French election 2017

[stui magpie]

A beginners guide.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/20/europ ... index.html

talk about a bag of cats.

Interesting comment at the end about the german election due soon.

[swoop42]

I'm backing Melancholy or whatever his name is.

[David]

[Pies4shaw]

And so castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually.

[Mugwump]

[David]

Is providing dodgy under-the-table payments to family members 'grown-up' behaviour? I understand Melenchon wouldn't be your cup of tea, but not sure what Macron has been done to be relegated to the kids' table. I'm not exactly thrilled about his candidacy, but he seems a relatively safe pair of hands.

[Morrigu]

Vive Le Pen!

[Mugwump]

Is providing dodgy under-the-table payments to family members 'grown-up' behaviour? I understand Melenchon wouldn't be your cup of tea, but not sure what Macron has been done to be relegated to the kids' table. I'm not exactly thrilled about his candidacy, but he seems a relatively safe pair of hands.

Macron is almost a grown-up, and he is clearly a man of intelligence and promise. But he has a programme that seems to me to duck the really hard questions and trade-offs that France will ultimately have to make. Le Pen nailed him in the debates, when she said that he is able to speak for 7 minutes without saying anything at all. He's a kind of Blair with added vacuousness, which is saying something.

As I understand the Fillon case, it's a little like the expenses scandal that engulfed British politics in 2010. Politicians are signficantly underpaid relative to the complexity, brutality and demands of the job, and these perks are common and a way of compensating for that. They still do not add up to a sensible reward for the job, but it is suddenly a populist cause like so much, these days. A real corruption scandal such as taking kickbacks from business or interest groups would be a very different thing, in my eyes. And everyone senior in French politics ends up arraigned over something or other. Politics by judicial investigation is one of the many flaws in the French political system. Fillon's policies speak to the French people like adults, and recognise that even states, too, have to pay their way and be competitive in the modern world. He is also attuned to the need to protect that lovely and precious thing, the French culture, from Islamisation.

I think Macron does show great promise, and if he wins he could positively surprise, but he is only 39 with life experience formed in Goldman Sachs and politics, and it shows. Still, I will not be too depressed if he wins. Le Pen is a far classier version of Trump, and while I agree with a few of her policies, that does not make the rest of her programme appealing. And it is still the FN, so one wonders at the intolerance and bigotry that still lurks beneath.

As I said, I almost hope Melenchon wins, as France, a country with so much to admire, needs a real crisis to awaken from its revolt against the modern world. As the Marxists used to say, the contradictions will surface eventually. He will surely increase the pressure in the cooker, as the Euro holds the lid and the escape valves firmly closed.

[David]

^ It's interesting to see the similarities between the US and French elections. There are plenty of deeper nuances and fundamental differences between them, of course, but you can almost roughly exchange each of the following names and get a general idea of what's going on:

Le Pen = Trump
Macron = Clinton (if 30 years younger and less obviously corrupt)
Melenchon = Sanders
Fillon = Marco Rubio for the politics, Jeb Bush for the age and political connections.
Hamon = Martin O'Malley? In the Australian context, he'd be closest to someone like Anthony Albanese.

[Mugwump]

^ yes, those are not bad analogies, though the distinction between Jeb Bush and Rubio's politics is a bit abstruse for my memory, nowadays. I suspect Fillon might be fairly analogous to Jeb Bush outright. I don't think that France has anything like the libertarian conservative movement that the US does, however, and I don't think Fillon fits that bill. He's just more of a liberal economic reformer than the alternatives.

The fact that you/ we can't really place Hamon, the Socialist Party candidate, against any known category, says something about how far into nullity that once-great party has fallen, after the utterly fatuous, utterly specious Hollande.

I suppose all politics resolves into places on the two great axes of political thought - liberty vs authority, on one axis, and individualist vs collective on the other, so there will be similarities in all places.

[David]

[Mountains Magpie]

And so castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually.

Tune

The millennial vote will be interesting. Let's see if the Identitarian movement has grown some legs.

MM

[Jezza]

The polls have opened for voting. I'll be happy to see either Fillon or Le Pen to go through to the second round.

I think Macron and Le Pen will go through with Macron prevailing and becoming the new President of France. God help France if Melenchon somehow makes it to the second round.

[stui magpie]

[David]

^ You can't say I didn't warn you.