French presidential election, 2022

[Alcibiades]

Zemmour has apparently been moaning that the subjunctive is no longer taught in schools. TBH I don't really know how you can speak/write French without the subjunctive.

But it seems like he's going for more of a traditionalist hard-right line (including maybe some of Fillon's electorate?) than Marine Le Pen.

I was taught the subjunctive in the not-too-distant past for GCSE French, so it would indeed be funny if it was no longer being taught in French schools . Then again, hard right demagogues have never let facts get in the way of a good tale from the trenches of the culture wars.

[Alcibiades]

I can’t really comment in a particularly informed manner on the domestic policy aspects of this debate*, but what I will say is that it’s pretty obvious whom Putin would be pulling for in a Macron-Mélenchon runoff. This is about the worst possible time for a Mélenchon victory from a wider world perspective, and would put a terrible dent in the impressive pro-Ukrainian European solidarity so far.

_{*Apart from the fact that I’ve read what Méluche has had to say about Jews and it’s … really, really bad. Almost cartoonishly shocking levels of anti-Semitism. If I were a French Jew, I find it hard to imagine I’d feel safe under a Mélenchon presidency.}

Edit: And by the way, I really do understand where parochial is coming from here; I never liked Corbyn, but I defended him to a lot of people as the lesser evil in both 2017 and 2019. In hindsight, having seen his reaction to the anti-Semitism report and his participation in anti-NATO rallies in recent weeks, I’m ashamed that I ever stood up for him as much as I did (this is not to say that I now think May or Johnson were any better, but, completely ignoring the Tories, that Corbyn on his own merits was so bad that he didn’t deserve a defence). There are a lot of similarities between him and Méluche — the anti-Semitism, the terrible foreign policy, the ‘reactionary left’ streak, and the petty narcissism and factional vindictiveness — but the sense I get is that anything bad you can say about Corbyn you can say the same but ten times worse for Mélenchon. Corbyn is clearly a deeply principled man even if many of those principles are terrible, whereas Méluche seems like an utter slimeball through and through.

[Alcibiades]

I know Mélenchon came tantalisingly close to making the second round, but honestly I reckon he did about as well as he possibly could have done — he’s a candidate with a high floor but equally a hard ceiling, and so I don’t see anything but an extremely narrow path through which he could possibly have finished in the top two.

For that and the other reasons that Antonio and Zinneke have spelt out, anger at the small number of voters for the other left candidates for not consolidating behind Mélenchon is very misplaced to say the least. Hopefully Mélenchon finally goes away now (certainly any serious party would not allow a candidate who has failed to advance beyond the first round three times to run again — but LFI is an entirely personalist outfit), and a left candidate combining some of his undoubted strengths without all the toxicity that goes with it can emerge next time. As long as he’s in the picture, I don’t think the left will be able to do any better than a strong third place finish as we saw this time, due to his divisiveness leading to the aforementioned ceiling and the fact that he really sucks all the oxygen out of the room.

[Alcibiades]

From what I’ve watched, Le Pen predictably embarrassing herself. Whatever you think of him, Macron’s a strong debater especially in the one-on-one format, though it’s not particularly hard to appear so when Le Pen is your opponent…