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French politics: houlala!


Rippounet

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Ok so I'd been thinking about opening this thread about the French elections for some time, so here goes...

Overview

What's it about ?
From April to May the French will elect a new president and new Parliament.

Why should you care ?
The candidate leading in the polls (Le Pen) wants to take France out of the Eurozone. This is way worse than Brexit (the UK always kept its £) and has the potential to trigger a serious economic crisis (think 2008 with the end of the European Union).

A bit of history
2007-2012 : Conservative government led by president Nicolas Sarkozy with prime minister François Fillon. Sarkozy led some « classic » right-wing policies : less civil servants, less taxes (especially on the wealthy), more incentives for work... etc. He eventually lost to Hollande in 2012 because of his own personal unpopularity.
2012-2017 : Socialist government led by president François Hollande with prime minister Manuel Valls from 2014 to 2016. Hollande won the presidency by campaigning on some classic left-wing issues : reining in finance, more taxes on the wealthy (up to 75% for the income tax's top bracket), more teachers... etc. He failed to deliver on the economic front and spent a lot of political capital on gay marriage, which made him hugely unpopular with both right-wing and left-wing voters.

The primaries/The prologue
On the right, the conservative primaries saw the surprising victory of François Fillon against his former boss Sarkozy and center-right candidate Alain Juppé.
On the left, president François Hollande gave up on relection because of his unpopularity. Surprisingly his prime minister, center-left Manuel Valls lost to "hardcore"-socialist Benoît Hamon.
What the primaries showed was that i) the French are eager for new faces in politics (the outsiders won) and ii) French society is increasingly polarized with the centrist candidates losing in the primaries.

The electoral system
The presidential election has two rounds with the two finalists of the first round facing off in a second round (unless someone gets more than 50% in the first round). Polls tend to show that whoever gets to face Marine Le Pen in a second round will win. However, polls are notoriously unreliable and populism has been on the rise for the past decade in France.
The parliamentary elections are next with the new president hoping to get a majority of representatives to implement their program (which, today, seems unlikely).

The candidates

Marine Le Pen
In some ways she's the classic right-wing populist candidate, and in some others she's not. Marine took over the National Front from her father and worked hard to make it more palatable to voters. She cut ties with the openly fascist groups and instead of an openly racist and anti-semitic discourse she now promotes a mildly xenophobic brand of nationalism ("national preference" for natural-born citizens). She's also moved to the left on some issues and proposes to raise the minimum wage. Of course, she's best known for her deeply anti-European stance and her hatred of the Eurozone, but one should not overlook her use of islamophobia in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2015.
Le Pen has been plagued with several accusations of fraud. Among other things she has been accused of misusing over 300.000€ of funds from the European Parliament. She was summoned by judges but refused to show up before the end of the campaign.
Also, she's received big loans from Russian banks (several million €) and presents herself as an admirer of both Putin and Trump.

Emmanuel Macron
Hollande's economy minister from 2014 to 2016, Macron was already known as a openly neo-liberal centrist even before handing in his resignation to found his own movement (En marche ! / Forward!). He's running on a platform of neo-liberal economic policies which has attracted the support of many prominent politicians from communists to neo-liberals. As a former Rothschild banker he has the support of most of the establishment and the media, and many socialists are rallying behind him.
He's been accused of misusing some funds while a minister, but it's still unclear whether such accusations have much substance. He's unlikely to be charged with anything.

François Fillon
Fillon is running on a classic conservative mix of economic austerity (less civil servants, less welfare) and reduced taxes (especially on the wealthiest). He started his campaign by promoting "exemplarity" in politics but this backfired spectacularly when he was recently charged with misusing funds as a parliamentary representative (his wife and children earned close to a million € and it seems his wife at least never really worked for him).

Benoît Hamon
Hamon attracted many left-wing voters by promoting a universal basic income and went on to win the nomination of the socialist party. But he has lost the support of most prominent socialist politicians who are rallying behind Macron. He has the support of the small Green Party on the other hand.
He was recently charged for insulting a journalist.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon
A former socialist minister (2000-2002), Mélenchon has moved to the left, founded his own party (the Unsubmissive France Party), and been labeled as a left-wing populist. His main proposal is to start a constitutional assembly for a sixth republic. He's running on a very socialist platform combining environmental measures, heavy taxation for the rich and a clearly "welfarist" and Keynesian program.

Predictions

The polls
Polls currently show Le Pen and Macron being almost tied for the first place with Fillon being a close third and Hamon and Mélenchon trailing. However, there are reasons to doubt some of the results. First, Hollande himself believes the polls underestimate Le Pen's strength. Second, Macron has a very fragile electoral base : although many people want him as a finalist, his centrist program doesn't necessarily generate as much enthusiasm as more radical platforms. Mélenchon, despite generally coming last in the polls, seems to be rather popular on the left (he recently organized a 100.000+ demonstration in Paris for his constitutional assembly project).

General (or why this is a clusterfuck)
Most candidates present themselves as running "against the system". Le Pen presents herself as a victim of the establishment, the media and the judges. Macron presents himself as renewing politics and running against the political establishment (he's never been elected to office). Fillon somehow manages to talk of being « anti-system » despite being a former prime minister. Both Hamon and Mélenchon are promoting forms of socialism that run counter to the dominant economic philosophy.
At least three candidates are facing legal difficulties and it's unclear what impact this is having on the campaign, though accusations of misusing funds tends to benefit Le Pen (even though she is accused of doing it herself). Also the minister of the interior just resigned after facing the same accusations as Fillon.

The main problem with the election is what is called "useful voting": the idea that people should vote for the best candidate to defeat Le Pen. On the surface this would appear to benefit Macron. However, this kind of vote is highly unpredictable: when it comes to the actual election, people like to vote for "their" candidate, and the increasing polarization of French politics means that centrist Macron may get far less votes than predicted. Another problem is that although it's safe to say Macron could defeat Le Pen, the same is no longer certain of other candidates. In the past, both right-wing and left-wing voters would oppose the National Front. In the current atmosphere, Le Pen's national-socialism attracts people from both the right and the left, meaning that she might conceivably win against Fillon (with the socialists voting for Le Pen) or Hamon/Mélenchon (with the conservatives voting Le Pen).
Bottom line is... the polls notwithstanding, no one can really say what's going to happen. At this point even minor events could affect the outcome.

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And this just in (this election is incredible): Fillon seems to be accused of forgery and embezzlement now.

That's really bad for him. Misusing funds is one thing, forging salary slips is something way more serious.

One can expect his voters to split between Le Pen and Macron now.

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Why on earth was Melenchon never accused of any crimes?

 

edit: also, first thank you for this thread. Very important and interesting. But I must deduct marks for your failure to discuss the Unsubmissive France Party, which has got to be the best name in current politics. 

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Have I been getting it wrong all these years? I thought it was ou la la.

Let Le Pen win I say. The only way to prove these people wrong is to let them actually run things for a while and for them to utterly fail. While they can snipe from the sidelines and claim they know how to fix things by putting up walls and shutting the world out without having to actually prove that it works, it remains a tempting solution for many disaffected people.

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19 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Have I been getting it wrong all these years? I thought it was ou la la.

Let Le Pen win I say. The only way to prove these people wrong is to let them actually run things for a while and for them to utterly fail. While they can snipe from the sidelines and claim they know how to fix things by putting up walls and shutting the world out without having to actually prove that it works, it remains a tempting solution for many disaffected people.

The problem is threefold. First, Le Pen being elected would have instant repercussions far beyond France itself, probably destroying the EU almost instantly (because France plays a critical role as arbiter between the rich, protestant North and the poorer, mostly catholic South of the EU, and because after Brexit, France would be the only remaining nuclear power in the EU, so a French exit would be even worse)

The second problem is that once these nationalists have taken over enough governments, I don't know if we'll be able to reclaim our democracies any longer. A British de facto Tory One Party state, Trumpism in the US, then Le Pen would basically mean that the proud history of Western Democracy would be in its death throes.

Well, and third, you're assuming that their rule will last "for a while". That may sometimes be the case, but the more autocratic ones may well be tempted to make their rule permanent, only bolstered by sham elections. And while Trump's incompetence may seem frightening, I find Le Pen's competent rebranding of her fascist party to be, in many ways, even more frightening.

 

ETA: I guess I'll have to be happy about Fillon's political demise. It makes Macron far more likely to reach the second round, which is encouraging.

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It looks like Fillon is toast -- he is denying the allegations, but I don't see how he gets into the second round after this. It's probably Macron vs. Le Pen and Macron is about as close to a lock as such elections get. The polls may not be very accurate, but this is not  Brexit or Donald Trump territory (where a 5% error changes the result); in a 2 way race with Le Pen, Macron is predicted to win something like 60 to 40. I can construct a scenario where Le Pen wins (e.g. suppose Wikileaks or a similar organization waits until two weeks before the second round election to release something really damaging about Macron), but it's really unlikely.

There was an article linked in one of the US politics threads about the adaptation of neoliberalism to current circumstances and Macron is a fairly solid part of that. This election is his for the taking.

 

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3 hours ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

The problem is threefold. First, Le Pen being elected would have instant repercussions far beyond France itself, probably destroying the EU almost instantly (because France plays a critical role as arbiter between the rich, protestant North and the poorer, mostly catholic South of the EU, and because after Brexit, France would be the only remaining nuclear power in the EU, so a French exit would be even worse)

The second problem is that once these nationalists have taken over enough governments, I don't know if we'll be able to reclaim our democracies any longer. A British de facto Tory One Party state, Trumpism in the US, then Le Pen would basically mean that the proud history of Western Democracy would be in its death throes.

Well, and third, you're assuming that their rule will last "for a while". That may sometimes be the case, but the more autocratic ones may well be tempted to make their rule permanent, only bolstered by sham elections. And while Trump's incompetence may seem frightening, I find Le Pen's competent rebranding of her fascist party to be, in many ways, even more frightening.

 

ETA: I guess I'll have to be happy about Fillon's political demise. It makes Macron far more likely to reach the second round, which is encouraging.

That's going to happen anyway and it needs to happen. Our current western democratic systems are no longer adequate to meet the current and future challenges. This wave of nationalist take overs we're seeing is just a regressive response to the inadequacies of the current political order. The answer is not to preserve the woefully inadequate systems we currently have but to offer radically progressive alternatives rather than reactionary regression.

People are thinking that the current systems are shit, so they are looking for alternatives. It's not surprising that if the only alternative on offer is this nationalist, isolationist, xenophobia horror show then a not insignificant segment of the population will go for it.

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16 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

That's going to happen anyway and it needs to happen. Our current western democratic systems are no longer adequate to meet the current and future challenges. This wave of nationalist take overs we're seeing is just a regressive response to the inadequacies of the current political order. The answer is not to preserve the woefully inadequate systems we currently have but to offer radically progressive alternatives rather than reactionary regression.

People are thinking that the current systems are shit, so they are looking for alternatives. It's not surprising that if the only alternative on offer is this nationalist, isolationist, xenophobia horror show then a not insignificant segment of the population will go for it.

You have convinced me. Down with the Weimar Republic!

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8 hours ago, James Arryn said:

Why on earth was Melenchon never accused of any crimes?

He was actually charged for saying Marine Le Pen is a fascist. The judges determined he could do so and he got away with it. :P

5 hours ago, Altherion said:

It looks like Fillon is toast -- he is denying the allegations, but I don't see how he gets into the second round after this. It's probably Macron vs. Le Pen and Macron is about as close to a lock as such elections get. The polls may not be very accurate, but this is not  Brexit or Donald Trump territory (where a 5% error changes the result); in a 2 way race with Le Pen, Macron is predicted to win something like 60 to 40. I can construct a scenario where Le Pen wins (e.g. suppose Wikileaks or a similar organization waits until two weeks before the second round election to release something really damaging about Macron), but it's really unlikely.

There was an article linked in one of the US politics threads about the adaptation of neoliberalism to current circumstances and Macron is a fairly solid part of that. This election is his for the taking.

One should not underestimate the support Macron is getting from behind the scenes. He is the real candidate of the establishment, and there were even rumors that he was getting the help of Hollande here or there (Macron was his protégé until he resigned).

And Fillon's legal troubles didn't come out of nowhere. Someone ratted on him. Many think it came from his own camp, but no one knows except the journalists who released the story.

3 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

That's going to happen anyway and it needs to happen. Our current western democratic systems are no longer adequate to meet the current and future challenges. This wave of nationalist take overs we're seeing is just a regressive response to the inadequacies of the current political order. The answer is not to preserve the woefully inadequate systems we currently have but to offer radically progressive alternatives rather than reactionary regression.

Hamon's universal basic income is based on the idea that with globalization and automation it is no longer reasonable to hope that continuous economic growth will reduce unemployment. The principle is to sustain demand, thus constructing an alternative economic model.
Mélenchon's main proposal is about reforming the institutions to make them more democratic.
Both candidates have solid environmental credentials.

So the radical progressive alternatives are there all right. In fact, Hamon and Mélenchon together would have a score comparable to Macron's. But the voters are still mostly going for Le Pen's rebranding of fascism, Macron's neo-liberal statu quo, and Fillon's Christian conservatism.
There are reasons behind this I guess. The media can be blamed at least in part: they systematically try to undermine Mélenchon (far more than Le Pen actually) and describe Hamon as an "idealist" with an "utopian program." Hollande turned out to be a bitter disappointment. And the terrorist attacks could only lead to xenophobia and islamophobia, which the conservatives benefit from.
But still, it's hard to say this specific democratic system isn't working. It's working as well as it was designed to.

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From what I understand, leftist French voters are more likely to vote for a mainstream right-winger to keep Le Pen out than rightist voters for a left-winger. 

8 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Have I been getting it wrong all these years? I thought it was ou la la.

Let Le Pen win I say. The only way to prove these people wrong is to let them actually run things for a while and for them to utterly fail. While they can snipe from the sidelines and claim they know how to fix things by putting up walls and shutting the world out without having to actually prove that it works, it remains a tempting solution for many disaffected people.

The French Presidency is immeasurably powerful - one of the most powerful elected positions on the planet (reflecting de Gaulle's taste for autocracy). You, really, really, don't want to go down the road of President Le Pen.

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8 minutes ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

From what I understand, leftist French voters are more likely to vote for a mainstream right-winger to keep Le Pen out than rightist voters for a left-winger.

That is perfectly true.
This was shown in 2002 when almost 100% of left-wingers voted for Chirac to prevent Jean-Marie Le Pen from getting elected.

But the situation today isn't as rosy. Marine Le Pen is far more popular on the left than her father was, She has attracted more disatisfied left-wing voters than her father ever did ; many like the fact that she has infused her program with elements of socialism ; others have given in to islamophobia after the terrorist attacks of 2015.
Also, the French conservatives have shot themselves in the foot by systematically refusing to formally ally with socialists against the National Front in the past decade (instead opting for a "neither nor" line and blaming the socialists for the rise of the National Front). People on the left feel that this is despicable and want to punish the conservatives for it.
According to polls, a right-wing candidate could not hope to get the 100% that Chirac got in 2002. Somewhere around 60% or 70% would be far more likely, and that may even be optimistic. A significant number of voters would simply abstain. A small proportion would actually vote for Le Pen because of their hatred of neo-liberalism..
This would make a Fillon-Le Pen duel a very risky situation. Polls have consistently predicted a very narrow Fillon win. And those polls are a few weeks or months old already.

Of course, it's probably all a moot point because of Fillon's legal problems that should safely project Macron to the second round.
Fillon's decision to stay in the race may have saved the election.

On an unrelated note, all these are acceptable:
houlala ; ouh là là ; houlalà ; ouh la la ; hou la la ; oh ! la, la ! ; oh ! la la ! ; oh ! là ! là ! ; oh la la ; oh, là là ! ; oh là là !

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10 hours ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

The second problem is that once these nationalists have taken over enough governments, I don't know if we'll be able to reclaim our democracies any longer. A British de facto Tory One Party state, Trumpism in the US, then Le Pen would basically mean that the proud history of Western Democracy would be in its death throes.

This is just silly. British democracy hasn't fallen to the nationalists. It's the Tory Party, not UKIP, pursuing policies that were mainstream in British democracy until the 1980s when arch-European Mrs Thatcher defeated the pro-Brexit Labour Party.

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2 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

From what I understand, leftist French voters are more likely to vote for a mainstream right-winger to keep Le Pen out than rightist voters for a left-winger. 

The French Presidency is immeasurably powerful - one of the most powerful elected positions on the planet (reflecting de Gaulle's taste for autocracy). You, really, really, don't want to go down the road of President Le Pen.

Indeed, I think it's fair to say that the French president is the second most powerful contestedly elected position in the world, directly after the US president (and that's only because the US is more influential than France; if they were equally so, the French president would be more powerful than the US president; I don' consider the Russian presidential eletion or Chinese leadership to be elected on similar grounds)

Chirac was more conciliatory than Sarkozy ever was, so while leftists may have voted for Chirac, the post-Sarkozy Conservatives aren't as unproblematic to the left as Chirac was.

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I'm living and working in Paris at the moment and have quite a bit of time to kill at work, so I've been following this closely for the past month. My money's definitely on Macron, especially with the new forgery accusations against Fillon. Mélenchon and Hamon don't seem to get as much coverage in Le Monde, which is mostly what I've been reading.

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22 hours ago, Rippounet said:


Also, she's received big loans from Russian banks (several million €) and presents herself as an admirer of both Putin and Trump.

I've been wondering how this is legal? From the reports I've heard it sounds like Russia is actively putting money into her campaign.

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1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

I've been wondering how this is legal? From the reports I've heard it sounds like Russia is actively putting money into her campaign.

The problem is that you'd have to establish a link between the bank and the Russian state (i.e. Putin) to make it illegal. Such links are both obvious and hard to prove.

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-12-22/le-pen-struggling-to-fund-french-race-after-russian-backer-fails

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/21/marine-le-pens-russian-links-us-scrutiny/

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19 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Hamon's universal basic income is based on the idea that with globalization and automation it is no longer reasonable to hope that continuous economic growth will reduce unemployment. The principle is to sustain demand, thus constructing an alternative economic model.
Mélenchon's main proposal is about reforming the institutions to make them more democratic.
Both candidates have solid environmental credentials.

So the radical progressive alternatives are there all right. In fact, Hamon and Mélenchon together would have a score comparable to Macron's. But the voters are still mostly going for Le Pen's rebranding of fascism, Macron's neo-liberal statu quo, and Fillon's Christian conservatism.
There are reasons behind this I guess. The media can be blamed at least in part: they systematically try to undermine Mélenchon (far more than Le Pen actually) and describe Hamon as an "idealist" with an "utopian program." Hollande turned out to be a bitter disappointment. And the terrorist attacks could only lead to xenophobia and islamophobia, which the conservatives benefit from.
But still, it's hard to say this specific democratic system isn't working. It's working as well as it was designed to.

Not radically progressive enough, since those are symptomatic treatments. It's not reformation that's needed, it's transformation.

The terrorist attacks only lead to xenophobia and islamophobia because no one is talking about the root causes of the terrorist attacks and proposing ways to overcome those root causes. I don't see the left or right saying the things that are necessary to start down the road of eliminating terrorism in the name of Islam. All they talk about is the size of the literal and figurative walls intended to keep the bad people out.

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4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

The terrorist attacks only lead to xenophobia and islamophobia because no one is talking about the root causes of the terrorist attacks and proposing ways to overcome those root causes. I don't see the left or right saying the things that are necessary to start down the road of eliminating terrorism in the name of Islam. All they talk about is the size of the literal and figurative walls intended to keep the bad people out.

Not at all. Mélenchon at least talks a lot about geopolitics. Or do you mean something else?

Not sure what you mean by transformation of the economy either.

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On 3/22/2017 at 3:43 AM, Rippounet said:

And Fillon's legal troubles didn't come out of nowhere. Someone ratted on him. Many think it came from his own camp, but no one knows except the journalists who released the story.

Fillon has accused President Hollande and the French state services of conspiring against him. He argues that the press somehow has access to to documents taken from his offices within 48 hours of the raid and is asking for an inquiry because this is only possible with the cooperation of the services (presumably with the tacit blessing of Hollande). Predictably, Hollande denies all of it.

This isn't a bad gambit -- claiming that the election is rigged worked for Trump -- but I don't think it will help Fillon.

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