PRESS RELEASE
Cheminade Announces for the Presidency of France: ‘My Ideas Scare the French Political Caste’
April 4, 2016 (EIRNS)—This morning Jacques Cheminade announced his candidacy to become French President in 2017, during a ten-minute interview with Guillaume Daret on "The Four Truths" program on France 2 national TV network. Aired at 7:40 p.m., on prime time, the approximate audience was 1.3 million viewers.
The following is the short article published by France 2, along with the video of the interview: Four Truths—Jacques Cheminade: "My Ideas Scare the French Political Caste."
"For 40 years, in France, there has been a policy of financial dismantling of the country; it is not a policy of growth; it is a policy of submission to international financial control—and thus we have now social austerity—it is a policy where the political seraglio make their pacts with the empire of money. Today, 81% of Frenchmen do not find this reassuring, and 71% think that French society is unjust.... We are under financial occupation against which we must fight in order to free ourselves."
Commenting on his results in the previous presidential elections (0.28% in 1995 and 0.25% in 2012), Jaques Cheminade said that "he was treated to be eliminated." "My ideas frightened them, not me: the idea that one can question the French political caste's collaboration, the oligarchy of the incapable, with the international monetary and financial system."
Having obtained a degree from HEC Paris (Higher Commercial Studies), from the ENA (National School of Administration), and formerly employed as a commercial attaché at the French Mission in New York, he doesn't expect he will have difficulty collecting at least 500 sponsorships by elected officials to validate his Presidential candidacy.
"The French will realize this time that the 'vote utile'[*] will be to vote for me" in 2017, he assured. "They thought they had given a 'vote utile' to François Hollande, who did not rise at all to the promises he had made."
Jacques Cheminade defines himself as "left Gaullist," and his references are "Jaurès, de Gaulle, and Mendès-France." He is for getting out of the euro, on condition that the aim is not a withdrawal to isolationism;" "for France to pull out of the European Union," "against the legalization of soft drugs, but against punishing the users."
Immediately the news spread throughout the press and was covered by Le Figaro, Le Monde, L’Obs, Huffington Post, Le Parisien, L'Express, Togo News, and many other outlets on the internet. Generally the coverage is more respectful, and the attack on the French political caste's collaboration with an international financial enemy, is covered in most articles. But the media outlets try to emphasize the "small" results of previous campaigns, but do mention Cheminade's support for space exploration.
Cheminade declared his candidacy at a moment when France is going into a full-fledged financial, economic, and social crisis: President François Hollande is thoroughly discredited and is likely not to run for a second term. Holland had to drop his hair-raising project to "withdraw nationality from those who would commit terrorist acts"—a scheme to get all the right and even extreme right wing on board with him, which would have led to the creation of stateless individuals. The bill was finally killed in the Senate. Demonstrations on March 31 brought hundreds of thousands of trade unionists and average people into the streets to get the government to drop a proposed labor bill, which would allow "uberization" of most professions and increase unemployment, already at a whopping 8 million! Cheminade's declaration of his candidacy comes at a moment when finally more and more groups are opposing the government's proposed bill to reform the regulations for the Presidential elections, replacing equal media coverage with proportional coverage, plus other measures to make it more difficult for those outside the existing discredited political class to run for President. Solidarité et Progrès spearheaded the campaign against this bill, which has now been denounced by not only the small parties, but also by most of the major newspapers and magazines.
Cheminade's full program is on his new website.
[*] The vote utile means to vote pragmatically for a candidate the voter thinks might win, rather than one whose ideas are most honest, but whom the voter thinks the system won't allow to win.
