RUTHFULLY YOURS

Macron 65.5%

Le Pen 34.5%

2:30 PM: in less than six hours the name of the next French president will be announced. I don’t need to go far out on a limb to predict it will be Emmanuel Macron. Though Marine Le Pen briefly enjoyed an outside chance to overcome the odds and squeak into victory, she destroyed it on the night of the debate. By the way, the official audience figure is 16.5 million, well under the predicted 20 to 22 million that I cited in Part 6. Why do I argue that she has no one to blame but herself for her display of incompetence, confusion, bad faith and bad taste? Because she herself proudly boasted that she had deliberately chosen a totally appropriate and, what’s more, a winning strategy. Her running mate Nicolas Dupont-Aignan publicly and proudly agreed, and many of her supporting commentators concurred. She was expressing the anger of the people. Some are even suggesting at this late hour that her audacious performance will prove to be stronger than all the forces allied against her. They are confident that she will win on an upset!

I can’t understand this uncritical support for someone that has never displayed the qualities of a viable leader of the résistance against jihad. Is vociferous denunciation of Islamization all it takes to fit the bill? If that were so, there would be no difference between writing a blog and leading a nation or even leading the opposition to a jihad-friendly government. In a democracy, you have to convince a majority of voters, you have to get elected. And then you need all the qualities of a brilliant, exceptional, strong, upstanding, competent political leader capable of prevailing over tremendous domestic and international odds.

This explains my dismay at the constant flow of messages from friends and allies in the United States telling me that Marine Le Pen will win, should win, or would be the best choice. The odds when the official campaign ended at midnight Friday were 62% to 38%. Where in the world have we ever seen an upset of that dimension? I will not repeat here all the verified evidence I have reported over the past five years to show the ambiguity of Marine Le Pen’s position on Islam. Can you set aside the coziness with Assad and Hezbollah, the antizionism of her pre-chosen prime minister, her tactical pressure on French Jews to accept sacrifices so the limits she will impose on Muslims won’t seem discriminatory? Do you understand what it means to dual French-Israeli citizens to be told they will have to choose one or the other? Is Frexit the French version of Brexit? Aside from the fact that Marine has surreptitiously dropped it from her platform, there is no comparison. Great Britain was never in the Eurozone, has a vibrant economy and, by its historical and geographical separation from the Continent and Churchillian tradition, has the guts to negotiate a tough divorce from a stubborn EU.

Seen from the USA, the free enterprise capital of the world, Marine Le Pen’s economic platform that fits hand in glove with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Bolivarian dreams-anticapitalist, antiglobalist, anti-American, and naïvely protectionist-might seem too vague to matter. Here on the ground, it would be disastrous. And the double-decker monetary system? The way she described it during the debate, multinationals would use the euro for their unspeakable foreign intercourse and the good French salt of the earth folks will have their francs as delicious as the baguettes they’ll purchase with them. A candidate that can float such preposterous notions is trustworthy on all things Islamic? It’s not logical.

Besides, she’s going to lose. And we’ll be stuck with Emmanuel Macron. In a democracy, you have to win elections if you want to implement your policies. However brilliant, if you can’t convince voters, you’re back in the shadows with the unsung poets.

The Dump

May surprise, Wikileaks ex machina, the eleventh hour dump, the world-shaking upset. Gigantic hack of Emmanuel Macron’s computers. And wild hopes are blooming. Of course no one’s interested in messages about the candidate’s appointment with his barber, who’s going to pick up his suit at the cleaner’s, how many wreaths to order for the memorial ops. All eyes are focused on the explosive offshore account documents. Macron stashed the millions he made as investment banker chez Rothschild (the name that always gets a wink) in a phony offshore company on one of those islands. Wikileaks leaked the supposedly Russian-hacked documents. French media will be released from the election weekend gag order at 8 o’clock tonight. Instead of popping champagne corks with Emmanuel and Brigitte, they’ll be picking through the dump looking for gold. Or maybe the miracle is already happening and thanks to Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange, Marine will be présidente!

Thursday’s local elections in Britain look somewhat less dramatic than people were expecting in the light of national opinion polls showing Theresa May’s Tories literally twice as popular as the Labour Opposition. The BBC summary was : Tories gain eleven councils and 563 seats; Labour lose seven councils and 382 seats; and UKIP retains just one seat nationally.

That looks pretty good for the Tories, very bad for Labour; disappointing for the Liberal Democrats; and terminally bad for UKIP.

For various reasons, however — mainly low turnout — this overall picture is misleading. Though chickens shouldn’t be counted before being hatched, the Tory prospects for June’s general election are even better than they look terrific, which is terrific; Labour’s, very bad but short of terminal; the Lib-Dems’, purgatorial; and UKIP’s, terminal but with an escape clause. Unless all the pundits are wildly wrong — not an impossibility, as we know, but not likely either — the Tories will win a landslide with a three-figure parliamentary majority over all opposition parties. They are on course to be the natural governing party of Britain for the next three elections and two decades.

That’s a massive turnaround from the results of the 2010 election, when the Tories fell short of a majority, and the 2015 election, when they had a small and vulnerable majority. What happened in the meanwhile?

The answer, of course, is Brexit.

According to all the wise men (and wise women too, of course), what Brexit was supposed to do was to divide the Tory party at all levels and render it incapable of government. What Brexit actually did was to repair a deep and bitter gulf on “Europe” that had divided the Tories at all levels since the Macmillan and Heath governments committed their party to Europeanism. And within a few months of the June referendum, the Tories had both reunited with surprising ease around a clear Brexit agenda and leapt from levels of support in the high 30s to stable figures of 44 to 48 per cent in polls. Large seismic shifts in the UK’s traditional voting blocs are therefore following.

To grasp why and how that’s happening, we should first consider the nature of the Tory party.

Toryism has three overlapping identities. It is the party of economic freedom and enterprise — Mrs. Thatcher is the purest symbol of that identity. It is the party of British nationalism — Churchill and Disraeli are the greatest figures in that tradition. Its third strand, however, is a more complicated one: It’s the party that always seeks to interpret, defend, and advance the interests of the British state in a skeptical and non-partisan way — Lord Salisbury and Sir Robert Peel are the most distinguished exemplars of that view.

Once Latin America’s richest country, Venezuela can no longer feed its people, hobbled by the nationalization of farms as well as price and currency controls.

ARE, Venezuela— Jean Pierre Planchart, a year old, has the drawn face of an old man and a cry that is little more than a whimper. His ribs show through his skin. He weighs just 11 pounds.

His mother, Maria Planchart, tried to feed him what she could find combing through the trash—scraps of chicken or potato. She finally took him to a hospital in Caracas, where she prays a rice-milk concoction keeps her son alive.

“I watched him sleep and sleep, getting weaker, all the time losing weight,” said Ms. Planchart, 34 years old. “I never thought I’d see Venezuela like this.”

Her country was once Latin America’s richest, producing food for export. Venezuela now can’t grow enough to feed its own people in an economy hobbled by the nationalization of private farms, and price and currency controls.

Maria Planchart has had to go through trash to find food for her one-year-old son, Jean Pierre. She is among a growing number of Venezuelans suffering from hunger and malnutrition. Photo: Miguel Gutiérrez for The Wall Street Journal

Venezuela has the world’s highest inflation—estimated by the International Monetary Fund to reach 720% this year—making it nearly impossible for families to make ends meet. Since 2013, the economy has shrunk 27%, according to local investment bank Torino Capital; imports of food have plunged 70%.

Hordes of people, many with children in tow, rummage through garbage, an uncommon sight a year ago. People in the countryside pick farms clean at night, stealing everything from fruits hanging on trees to pumpkins on the ground, adding to the misery of farmers hurt by shortages of seed and fertilizer. Looters target food stores. Families padlock their refrigerators.

Three in four Venezuelans said they had lost weight last year, an average of 19 pounds, according to the National Poll of Living Conditions, an annual study by social scientists. People here, in a mix of rage and humor, call it the Maduro diet after President Nicolás Maduro.

For more than a month, Venezuelans have protested against the increasingly authoritarian government of Mr. Maduro; by Friday, more than 35 people had been reported killed in the unrest. The country’s Food Ministry, the president’s office, the Communications Ministry and the Foreign Ministry didn’t return calls or emails requesting comment for this article.

“Here, for the government, there are no malnourished children,” said Livia Machado, a physician and child malnutrition expert. “The reality is this is an epidemic, and everyone should be paying attention to this.”

Dr. Machado and her team of doctors are seeing a dramatic increase in emaciated infants brought to the Domingo Luciani Hospital in Caracas, where they work.

The problem is no better in towns like Yare, south of Caracas, where the government’s leftist movement was long popular. “To eat,” said Sergio Jesus Sorjas, 11 years old, “I sometimes go to the butcher and I say, ‘Sir, do you have any bones you can give me?’ ”

The boy receives nutritional formula or a traditional Venezuelan corncake from the parish priest. Sergio said he hasn’t tasted meat in months: “Sometimes, I don’t eat at all.” CONTINUE AT SITE