Both candidates have more in common than their followers think

What You Discover About Macron and Le Pen If You Don't Conform to the Media Adjectives

Yesterday was held the first round in the French presidential elections. Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen have been the most voted. One of them will become president of France.

Taking a look at various media, what I find of both candidates is a succession of adjectives that tell me very little of each candidate. To Le Pen they throw to him with profusion one of the denominated curses: far-right. With this they try to say about someone who is as bad as if she ate children for breakfast and trampled old women for pleasure. However, in Spain that word is used for ideas so varied - and even opposed - that in itself no longer says much. About the other candidate I have read more varied things: from liberal to socialist, including right-wing, pro-establishment, etc. You feel lost in a shower of adjectives like that. The most curious thing is that both have received an adjective today something ambiguous: antisystem. It is ambiguous because this depends on what each media understands by system, of course. I have stayed like other times: agter so much speculation about one and another, in the end what is each one defends on themes of which no media speaks? After searching a bit, I'll give you a brief summary.

Emmanuel Macron, candidate of En Marche!

He has tried to capture - with success - the vote of different sectors of the population saying that he wants "the best of the left, the best of the right and even the best of the center." He has some liberal proposals (lowering the tax burden, lowering contributions to the self-employed, making the labor market more flexible and reducing the size of public administration), and other social democrats (raising public investment by 50 billion, giving young people a check to spend 500 euros in "culture", and not touch the pension system). Although he declares herself a Catholic, he is openly abortionist (in February he paid tribute to Simone Veil, the author of the French law to kill unborn children), a supporter of gender ideology and akin to the LGTB lobby, of which he has declared himself a defender.

In the religious issues, he favors reinforcing secularism in schools. He wants the Government to manage certain confessions, creating a French council of Muslim worship, which would have the responsibility of building mosques and forming Islamic imams. However, he has charged against "revanchist secularism", stating: "I believe that a practicing Catholic may consider that the laws of religion go beyond the laws of the Republic." "I do not ask people to be moderate, it's not my business", he said last year in a public debate. However, in that same event he contradicted Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating: "Religion can not be present in school."

Marine Le Pen, candidate of the Front National

Her speech includes, like Macron's, typical ingredients of the right and left. She blocks the free competition of "law of the jungle", criticizes the free market and intends to punish the French companies that invest in other countries. On the other hand, she defends the freedom of education, but at the same time she wants to control that the private schools are taught the "values of the Republic", values that are secularists. Likewise, she wants to encourage the birth and increase the family support, but also she has made clear that she will leave the abortion law intact.

She proposes to combat jihadism with various measures, including banning Islamic fundamentalist organizations and closing extremist mosques. But in addition to this, she risks to commit injustices, banning "the financing by foreign countries of places of worship and their personnel" (this would affect Catholic temples that receive funds from the Holy See, even though Catholics do not commit attacks in France), and banning religious symbols in public spaces (something that has criticized Catholic and Jewish sectors, as she could include the ban on crosses and kippah). She also wants to restrict immigration, allowing only 10,000 legal foreign immigrants per year. In addition, she has announced a special tax for companies that hire foreigners, forgetting - perhaps - that many French have prospered working for foreign companies or investing abroad.

What would I vote if I were a French citizen?

For many years I have been in the habit of not trusting the adjectives and doing the work to look for what the politicians say to know which one to vote for. If I were French, I have clear that my vote in the second round would be a blank vote. I do not feel identified with either the abortionist Macron or the abortionist Le Pen, and I start with a topic that seems to me non-negotiable. I would not think of voting for a politician who had a fabulous program but who was anti-Semitic or a supporter of slavery. Abortion is an attempt against human dignity and the politician who defends is automatically out of my voting options. But neither Macron nor Le Pen have fabulous programs. Although both are correct in certain issues, they have others that are totally unacceptable to me. I do not like politicians hostile to religious freedom, not even when that hostility takes as an excuse to fight a problem like jihadism. I do not support politicians who support the ill-fated gender ideology or who want to privilege the LGTB lobby at the expense of the rest of the population, as Macron does, or politicians who want to combat the problem of illegal immigration by committing injustices, as Le Pen.

I know what I take with the discourse I've just made. We live in a polarized world, in which one has to be proTrump or antiTrump, proLePen or antiLePen, do what Trump, Le Pen and their rivals do. I am already tired of that tricky dialectic, in which the proposals or measures of a politician are not valued for their level of accuracy, but by who signs them. This is an independent blog: here I defend values and principles, not acronyms or surnames.

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(Photos: Macron's Facebook and Le Pen's Flickr)

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