One down, eight to go.

We previously reported that Le Pen’s first rival, François Fillon, was being accused of criminal corruption. And while he continued campaigning during all this time, probably hoping that this would blow over or that the establishment would save him for fear of a Le Pen presidency, this is now coming to a close.

The way is clearing for a straight up battle between Front National and the hard left, which is the best scenario she could hope for.

New York Times:

The French center-right presidential candidate François Fillon was charged with several counts of embezzlement on Tuesday, further hobbling a campaign that he has nonetheless said he will continue.

Mr. Fillon becomes the first major candidate to seek the presidency under France’s Fifth Republic while under formal criminal investigation. The accusations against him center on the employment, at public expense, of his wife and two of his five children as parliamentary aides.

He had been leading the race after winning center-right primaries in November, but his campaign was upended when Le Canard Enchaîné, a weekly newspaper, reported in January on allegations that his wife had what amounted to a no-show public job as a parliamentary aide.

Since then, although Mr. Fillon, 63, has stabilized his standing in the polls, new revelations in the news media of possible financial shenanigans have kept him down. Pundits have repeatedly declared his candidacy dead, but he has hung on grimly, beating back challenges from within his party.

Yeah, he’s done.

So this means there’s no serious contended on the right – that kike rat Sarkozy is also out of the race, having lost to Fillon in the primaries.

This, by itself, far from guarantees that Le Pen will win, or even do well. Her only real chance will be to frame herself as an anti-establishment figure, just like Trump did to wrestle victory away from the cucks.

The good news is that she’s seemingly starting to adopt some pages from the Trump playbook. This happened yesterday:

Attacking the establishment media is a very good first step.

She needs to keep pushing this – hard.

Here’s your chance. You better not mess this up, woman!

After the great victory in America, the next struggle will play out in France. Marine Le Pen’s Front National is the only party which is campaigning on a platform to secede from the European Union, a move which would in all likeliness destroy the Jew-controlled organization.

The situation did seem dire, but I’ve previously outlined a scenario in which victory was possible. Basically, although she’s currently leading in the polls, Le Pen can’t win if the second round of voting opposes her and a right-wing candidate, since the left would unify against her. The current runner-up needs to fall behind in the race to ensure a leftist candidate wins the second position. This would allow her to unify the right on her side.

And, by Kek’s grace, it seems the stars are aligning to make that scenario a reality.

BBC:

Francois Fillon has promised to hit back fast with the facts that show his British wife Penelope is above suspicion, after prosecutors launched a preliminary investigation into claims that she received public money improperly.

He needs to do just that. Otherwise this family affair could have grave consequences indeed on his chances to be the next French president.

DENIED!

“Judicial time is not political time is not media time,” says BFMTV’s political commentator Laurent Neumann.

“The prosecutors may take weeks examining the allegations. [Mr] Fillon needs to squash them now,” he added.

According to Mr Fillon’s lawyers, the documents currently being fast-tracked to the prosecutors’ office will demolish the central charge that for more than eight years Penelope Fillon was paid for non-existent work as his parliamentary assistant.

But the problem for Mr Fillon is that even if he provides proof that his wife did indeed earn her 500,000 euros (£430,000; $534,000), that does not mean the end of the affair.

All may have been done strictly according to the law – and indeed to common parliamentary practice – but the image many voters will retain is of yet another senior politician feeding from the public trough.

In democracy, basically all politicians are corrupt. The trick is not getting caught.

Le Pen needs to pounce viciously and finish him off.

Fillon can’t be allowed to finish the primaries in second position. That would make it nearly impossible for Le Pen to win in the second round.

We better pray that Steve Bannon is advising her on how best to attack him. The future of Europe may hang in the balance.

I’m sure France hoaxes polls, just the same as the US does.

Well, actually, they’re probably a couple decades behind in poll-hoaxing technology. Due to their refusal to learn English, the French tend to be a couple decades behind in everything.

Paris 2016

So yeah, I mean – whatever the case, Le Pen is going to need some kind of miracle.

Sigh.

It’s so, so frustrating.

We have to remove women from politics. At least from right-wing politics. That’s something the right-wing has control over. We are not benefiting from this. It doesn’t “soften our image” in any way that could be considered positive.

RT:

Francois Fillon looks likely to triumph over Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election runoff in May, with 66 percent of vote shown as going to the center-right candidate, the latest opinion poll by the Elabe Institute shows.

The survey indicated that Fillon (Les Republicains) and Le Pen (Front National) will take the lead after the first round of voting in April, and will get to the runoff. In the later ballot, scheduled for May, Fillon looks very likely to get 66 percent of the vote, while Le Pen is to receive 34 percent.

…

The poll was carried out online on September 28-29, and involved 941 voters as a representative group.

Hollande’s ratings have been going steadily down, with a drop from 17 percent in August to 15 percent in September, and continued sliding to the lowest figure in the history of the French presidency – 4 percent – according to polls by Ipsos, Elabe for Radio Classique, and Les Echos daily.

It was all setup, just like the situation with Donald Trump in the US.

But France doesn’t have a Donald Trump.

Instead they have Madam Frump.

Basically, on everything but the EU, Fillon’s rhetoric is better than Le Pen’s. People also view him as more capable than Le Pen, given that he is male. And though I don’t know his history in detail, just reading up on him over the last week, it seems that he has a more solid record than Le Pen, not doing all of this flip-flopping around.

This is so, so frustrating.

Frexit would kill the EU but this stupid woman is going to kill Frexit.

Dear French: It isn’t too late to pull Le Pen and run a Dark Horse.

So, I don’t really know – I thought Sarkozy was going to win his primary and face off against Le Pen – but apparently, this Fillion person is going to be doing that.

He is extremely pro-EU, shilling for the most insane positions, such as the EU army.

But his rhetoric on Islam and immigration is now more extreme than Le Pen’s.

Daily Mail:

French conservative politician Francois Fillon has said he doesn’t want the country to be multi-cultural and promised ‘radical’ changes should he become the next president.

Fillon has been tipped to be the next president of France should he beat Alain Juppe in the Republican party’s presidential primary on Sunday.

When asked whether he saw the future of French society on Thursday as multicultural the conservative firebrand said: ‘the answer is no’.

‘France has a history, a language, a culture, of course this culture and language have been enriched by the contributions of foreign populations, but it remains the foundation of our identity,’ he said.

Fillon also rejected the suggestion that France is already a multi-cultural country.

‘No, in any case it’s not the choice we made, we did not make the choice of communitarianism and multiculturalism.’

‘When we go to somebody’s house, we don’t try to take power,’ said Fillon adding that immigrants must respect France’s cultural heritage.

That’s serious business. He’s got one more primary this Sunday, and then it is pretty much sure to be him and Marine Le Pen in the run-off in May which will decide whether France leaves the EU.

She’s in a worst of both world’s situation, where she has the Nazi label, based on the party’s history, but positions that are less radical than those of her opponent on race and immigration. She is also a woman, a type of person not generally associated with the right-wing.

Le Pen needs to get advice from Farage and Bannon ASAP, and she needs to just do whatever they say.

I don’t want to lose this election because of this horrible woman.

So, I was surprised Jew Sarkozy lost the primary. But I assume that is because I was just seeing the English media coverage.

The man who won, François Fillon, is more hardcore than Sarkozy in his rhetoric. Of course, like Sarkozy, he is pro-EU. That is the only issue currently setting Le Pen apart, and the reason the Daily Stormer endorses her for President of France.

But is she going to be able to beat a man who speaks more strongly about Islam and immigration than she does – and is even pro-Russia – on that issue alone?

It’s going to be difficult, I’d say.

New York Times:

A patriotic sea of supporters, waving red, white and blue flags, greeted the newly ascendant presidential hopeful François Fillon this week at a soulless conference center in this suburb of Lyon.

Mr. Fillon described radical Islam as a “totalitarianism like the Nazis” to the cheers of an enthusiastic crowd, adding that France would need Russia’s help to fight it. Catholics, Protestants and Jews “don’t denounce the values of the Republic,” he thundered — unlike the faithful of a certain other religion.

“We’ve got to reduce immigration to its strict minimum,” he said. “Our country is not a sum of communities, it is an identity!”

In a year when nativist politics have become the ticket to electoral victory, Mr. Fillon, 62, a dark-suited, stern-faced former prime minister has managed to successfully ride the same nationalist and xenophobic currents as that have pushed politicians in Britain and the United States to victory.

For months, Mr. Fillon polled third and even fourth among presidential contenders in France and was largely dismissed. But his defense of French values and identity has suddenly made him the front-runner as France’s right-center Republican Party prepares to vote Sunday in a runoff to choose its standard-bearer in the 2017 elections — and quite possibly the next president of France.

That strategy has not only vaulted Mr. Fillon to the front of the pack, surprising the French news media, pundits and politicians. It has also has shifted the playing field for French conservatives far to the right, snug alongside the far-right National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, who may be his strongest challenger next year.

The two are now competing for some of the same voters, but the xenophobic, anti-immigrant National Front is not regarded as respectable by many middle-class French people, particularly Catholics.

Mr. Fillon, on the other hand, has positioned himself as a staunch defender of French values, vowing to restore authority, honor the Roman Catholic Church and exert “strict administrative control” over Islam.

Such appeals were met with fervent cheers during his campaign rally here by supporters who agreed that French identity and French values were under threat from both Islam and the secular left.

If those themes sound familiar to the ones that already shaped pivotal votes in Britain and the United States this year, it is because they are. And Mr. Fillon, an unsmiling political veteran, has used them to remarkable effect in France to change his political fortunes.

Few analysts give France’s Socialists and their unpopular president, François Hollande, a strong chance in the spring. But Mr. Fillon, with his dark-eyed frown, suggests a return to authority, and the rally crowd of about 5,000 here loved it.

“He really respects French values, and that is very, very important to us,” said Vincent Robert, a man in late middle-age who said he was a retired artisan.

“There is uprightness and frankness,” Mr. Robert said. “And incredible enthusiasm for him in the middle class.”

His friend Bruno Perrin, a retired management consultant, was equally in thrall. “It’s his defense of values — Christianity, the family, our traditions — that is what we like,” he said.

Mr. Fillon’s supporters say he is now the candidate best placed to bar Ms. Le Pen’s path to victory.

And the entire establishment will support him.

Because just like with Orban in Hungary, it doesn’t matter how hardcore you are on any issue as long as you don’t confront the EU. Because any resistance can be fully crushed by the central EU government as the power is solidified.

Fillon is an aggressive supporter of the EU agenda.

As Politico notes with regards to the Margaret Thatcher comparison the media is pushing:

Only on Europe does Fillon differ with Thatcher. Proposing an overhaul of institutions, he wants to form a eurozone government, integrate EU defense capabilities and beef up protection of exterior borders.

“Integrate EU defense capabilities” is a euphemism for “build an EU army.” That is now a thing.

The long run is over.

In the very long run, we will need a European army. Because we have to be credible when it comes to foreign policy #wahlarena #withJuncker

— Jean-Claude Juncker (@JunckerEU) May 20, 2014

Germany is pushing for rapid integration in response to Brexit, to attempt to ensure that all member states will be so wrapped up in this web they won’t be able to escape in the future.

Whereas Sarkozy was critical of the EU, this guy is full-on – using the hard anti-Isalm rhetoric as cover.

If Le Pen wants to win, she’s going to need a better bag of tricks than she’s got right now.

If I were a member of the National Front right now, I would be pushing to have her replaced with a male figure who isn’t a chronic flip-flopper. But they’re not going to do that.