French Presidential Election

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Hamon has extended an olive branch to Melenchon to build a broad socialist coalition, but Melenchon has REFUSED this. This shows me only one thing: Melenchon seeks to serve his own interests rather than the interests of the French people. If you are French, then at the very least, you must vote for Hamon in the first round and then Melenchon in the second round if Hamon doesn't get in. Hamon MUST get in. He is France's only hope. Also, Trump is not a crony capitalist, his leeching off of the labour of the working class is EXACTLY what Capitalism is about. This can only end when we workers seize the means of production, and voting in Hamon will set the fuse for the workers revolution

Again Hamon is the best candidate and I'd argue with people to agree that he should be the President, but you have to be strategic, if someone asked me who I supported I'd say Hamon, but until enough people agree that he should be President based on accurate polling or the race changing dramatically I'd vote Melenchon on the slim chance of getting to the second round, because as it stands Hamon doesn't and it would be a wasted vote, and better to vote Poutou if it's 99℅ likelihood of neither.

Melanchon is only slightly better than Macron because the latter would destroy the French civil service, union rights and traditional work holidays.

Eh, this is where I differ. I think that stategy and voting for a lesser of two or three evils will almost definitely end up in situations like the 2016 Presidential Election where both candidates are just so utterly terrible it is difficult to see who is worse.

[NonZeroSum]

Eh, this is where I differ. I think that stategy and voting for a lesser of two or three evils will almost definitely end up in situations like the 2016 Presidential Election where both candidates are just so utterly terrible it is difficult to see who is worse.

Tell that to the establishment parties who pulled out of each others contested seats in midterm-elections when it looked like Marine Le Pen had a fighting chance and they wanted to do everything they could to keep her party out.

Hamon had to start off working with a 9% approval rating in the president and less in the obnoxious prime minister he ran against. He gave them an initial boost with his change platform winning the party primaries, but his polling started to fall when he just didn't do as well in the TV debates as Poutou or Melanchon, and Melanchon was included in the first debate as the radical firebrand opposite of Le Pen, which people like, the polls started to change after the first debate in the middle of march as you can see below. If there's one thing Trump has shown us general elections with uninformed voters is like running an advertising brand, you just will be able to rally more people into voting Melanchon so that's the work that needs doing for the left. Hamon's policies now look moderate in comparison and will encourage the socialists to stick with a radical platform next election season that Hamon and Melanchon had been fighting together for since the 2008 conference when they split because they weren't making any headway.

[NonZeroSum]

Melanchon is using his platform to attack the spectacle advertising brand electoral system and economic rightward drift much of the world is coming too. Macron needs to reach out to french people to provide detailed policies that work for them, Melanchon asking supporters to blindly vote for Macron is not how politics should work, establishment conservatives like Fillon should also be wary about whether that open support for Macron will backfire.

MÉLENCHON - DECLARATION AT THE EVENING OF THE FIRST TOUR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeDBGyRT2ts

April 23, 2017, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was speaking on the evening of the first round. He gave no voting instructions for the second round and explained that the 450,000 insubordinates would vote on this point. Jean-Luc Mélenchon hailed the strength that we have built and called the rebellious to be united for the future. Here is the transcription of his speech:

"The result announced since the beginning of the evening is not the one we were hoping for. In any case, it will not be the one that has been announced that will be the right one. Indeed, the Ministry of the Interior has reserved its statement until midnight tonight.

Of course, by then, medacrats and oligarchs are jubilant. Nothing is so beautiful for them as a second round between two candidates who approve and wish to prolong, both, the present institutions, which express no ecological awareness or the peril that weighs on human civilization, and who both intend to attack once again the most basic social gains of the country.

Anyway, and whatever they are, when the official results are known, we will respect them.

I can not say or do more at this time. Every one of you knows in conscience what his duty is. From then on, I stand there. I did not receive any mandate from the 450,000 people who decided to run for the next session. They will therefore be asked to vote on the platform and the result of their expression will be made public.

My beautiful country, my beautiful country, and you all people, we can be proud of what we have undertaken and achieved. We are a conscious and enthusiastic force. I call on you to stay together, to stay on the move, and to be a movement, because the challenges we have named, without hiding any of the difficulties that it raises to solve them, these challenges remain to be met. And those who now claim to have the honor of representing us all have already demonstrated that they themselves are incapable of thinking them.

The hour to come and the days to come remain those of characters and of conscience. You all people, beloved country, you are a new morning that is beginning to break through."

Fidelity to the motto of the Republic: Freedom, Equality, Fraternity.

[NonZeroSum]

Go 'ed girl, still all to play for in legislative elections on the 18th of June:

France Presidential Election: why did the far-left refuse to support Emmanuel Macron after defeat?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CjcYGwBcDY

Supporter Says Melenchon Doing a 'Happy Campaign'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c_w5D-KqtU

A four-way race? Late surge by France’s far-left candidate Mélenchon (part 1)
http://www.france24.com/en/20170410-debate-france-election-part-one

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Rip in pieces Benoit Hamon, you will be greatly missed. If I believed in reincarnation, I would say that you were almost certainly Napoleon reincarnated. But I don't. So you are just Benoit Hemon.

[NonZeroSum]

Can you break down the main differences in the leading candidates?

The main topics that will decide the election are the National Fronts racist authoritarianism past and present, the fragile EU, Trade and Security.

Le Pen supporting Brexit, made her name attacking EU for weak borders and is protectionist on trade. Macron is pro-EU market bubble, for reasons of protecting business class from inflation. And both are hard line on law and order, but Le Pen has a distinctly anti-refugee, anti-commonwealth duel-citizens bent.

Macron's policies - http://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/french-presidential-election-emmanuel-macrons-key-policy-proposals
Le Pen's policies - http://www.euronews.com/2017/02/09/what-do-we-know-about-marine-le-pen-s-policies

Interesting take on the results of the first round of elections from the conservative establishment press in the UK - quoted at the bottom. I think dangerously underestimating how the Front National have taken over all but 4 districts in republican heartland:



Candidate with the most votes in the first round of the French presidential election of 2017 by department
Yellow - Emmanuel Macron....23.8%
Dark Blue - Marine Le Pen......21.5%
Light Blue - François Fillon.....19.9%
Red - Jean-Luc Mélenchon......19.6%

The legislative elections in June will be the big test to find out if France Unbowed movement can hold onto their voters for the necessity of an opposition beholden to the grassroots against that of a dangerous libertarian technocratic government which will be propped up by opportunist socialist and republican party rejects.

Emmanuel Macron is no revolutionary – he is just 2017's Jacques Chirac - http://tinyurl.com/lvhz9gf
- Anne-Elisabeth Moutet - http://tinyurl.com/m2qj6qq

"What does that damn housewife want from me now? My balls on a plate?” Jacques Chirac famously cried next to a live mike at the end of an especially tense round of negotiations with Margaret Thatcher, intent on preserving Britain’s EU “rebate”, back in 1988. A much smoother Emmanuel Macron will never subject Theresa May to that kind of language in future Brexit talks. She should not fool herself, though: the sentiment will be the same.

President Macron – there is little doubt, really, that he will win in two weeks’ time – may have run, improbably, as an outsider. But he was formatted by ENA, the super-elite graduate school that formed Chirac (and François Hollande), then refined in the corridors of the French technosphere; banking was only a lucrative hiatus. Like Chirac, once the brightest young thing in the De Gaulle cabinet, Macron was minister for the economy for two years.

And like Jacques Chirac in the 2002 run-off, Macron aims to gather the qualified support of almost the entire political class against a Le Pen, come the second round. He will not reach the 82 per cent of the vote Chirac won against Jean-Marie; but anywhere above 60 per cent against Marine will, he thinks, earn him enough political good will to build a coalition in June’s legislative elections.

What’s also clear is that the French election may have, once and for all, put paid to the “populist wave” narrative. The pollsters got it right: the voters didn’t go for broke (recall the successes of the French Communist Party for half a century, compared with Mélenchon’s smaller surge). In short, things happened here exactly as they would have done without Trump, without Brexit – even without the Charlie-Hebdo and Bataclan massacres.

Macron ran – courageously, some thought – on an openly pro-Europe platform, encouraging his followers to wave the gold and blue flag at rallies. It did not harm him. His platform is so vague that it requires an expedition with Sherpas and head torches to locate any tangible policy. (When, on the evening of the Champs-Elysées attack, he was asked during the last televised candidates’ debate what he would do to combat Islamic terrorism, he quipped that he couldn’t cook up “an antiterrorism policy overnight”. His numbers did not falter.)

In short, Macron ran not so much as Hollande’s successor as a modern-day Chirac, a very French phenomenon: an engaging young man in a hurry, capable of pleasing both sides at the expense of taking hard decisions. The voices of the many angry French citizens who felt hard done by the elites, globalisation, and Hollande’s policies were heard, but not enough to shake things up. Marine’s performance was lacklustre, but that can’t be the only explanation for her slide from a projected 27 per cent of the vote to under 22 per cent.

In buying too easily the whole idea of “the rise of populism” in European national polls, we may have indulged in an easy but flawed generalisation. Nation states are more stubborn than that. This is just one more example of HL Mencken’s famous quip “To every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Macron, supported by moderate local Socialist Party satraps such as the mayor of Lyons, Gérard Collomb, and former Chirac supporters such as Dominique de Villepin, belongs to a far less ground-breaking tradition than was first thought. Though he sounds modern, he isn’t. So expect five more years of no hard decisions, camouflaged by a small amount of sabre-rattling.

Alas for Britain, one of the few substantial issues President Macron will stick to is preventing any Brexit giveaway. His election is welcomed in Brussels and Berlin largely for that reason. In France, it plays to the anti-rosbif gallery, as well as to those deluded souls who believe Paris can take the Europe’s financial leadership from London. This may not be a wise assessment, but Macron buys the notion.

Still, it is rather fitting that three decades on from the Thatcher rebate wrangle, the French leader will once again find himself scrapping with Britain over money matters in the EU. Plus ça change for the new Chirac. Macron’s eager backers should brace themselves for the revolution that is not to come.

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I'll add to NonZeroSum's description some key points of relevance to this forum; Macron sees sustainability as a great priority, wants to reform the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (which in my view is not working very well at all) and he supports nuclear. Le Pen doesn't give a shit about sustainability and opposes nuclear.

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I'll add to NonZeroSum's description some key points of relevance to this forum; Macron sees sustainability as a great priority, wants to reform the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (which in my view is not working very well at all) and he supports nuclear. Le Pen doesn't give a shit about sustainability and opposes nuclear.

I'd probably vote for Macron if I lived there seeing as there are no alternatives. But I would feel like jumping off of the Eiffel Tower afterwards.

[brimstoneSalad]

I'll add to NonZeroSum's description some key points of relevance to this forum; Macron sees sustainability as a great priority, wants to reform the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (which in my view is not working very well at all) and he supports nuclear. Le Pen doesn't give a shit about sustainability and opposes nuclear.

I hope then, for all of our futures, he wins it.

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I'll add to NonZeroSum's description some key points of relevance to this forum; Macron sees sustainability as a great priority, wants to reform the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (which in my view is not working very well at all) and he supports nuclear. Le Pen doesn't give a shit about sustainability and opposes nuclear.

I hope then, for all of our futures, he wins it.

Right. France is a beacon of hope for the environment; if they were to quit the EU and start closing nuclear plants we'd lose vital international cooperation and one of the best examples of decarbonization.