Sunday, March 21, 2021

Some Very High-Level Political Thinking: "Macron’s interior minister confronts Le Pen on her own territory"

 This homie don't play, as they say in the banlieues of Chicago.

The tag-team of the FT's David Keohane and Victor Mallet got Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin to open up and what Darmanin had to say was scary smart. I have a feeling Le Pen is going to stop inching up in the polls.

From the Financial Times March 14:

Emmanuel Macron’s rightwing interior minister is unapologetic about his crackdown on Islamists in France. But his campaign is aimed not only at curbing homegrown extremism, he says — it is also a political project to defeat far-right leader Marine Le Pen in next year’s elections. 

Gérald Darmanin, whose planned new law against Islamist “separatism” is aimed at bolstering France’s secular republican values, has been accused of Islamophobia and pandering to the far right after suggesting Le Pen was “softer than we could ever be” in a recent television debate. 

But in an interview with the Financial Times, 38-year-old Darmanin was unrepentant about tackling sensitive issues such as immigration and Islamist radicalism. The danger for France, he argued, was “to let Madame Le Pen become president of the republic because we’ve shown ourselves to be too naive, too soft”. 

“There are between 60 and 70 per cent of French people who say there is too much immigration in France, that Islam is not compatible with the republic, that there could be civil war,” said Darmanin. “When 47 per cent of people are ready to vote for [Le Pen], you have two solutions. Either you call them all idiots — but if you insult people, it’s rare they end up voting for you — or you try to understand what they’re going through.”....

"I’m here to do politics. 
I’m not going to be happy in a country
 where every year Madame Le Pen takes more votes"

....MUCH MORE

Scary smart. 

HT:

Via: https://twitter.com/DavidKeo
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