70 year old Jacques Cheminade is the surprise candidate of the presidential elections. Having managed to get more than 530 sponsorships from local councillors, this almost total unknown has succeeded where former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Corinne Lepage, Minister for the Environment between 1995 and 1997, have failed. As the official campaign began, the France Télévision news website ran this portrait.
Photo: Jacques Cheminade launching his campaign on the 19th March 2012 in Chevilly, Loiret. (Christelle Besseyre, MAXPPP)
Article Source: “Cheminade, l'étrange candidat qui avait annoncé la crise financière”, Bastien Hugues, Francetvinfo (20/03/2012)
A “left-wing Gaullist” with links to holocaust denial and conspiracy theories
Jacques Cheminade, the leader of Solidarité et progrès, has assembled a coterie of a few dozen activists. Born in Argentina in 1941, he came to France at the age of 18, and graduated from the HEC business school in 1963 and from the École Nationale d'Administration (ENA) six years later. A civil service mandarin at the Ministry of Finance until 1981, in 1982 he became General Secretary of the French branch of the European Workers’ Party, an offshoot of the US Labor Party. This movement was founded in the United States by Lyndon LaRouche, whose declarations range from racism to holocaust denial, conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism and homophobia, as the website Rue89 reminds us.
The site Conspiracywatch.info, “watchdog of conspiracy theories,” also recalls that Mr. LaRouche is “convinced that Hitler’s rise to power in Germany was planned by the United Kingdom, that the Beatles were an offshoot of British propaganda services, that the Bush administration itself masterminded the 9/11 terrorist attacks, that Queen Elizabeth II controls international drug trafficking, and that homosexuality is an invention of the KGB...”
Although he is now trying to play down these controversial claims, Jacques Cheminade, who defines himself as a “left-wing Gaullist,” remains a close friend of Lyndon LaRouche, whose name figures prominently on his party and campaign websites. As for his party, Solidarité et progrès, Le Monde points out that it was cited in a 2005 report of the Interdepartmental Committee for the Prevention of Sects and Cults (MIVILUDES)*. The Miviludes observed that, “students are a prime target for this party which, under the cover of an 'anti-Bush' political ideology and by using the image of an alternative to traditional political movements, plays on students' activism and idealism.”
A candidate who was already predicting the financial crisis in 1995
But Jacques Cheminade has already been a candidate in a presidential election, in 1995. Although he only obtained 0.28% of the votes in the first round, he can claim to have predicted the collapse of the international economic system before anybody else.
[Readers who speak French might want to listen to an extract of an interview Cheminade gave in 1995, which was included in the original article to back up this observation. Click here. (ed.)]
This year, he’s back to rejoin the fight against “the same financial oligarchy that once supported and aided Hitler.” And he proposes, in no particular order, to exit the Euro, to separate commercial banks from investment banks, to provisionally place private banks under the control of the State, to combine Income Tax and the CSG (National Insurance and Social Security payments), to create a social VAT whose rates would vary depending on the goods bought, and to introduce a tax on financial transactions.
An iconoclast, to say the least
But what sets Jacques Cheminade apart from the other candidates is a number of rather more surprising proposals. Top of the list are: “colonising the Moon and Mars”; “forming artistic intervention brigades to bring classical music to the courtyards of public buildings and to station concourses”; “promoting the Aérotrain (monorail) developed by the engineer Bertin,” over the development of TGV networks; creating a “land bridge between Europe and Asia,” to connect France to China at high speed; “launching a major cultural TV show named Art and science for the people”; "forbidding violent video games and imposing tax surcharges on those with no educational content...”
These are the proposals Jacques Cheminade will want to present in the media before the 22nd April. From 20th March onwards, he gets exactly the same amount of airtime on television and radio as any other candidate. According to the lastest polls, fewer than 0.5% of the electorate intend to vote for Jacques Cheminade.
* La Mission Interministérielle de Vigilance et de Lutte contre les Dérives Sectaires
Translation: Antoine Gervais and Jérémy Delhaye
Editing: Sam Trainor