become French, and ruled that dual nationals sentenced for serious crimes against the police could lose French citizenship.

Why would the opposition debate the bill?  The left is opposed to the crack-down, and Le Pen and her merry band of Fascists gain nothing by negotiating.

So Macron blinked, because he had no alternative.

The last two 'graphs of the article say it all:

………

Opposition politicians on the left pointed out that when Macron was re-elected for a second-term in 2022, he had acknowledged that many voters chose him not for his own ideas but to keep out the far-right ideas of his opponent Marine Le Pen.

Cyrielle Chatelain, a Green MP, told parliament there was a feeling of “shame and betrayal” that Macron had instead brought in the ideas of the far-right with this bill.

Trust me on this, because as an American, I have had a lot of experience with this, when you make a decision to run candidates who stand for nothing, because the other side is perceived as frightening, eventually, these nothings will be forced to adopt core policies of the opposition, because they have no foundation to stand on.

I can think of no better examples of this than Bill Clinton, (Eviscerating welfare, anti-union, repealing Glass-Steagall, etc.), and Barack Obama. (Get out of jail free for fraud and torture, anti-union, in bed with the health insurance companies and big pharma, support for forever wars, etc.)