French National Assembly Elections, 06/30-07/07

[GM Team Member and Acting PPT WB]

really feels like a head-scratching gamble, but I do agree it seems most likely he wants to try and cause RN to crumble under the weight of governance while he can hold them back as well as he can as President for 3 years. The question is if he can manage to actually pin the blame of the near-certain dysfunction this would cause onto RN. Because if not...

[GM Team Member and Acting PPT WB]

So far the only public endorsements of Chiotti's idea have been from the head of the LR youth wing (a guy named Guilhem Caraymon who looks exactly like you imagine him to be),

Jeez, someone needs to work out the kinks in the Nick Fuentes cloning machine.

[GM Team Member and Acting PPT WB]

Headquarters of LR retaken by loyalist forces:

https://twitter.com/alexandrepedro/status/1800911525278081311

Annie Genevard open the doors of Les Républicains headquarters with her copy of the keys.

Was that a pro-Ciotti guy calling them "collabos"? Parody is dead.

I definitely hear the same guy saying "Ciotti President!" so yeah, definitely one of his supporters.

[GM Team Member and Acting PPT WB]

we were all so confused by Macron calling elections, but these developments show that clearly he inhabits a higher plane of thought that only 1 man on this forum can surpass.

[GM Team Member and Acting PPT WB]

we were all so confused by Macron calling elections, but these developments show that clearly he inhabits a higher plane of thought that only 1 man on this forum can surpass.

I'm not sure imploding the French right as painting other competitors of RN as incredible really helps Macron at all.

It sounds more like it's helping Le Pen.

Besides the left has united much quicker than anyone expected and is polling at 28%, 10% higher than Macrons LREM.

Yeah, I was just playing into the jokes

[GM Team Member and Acting PPT WB]

In all fairness, it seems like PS is very reasonable and realizes that the big threat is coming from the right. Even Hollande has endorsed the alliance.

but this LFI infighting is stupid... . Melenchon has to go and be replaced tbh. But do that sh**t after the election.

Still only one option here, NFP no matter what, regardless of what faction they are from.

Poutou of NPA is standing in Carcassonne. Fitting choice as the city has a history with weird religious fanatics.

Poutou is the best politician in France.

Hopefully Poutou makes it in parliament. It would be good if all of the factions, the smaller ones have at least some kind of representation.

the issue with that is, from most things I've seen, Melenchon basically is LFI. Or at least a very significant chunk of it that would cripple the party if he were to leave, especially if it wasn't on good terms.

I wouldn't have tears for LFI falling apart, but it would probably cripple the French left since I expect a number of LFI people simply wouldn't vote if they were gone.

[GM Team Member and Acting PPT WB]

Still wondering why there has been so much emphasis for both sides trying to present one candidate in the first round. There’s the runoff to sort these things out. Or is it that the compressed nature of the snap election is stampeding everyone to get their act together right now and not have to worry about post first round discussions.

Having many candidates runs the risk of none getting into the runoff.

For example, here’s a hypothetical constituency result:

RN: 33.1%
ENS: 23.4%
LFI: 18.8%
PS: 17.2%

Combined the left would have enough to get into the second round, but due to vote splitting now it’s down to a Macronista or RN person.

[GM Team Member and Acting PPT WB]

One of the few places in the world where I would probably be a Green voter, or possibly Generation.S for however long Hamon's party is around, even though LFI is probably closer to my actual beliefs.

It's simply grown too much of a 'one-man party' rather than an actual movement and I really despise leftist parties that use party bureaucracy in this manner.

Has there been a poll of the forum for this election? I may start one if not.

I'll be making one for the "elections of 2024: you decide" series

[GM Team Member and Acting PPT WB]

While they are irrelevant, I do want to point out this hilarious line from a press release that minor regionalist party Unser Land (Our Land) put out on the 14th where they said "Macron is a Jacobin, Le Pen and Mélenchon even more so." https://www.facebook.com/unserland.mouvementalsacien/posts/pfbid0cddVNeXApxCErUskWeJiDbm8xsnoTrffD9XwoHyAhJ8xG7NE8EC4vKSngiLyVaTrl

[GM Team Member and Acting PPT WB]

https://twitter.com/PaulLarrouturou/status/1803851311861108864

Édouard Philippe saying that Macron ‘has killed the presidential majority’ and that it’s time to ‘move on’ and ‘create a new parliamentary majority working on a different basis that the previous one’. He is breaking with Macron and already planning his 2027 presidential bid.

Shortly thereafter, Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister, criticized in strong terms in a TV interview the inner circle of Macron.

The parquet floors of ministries and palaces of the Republic are full of woodlice. There always have been woodlice, it is part of the French political life… They are in the parquet floors, in the parquet grooves. It is very hard to get rid of them. The best is to not listening to them and remaining at your place whether one is president, prime minister, minister and taking decisions in full knowledge.

The unnamed targets of Le Maire are Pierre Charron and Bruno Roger-Petit, two presidential advisers who reportedly encouraged Macron to dissolve the National Assembly. Charron is a former Sarkozyist senator for Paris currently acting as an unofficial presidential adviser. He is mostly known in the press for engaging in gossip and is a worthy representative of the Parisian Right, a permanent laughing stock of French politics since the Tiberi era which is dedicating more time for petty feuds and personal rivalries (case in point: in the 2023 senatorial election, the official LR list in Paris faced two dissident lists, one led by Charron who didn’t get reelected) than trying to constitute an effective challenge to the PS dominance in the capital. Roger-Petit is a second-tier and fairly mediocre journalist who started as a PS supporter but became later a Macron sycophant and was rewarded with a job of ‘presidential adviser for remembrance’. He is said to be very close to Brigitte Macron and to have inspired the reactionary turn of the Macron presidency, enjoying ties with far-right circles, notably Pascal Praud, the star columnist on Bolloré’s CNews TV station who, according to Le Monde, was informed by Roger-Petit about the dissolution even before the prime minister.

The roles of Charron and Roger-Petit may be exaggerated (firstly by Charron and Roger-Petit themselves) but the fact such political mediocrities have integrated the presidential inner circle and could influence political decisions is already very telling and strongly reminiscent of the Ancien Régime monarchy when politics were partly decided by courtiers and royal mistresses.

Anyway, there is a lot of resentment against Macron among the ranks of Renew parliamentarians, unhappy about the unannounced and clearly unprepared dissolution and about the disconnection and authoritarianism of the president who has snubbed the parliament all along his tenure in office. In the case of a (likely) electoral defeat, the leadership of Macron (barred from running in 2027) over what remains of Renew will be strongly challenged by Philippe, Le Maire, Attal, Bayrou and maybe Darmanin (who is apparently uninterested into remaining interior minister after the legislative elections). More internal squabbling in sight.

This hasn’t been yet mentioned but the candidate fielded by the NFP in the Conflans-Sainte-Honorine constituency (on the PP quota) is Aurélien Rousseau, a former chief of staff for Élisabeth Borne and one of the architects of the pensions reform. Subsequently the health minister, Rousseau resigned from that office in December 2023 to protest the immigration bill. His defection is yet another sign of discontent with the leadership and political orientation taken by Macron.


As for the campaign itself, Macron has decided to double down on his Boomer anti-youth populism, promising a revaluation of pensions (when pensions are already constituting one of the largest government expenditure and as pensioners have been entirely spared by the pension reform which is only penalizing younger generations), even harsher penalties for unemployed workers (the third reform of unemployment insurance in four years), prohibition of cell phones for children under 11 and social networks for teenagers under 15 (good luck trying to implement these ones considering they can’t even regulated mainstream TV/radio channels), compulsory school uniform by 2026, the generalization and mandatory character of the expensive and useless ‘national universal service’ (a cheap civic service for youth that has already faced various scandals of harassment, racism and physical harm against its first volunteers) and the promise of ‘excellence for everybody at school’ when the education system has suffered from repeated budget cuts and chronic understaffing and has been disorganized by a series of hasty and ill-prepared reforms. As mentioned, the simplification of administrative procedures for change of gender self-identification, which was part of Macron’s 2022 platform, is now derided as an abomination because throwing under the bus minorities for short-term political gains is apparently the new cool in French politics.

That’s pretty much for the platform as the main strategy is to contrast the supposed budgetary seriousness and competence of the current government with the economic incompetence and inexperience of the RN and the unrealistic and arch-expansive platform of the NFP. A risky choice when the 2023 budget deficit has been estimated at 5.6% against the 4.9% initially predicted by Le Maire and when the debt of France has been downgraded by Standard & Poor’s at the beginning of the month. But, even more, the government can boasted about its economic successes as much as it wants, on the ground the average voter is still experiencing increases in the prices of basic necessities, the closure of public services, the deterioration of education and hospitals systems, the excessive delays to get an appointment with specialists and the unfortunate financial consequences of stricter roadworthiness tests and ill-conducted energy renovation programs for households.

there goes the point of "Macron's coalition is the only one without significant infighting"