Olivier Vedrine, a French political scientist who hosts a weekly English-language current affairs TV program in Ukraine, said Ukrainians have a big interest in seeing that Emmanuel Macron is elected as the next president of France.
“I support Macron because he’s pro-European; he’s for a close relationship with Germany,” Vedrine said in an interview on Jan. 30. He likens Macron, 39, a centrist independent who worked as a civil servant before becoming an investment banker, to John F. Kennedy – “brilliant, young, dynamic.”
“He knows what’s happening in the world. He speaks English well – for a French man, it’s very difficult,” he said. Vedrine said Macron would take pro-US, pr0-Ukraine, pro-NATO and pro-European Union positions.
The first round of the French presidential election is on April 23. If no one wins a majority of votes, the top two candidates face each other in a May 7 runoff election. The winner replaces Francois Hollande, the Socialist Party president who became so deeply unpopular that he decided not to seek re-election.
Vedrine considers Hollande an historical accident “who was not supposed to be president.” Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund chief, was favored until a hotel maid accused him of sexual assault. Despite being cleared of the charge, Strauss-Kahn sank his political career with the scandal.
Vedrin said the three other major candidates in the race are scary for Ukraine: Two of them, Marine Le Pen and Francois Fillon, hold openly pro-Kremlin views while the Socialist Party candidate, Benoit Hamon, is so left-wing that he has no chance.
Ironically, Vedrine thinks the ascension of Donald J. Trump as U.S. president will turn French voters away from the American leader’s political soulmate in France – Le Pen – an ultra-nationalist who has praised the Kremlin’s illegal annexation of Crimea and criticized NATO and the EU. She has triggered scandal by accepting a loan from a Russian bank with ties to President Vladimir Putin. He thinks most in France are watching Trump with horror and saying “we don’t want that in Europe.”
As for Le Pen, Vedrine thinks her support will peak at 35 percent. “She won’t win,” he said. “Nobody in France wants to do an alliance with Marine Le Pen.”
While Fillon has been polling with Le Pen in the top two positions, Vedrine said that support for Fillon is falling because he is embroiled in a scandal over the use of public funds to hire relatives for do-nothing jobs. Ukrainians should hope he doesn’t win, Vedrine said. Members of Fillon’s political party have traveled to Russian-occupied Crimea for friendly visits with Kremlin-backed leaders.
Vedrine, 47, hosts the “This Week With Olivier Vedrine,” a current affairs show on UA.TV. It airs Sundays at 9:05 p. m. with rebroadcasts on Mondays at 8 a. m. It can also be viewed on YouTube. Previously, he and Ukrainian Sergiy Velichansky co-hosted “Tea Time” for a year on First National Channel.
Vedrine has made his home in Ukraine for the last four years, coming just before the EuroMaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, 2014.
Vedrine thinks the West under Hollande and former U. S. President Barack Obama made key mistakes by not standing up to Russia from the start of its invasion of the Crimean peninsula. The time to act, he said, was when the Kremlin initially denied that the “little green men” deployed were actually invading Russian soldiers.
Vedrine thinks that the West should have “sent troops to help Russia with the ‘little green men.’ Nobody did that. Why didn’t the Ukrainian army fight? They didn’t have the instruments to fight. Why didn’t we send some troops to stop Putin in Crimea, to see what’s going on. That’s quite a shame. If we had done that, there wouldn’t be (a Russian-led war in) Donbas today.”
He also doesn’t understand why the world is so afraid of Putin, whose country amounts to only 1.6 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. “Russian cannot go to war; they will lose. The only thing they can do is disturb,” he said.
Vedrine was heavily influenced by his childhood living in Nova Scotia, Canada, and by time spent living in Greenville, South Carolina, in the United States.
“France alone can do nothing. It needs Europe. Europe also needs France,” he said. “When I came back to France, I had the spirit of the USA. For me, the European Union needs to be the United States of Europe. Everybody wants to go to the USA or EU. Nobody dreams to be in Russia, Turkey, Iran or some country without democracy.”
Vedrine came to Ukraine to start a business school, but said corruption and conflict with Yanukovych-era Education Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk, who is now in exile, sank his plans. Ever since, he’s volunteered as an English-language TV host. His ambitions to help Ukraine’s European integration are supported by his parents. He got a bachelor’s degree from American Univeristy in France and an International Executive M.B.A. degree at the International School of Management in Paris. He worked from 2010–2014 as chief editor of the Russian edition of France’s National Defense Review. He quit in protest of the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
He has no plans to live elsewhere.
“I can be more efficient in Ukraine than in France for European integration, with my TV program and all my other activities,” Vedrine said. “I am a free man in Ukraine and I like my freedom.”
