France General Discussion III: Tout doit disparaître

[EPG]

Is it very surprising that Macron and moderate political Catholicism have a political affinity? This was already my mental model of Macron, but I am an outsider and sadly, I read poorly and slowly in French.

[EPG]

Ifop poll, presidential election 2022, 1st round

Macron: 36%
Le Pen: 23%
Mélenchon: 16.5%
Wauquiez: 8%
Hamon: 7%
Dupont-Aignan: 6%
Others at 1% or under.

Ifop also polled the race with the 2017 candidates : Fillon does better than Wauquiez (12%)

1 year after, 42% are satisfied with Macron (Hollande 2013: 21%, Sarkozy 2008: 28%, Chirac 2003: 58%)

Macron:
is authoritarian: 73%
has authority: 73%
knows where he is going: 67%
has a vision for the country: 58%
is competent: 57%
defends the interest of France: 55%
is likable: 53%
is honest: 48%
is sincere: 44%
is fair: 37%
is capable to unite the French: 33%
understands the concerns of the French: 30%

Thanks. Those are remarkably good numbers for Macron, albeit after a short time.

[EPG]

Still beats Hamon's 6%.

[EPG]

Unemployment in 2013 was 10-11%. Now it's 9-10%. My impression of the French economy - though I'm not there very often - is that the job situation has hardly changed in 6 years, while wages have just kept up with prices until the last year, as eurozone inflation has risen toward 2%. The student towns are doing fine and I don't see many other parts to judge. These are not objectively awesome conditions.

[EPG]

My best guess today is that the run-off is Macron versus not Wauquiez or centre/left.

Unemployment in 2013 was 10-11%. Now it's 9-10%. My impression of the French economy - though I'm not there very often - is that the job situation has hardly changed in 6 years, while wages have just kept up with prices until the last year, as eurozone inflation has risen toward 2%. The student towns are doing fine and I don't see many other parts to judge. These are not objectively awesome conditions.

In France, the student towns are, with probably the exception of Poitiersle, the same thing as the big cities - which has always been part of the problem.

Anyway, that is almost the point as to why Macron is not popular despite better top line economic conditions. Until the last few months, the direction of travel had been declining unemployment etc, etc... But the fact that this trend of improvement, which was already heavily reliant on increasing numbers of CDD's, has stalled, plus the strikes and controversy surrounding his economic reforms (although admittedly, the circles I move in are likely to be far more angry about the content of them than the average French person) can easily explain why his popularity is eroding so quickly.

Or it's just part of the French national psyche to hate whoever is president, which makes obvious sense to anyone who has ever met a French person.

Ha. Well, I love them as a country anyway. I'd also probably resent a series of governments that kept unemployment at 9 to 11%. But what's to be done? It seems the median French hates both trade unions and liberal reforms. And then blame Sarkozy/Hollande/Macron?! A tiny improvement in joblessness and inflation goes up. No spare capacity? What's to be done?

[EPG]

Hulot resigned over French hunting, which is totally environmentally irrelevant.

[EPG]

Back to reality for a second, the three most popular political forces in France are liberals who rejected social democracy, mildly Eurosceptic centre-right social conservatives, and very Eurosceptic far-right nationalists.

[EPG]

https://twitter.com/PedderSophie/status/1042409562329042946

^^ interesting take...

Yes, there's far too much hyper-ventilation and obsession about polls, but more importantly a belief among the writer/Twitter class that criticising everything makes the critic better than the practitioner, and that nihilism is somehow clever, this place included. I would even say that too strong an interest in elections per se is kind of crass and misses the point of politics. There's a reason why the top politicians signal that they have no interest in opinion polls or what is called "wonkery". It's almost undignified relative to what democratic politics is really about, the control of the government by the people, and polls are interesting in so far as they signal successful ways to exert that control rather than as a cheering contest.

All democratic governments lose popularity or there'd be no point to elections; sitting around gloating about it doesn't allow the writer to take credit for a phenomenon that has been the case since 1945!