French Presidential elections

[butchersapron]

Manslaughter conviction from ages back means he's disbarred from standing - he's not even allowed to lead the party he leads in fact.

 

[Idris2002]

Manslaughter conviction from ages back means he's disbarred from standing - he's not even allowed to lead the party he leads in fact.

Wow (really).

 

[rekil]

He killed 3 people. Is it his party's rules or state rules that bar him from standing though?

 

[gosub]

Manslaughter conviction from ages back means he's disbarred from standing - he's not even allowed to lead the party he leads in fact.

read that on his wikipedia today, along with a call for citation needed, was a bit confusing because the sentence before had him calling for people with criminal convictions being barred from public office....which suggests they aren't currently

 

[stavros]

I can't seem to find the link now, but I'm sure I saw a quote earlier from a Fillon source saying that Macron was regarded as his greatest threat from the left.

 

[Casually Red]

Hollande has said he's not standing again and unsurprisingly Valls has put himself forwards.

Popularity rating around 4 % . Really makes you wonder about that 4 % .

 

[Casually Red]

Le Pen is concentrating her rhetoric on what she will do for working people. She says she has no problem with Islam, only with fundamentalist Islam. Fillon, OTOH, makes no bones about his problems with Islam generally. And he wants to do away with half a million civil service jobs in a country where unemployment is twice the rate it is here. It looks as though Le Pen is laundering her image to make a bid for the socialist vote, the socialists having at present no realistic candidate.

Le pen won't lose any votes at all with economically leftish , pro worker rhetoric and promises .She only stands to gain the disenfranchised . That aspect of her rhetoric intersects with Menechons platform. Just as Trumps anti globalist , pro jobs rhetoric intersected with Sanders . She's going for the anti establishment vote, not either left or right specifically . Trying to capture that wave . The further to the right Fillon goes ...to try and capture the FN vote...the more sense it makes for her to veer economically left . The more distance she puts between Fillon and herself the better for her on an anti establishment platform . Usually these things would work in reverse . but that's populism.

 

[brogdale]

More polling...

 

[stavros]

Why isn't Macron on there?

 

[Sasaferrato]

More polling...

Of course, recent events have taught us that us that the polls are infallible.

I suspect also, that there are Le Pen voters who won't publicly admit to being so.

It will be tight, I think.

 

[stavros]

Popularity rating around 4 % . Really makes you wonder about that 4 % .

Unemployment has gone down for the third successive month, so maybe it's them.

Anne Hidalgo, the PS mayor of Paris, has run some interesting transport schemes in the last month to counter the shitty air quality. These include free public transport, free Vélib (their Boris Bikes) and only allowing odd or even number plates on alternate days. I'd love it if the UK tried these, whether in London or elsewhere. Sadly London didn't join Paris, Athens, Mexico City and Madrid in pledging to ban diesel cars by 2025.

The upshot of this is that I haven't heard of riots on the streets of Paris at the nanny state, so maybe the PS aren't that unpopular as a whole (unless there's a Parisian metropolitan bubble).

 

[Casually Red]

Unemployment has gone down for the third successive month, so maybe it's them.

Anne Hidalgo, the PS mayor of Paris, has run some interesting transport schemes in the last month to counter the shitty air quality. These include free public transport, free Vélib (their Boris Bikes) and only allowing odd or even number plates on alternate days. I'd love it if the UK tried these, whether in London or elsewhere. Sadly London didn't join Paris, Athens, Mexico City and Madrid in pledging to ban diesel cars by 2025.

The upshot of this is that I haven't heard of riots on the streets of Paris at the nanny state, so maybe the PS aren't that unpopular as a whole (unless there's a Parisian metropolitan bubble).

Fillons pledged to sack 500,000 govt workers , abolish the 35 hour week and do a Thatcher on the trade unions . I suspect we'll see riots in France whatever happens in the near future .

 

[stavros]

That's assuming Fillon can implement his proposals. I'm learning the French parliamentary system as I go along, but there must be some kind of accounting chamber, albeit led by the PM that the president appoints.

 

[gosub]

Almost 1,000 cars torched around France on New Year's Eve but government insists it 'went particularly well'

 

[J Ed]

Almost 1,000 cars torched around France on New Year's Eve but government insists it 'went particularly well'

plus ça change

 

[mojo pixy]

...rioters promise to try harder next year.
Le Championnat se relance.

 

[mojo pixy]

En plus, it'll be even more fun with an actual fascist president...
(I'm finding it hard not just to despair atm)

 

[stavros]

Valls has laid out his ticket, with more spending on defence, more coppers, more prison spaces, increasing teachers' salaries and more money pumped into universities. He's also proposing to lobby for a Europe-wide minimum wage of at least 60% of the median, I think based on the median wage of each EU country rather than that of the whole continent.

 

[stavros]

The first left primary debate took place on Thursday, which I'm making my way through slowly. Politics is quite a good thing to help improve my French listening, as inevitably when electioneering they'll speak clearly and in ways to speak to the whole electorate.

 

[coley]

Of course, recent events have taught us that us that the polls are infallible.

I suspect also, that there are Le Pen voters who won't publicly admit to being so.

It will be tight, I think.

Going off the Brexit and US polls Le Pen will win by a narrow majority.

 

[stavros]

Would a President Le Pen be able to put through her extreme policies? Le Front national only have two seats in the National Assembly and none in the Senate (although there are elections this year for both). I'm not entirely sure how legislation gets enacted in France yet, but my understanding is that even Les Républicains won't play nicely with the FN.

 

[Raheem]

Would a President Le Pen be able to put through her extreme policies? Le Front national only have two seats in the National Assembly and none in the Senate (although there are elections this year for both). I'm not entirely sure how legislation gets enacted in France yet, but my understanding is that even Les Républicains won't play nicely with the FN.

No, it would be a cohabitation, so the Prime Minister would be from another party (LR, presumably). Where you have a cohabitation, the Prime Minister is in many respects more powerful than the President, because they basically run the legislative programme and have the Assembly votes. I wouldn't be so confident that LR and FN are incapable of colluding on some pretty nauseating stuff, though.

 

[redsquirrel]

Shitty soft soap piece about how the lovely progressive Macron will (hopefully) ride to the rescue.

Macron is becoming a growing phenomenon in the highly unpredictable French presidential election campaign. In recent weeks, the maverick former economy minister has begun to rise so steadily in polls that he is now seen as capable of causing a major surprise in the spring vote – perhaps able to reach the final round by knocking out one of the current top contenders: the rightwing, social conservative, free-market reformist François Fillon and the far-right, anti-immigration, anti-EU Marine Le Pen.

Though no actual figures of the rise given.

 

[DotCommunist]

former investment banker

 

[J Ed]

French Lib Dem/Ciudadanos he's basically a guardian wank fantasy

 

[Raheem]

former investment banker

I don't think the French really do rhyming slang.

 

[stavros]

No, it would be a cohabitation, so the Prime Minister would be from another party (LR, presumably). Where you have a cohabitation, the Prime Minister is in many respects more powerful than the President, because they basically run the legislative programme and have the Assembly votes. I wouldn't be so confident that LR and FN are incapable of colluding on some pretty nauseating stuff, though.

They're not always different parties though, are they? Hollande and Valls are both PS, for example. Wikipedia seems to suggest the President has a free choice, even being able to go outside the National Assembly, but is there any kind of expectation that the PM is from the largest party in the NA?

 

[Old Spark]

Going off the Brexit and US polls Le Pen will win by a narrow majority.

On the first or second ballot ?

 

[Raheem]

They're not always different parties though, are they? Hollande and Valls are both PS, for example. Wikipedia seems to suggest the President has a free choice, even being able to go outside the National Assembly, but is there any kind of expectation that the PM is from the largest party in the NA?

Hollande and Valls were not in a cohabitation. The Assembly has to ratify the President's choice of PM, so if the President doesn't come from the party that controls the Assembly, you end up with a President and PM from different parties, which is what's referred to as cohabitation.

The PM basically runs the government. At present, though, Hollande has the ultimate power, because the President can dismiss the PM at any time if they cease to see eye-to-eye. But in a cohabitation you can't expect to have control over the PM, and if you sack them you will only be able to appoint someone else from the same party.

So, if Le Pen did become President, she wouldn't have the same ability to carry out her party programme as Hollande has or Sarkozy had, because she would be the weaker, cohabitation version of a President.

 

[redsquirrel]

More skeptical piece on Macron than the sycophantic rubbish published last week here

. Marine Le Pen also foresees danger. She has argued that Macron was “the bankers’ candidate”, and she may have a point: before entering the political arena, Macron was an investment banker with Rothschild. While working for the company, he was behind a high-profile deal between Nestlé and Pfizer that made him a millionaire. Yet Macron astonishingly portrays himself as an “anti-system” candidate in a struggle with all “types of corporatist and conservative powers”. This is an audacious claim from someone who is a media favourite and who has close connections with business circles.

Emmanuel Macron will not be able to fool the public for much longer: his “anti-system” stand is a sham. His ideas are totally embedded in a failed economic system that he supported when he was in government. Yet he may still pull off a major upset in the spring: French voters are in the mood for kicking out the discredited old hands of French politics. Macron, although a man of the system, is not perceived as one of them.