things in there I like e.g. funding rural schools under twelve pupils and add 2,500 - 3,000€ a year as an incentive to locate in a rural location.

Also his reduction of civil work force has redeployment in much needed ways, such as having service bureaus open after 17h on weekdays and open on samedi (Saturday).

But and however, saying he is like Ronald Reagan, is not an overstatement: he is antiunion, for austerity, pro corporate. How we watch him and better still see that he doesn't bring over any more of the US worst practices is the question.

Why was he voted in when Sarkozy was a lame duck after his first year, and Hollande, although given more time to do what the platform stated, ended up the same. What made voters think a pro NATO, pro trade, anti union, pro austerity (just a few items on his neo liberal agenda) would be any different if not worse than the previous two. I cannot figure this out. There were options in the first round. And anyone I talked with was scared to death of Le Pen, who at least is very visible in her goals.

Is Macron the king some say the French are looking for?

Referring to the guardian article Brand new Macron, same old colonialism - Eliza Anyangwe and in there just the quotes given by US author Laura Seay. My critical comment goes against Laura Seay, not Elza Anyangue, whose blood boiled over and I know why. Just to be clear.

"plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"—"the more it changes, the more it's the same thing".

I remember the discussions about these issues from 1968 to 1999 in my extended family. I was reminded of it lately between 2014 to 2015. I just want to comment to one paragraph in that article.

The condemnation online was swift and relentless. The US political scientist Laura Seay summarised the problem many had with Macron’s words in a series of tweets: “It is RICH for a French president to criticise Africa this way,” she said. “France’s colonial theory was called the ‘mission civilisatrice’, which purported to bring all the benefits of Frenchness to the continent. Part of the ‘mission’ was the institutionalisation of Catholicism as the official religion of French colonial territories in Africa.”

“We see all kinds of effects of the ‘mission civilisatrice’ in Francophone Africa today,” she continued, “like the church’s teaching against contraceptive use, which most African adherents take very seriously. Do women in Francophone Africa want to give birth to far more children than they can reasonably feed, clothe, and educate? I doubt most do.”

With all due respect my experience doesn't support some of her comment quoted in the article. It's not the influence of the Catholic Church's teaching against the usage of contraceptiva, which is responsible for the number of children African women give birth to, at least not in my experience.

My mother-in-law, born in the francophone part of Cameroon, gave birth to 14 children. 7 died. She gave birth from the 1918 to 1945. The churches in her village were affiliated with American missionaries and not catholic ones. The colonialists in her village were the Germans til 1918, then the French. Her husband was not a polygame and an assistant 'doctor' to colonial medical doctors in that village.

And African woman who refused to have children or tried to prevent pregancies in those times were pressured from the female sister-in-laws to give birth and consume marital intercourse whenever it was wanted by the husband (their brother). If they would not comply, they were thrown off the family clan. Isolated. Disrespected. Sent back home to her family, a "shameful" affair. A woman who couldn't give birth for real medical reasons had a very complicated role to play in her extendend family clan.

In the next generation, ie my sister-in-laws (now dead but would be in the seventies to eighties today) all could have had access to contraceptiva, if they needed them. I saw those contraceptiva with my own eyes in their households. At least it was not the lack of money and there were no legal impediments for them to get anticontraceptiva. (Ironically it might have been more difficult for poor Afro-American women to have access to contraceptiva than for her 'sisters' in Africa). The number of children my sister-in-laws gave birth to ranged from zero to three to six to ten children. Some of the children were born in France, as their mothers - with or without their husbands - made it into France in the sixties and seventies.

The next to next generation. One of those children of my sister-in-law, born already in France, I hold as a baby in my arms, when I visited her in 1970. Neither parents of her were catholic. I lost contact to her mother later on because if separated from my francophone husband some twenty plus years later in the US.

When my former husband died two years ago, among the guests during service in the funeral home, was this baby I hold in my arms in 1970. She lived in France her whole life with her francophone African husband. I understood through conversations with her and one of my husband nieces that she had ten children, all born in France. Even that niece (now having two kids in America and all being American citizens and being herself in the fifties) said "oh, my, ten kids that's "trop" (too many)". When I asked my niece how she managed to raise ten kids in France and if her husband was somehow a well-to-do guy, my nieces' facial expressions indicated she took offense at my question. You can't indirectly accuse an African woman to have too many kids as a white woman not affiliated to the family. Babies are "gifts of God" and therefore you don't accuse a women to give birth to children.

So, to me it's clear that the church has little to do with it, nor does the question of being rich or not, has anything to do with how many children African women give birth to. Many AFricans adore the Pope and the Catholic church as a matter of hope to compete against traditional religions, who can be feared as being destructive.

I do believe to have learned that birth control is left to the responsibility of the women. Men don't want to use methods available to them to take care of preventing pregnancies. They refuse it for the most part. Women might be glad to have birth control drugs or methods available to them, but are also influenced by the role their traditions pressure them to play.

I do believe that a francophome woman living in the US with her francophone African husband wouldn't give birth to ten children in the US.

And I do believe that is due to the miserable social support of the US healthcare system and school system of the US. To raise 10 children in the US and being not rich is less possible or desirable than in France, where at least you get your kids through school and they are covered for their health insurance independently from their parents class status and ethnicity.

Most African women I know about today react like all other women everywhere. They try to control the number of children they give birth to, hopefully in accordance with the father(s) of their children.

With other comments in that article I would agree:

Macron’s statements make the blood boil not because they are novel but because they make no mention of the root causes of the challenges of which the president speaks. Gone is the lucid, welcome admission that France’s role in its former colonies was anything but laudable. He now says nothing of the fact that France’s future is indelibly tied to that of its former colonies, and that the relation between the two remains largely neocolonial: Francophone Africa still trades heavily with France, and French companies – particularly in the extractive industries – have a strong presence on the continent.

More controversially, France’s relationship with its former colonies – known as Françafrique – is perhaps best captured by the use of the CFA franc currency, which offers little benefit to the Francophone nations. As the Cameroonian journalist Julie Owono has written: “CFA zone countries have to deposit 50% of their currency reserves into a so-called operations account managed by the French treasury.”

Militarily, France also continues to embroil itself in issues of state in its former colonies, but is often silent on human and civil rights abuses. Again, look at Cameroon, where the strongman Paul Biya imprisons opponents with no charge, meets peaceful protest with violence, and turns off the internet in order to silence his people – all of which has elicited not a peep from the French regime.

I agree with all of that and it has been discussed ad nauseam. The author Laura Seay (or may be it's Eliza Anyangwe - I don't know who says what in that article ) reflects the long-standing rivalry between francophony and anglophony in Cameroon or even in general. One should not forget that such activities by Paul Biya to imprison opponents with brutality behind the curtain has NOT elicited a peep in the United States as well.

So, what else is new? It never stops, right? It goes on and on with the same bullshit from one generation to the next and the next to next. May be the fourth generation gets it right. As all good bad things are three.

Sigh.

Don't be surprised to wake up one morning to cries of 'Vive l'Empereur!', and the administration of Macron 1er.

Might even be able to do more damage than LePen would manage cause he looks and talks pretty.

is that he has made no obligatory trip to Israel--unlike our fearless leader. Netanyahoo has not, so far as I know, been invited to Versailles for ceremonial toe kissing, again, not following T-Rump's example, although I believe Bennie has just this week invited himself to Paris. Other, less important heads of state, such as, oh, the President of Russia and the Chancellor of Germany, follow diplomatic protocol and wait to be invited before crossing international borders.

Nor am I aware that Macron has joined in any demonizing of Assad or Iran.

I regard the new President of France as a man of immense will and talent and few or no discernible principles. He puts me in mind of Julius Ceasar, albeit on a lesser scale.

I did not expect Jupiter on the throne, though Napoleon would have been a good fit. Can EM throw a wicked thunderbolt to smite his enemies, those who do not thrive in austerity (which is mostly everyone). With his cosying up to Trump (the less charitable might call it sucking up but such would diminish the stature of such a manly man). Not being a Francophone nor having visited France, makes me about as expert in French affairs as our recently departed empty suit BHO. So from across the pond or whatever the French term is, I still believe that LePen's populism will resonate better with the French citizen than Macron's neoliberalism. Some political outsider he was. Yeah, right. You know, just like Loyd Blankfein.

I was fortunate to have a picture of Jupiter sitting on his throne, awaiting his consort Juno (Angela Merkel) to arrive.