French presidential election, 2022

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

A good strategy for those who want to chuck Macron into the dustbin of history: a coalition of NGOs and trade unions should randomly select some men on the street, vet them, and run the one who has no history of beating women or committing petty crimes etc. This candidate would probably become the next French President!

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I guess you dislike Mélenchon then, because he seemed to have the best chance of doing well of the leftwing candidates. Did you support Macron in the second round (without the hindsight)?

No I couldn't vote (still can't). From the little I knew I was supporting Macron. I believe my father was quite enthusiastic for Juppé, admiring him as mayor of Bordeaux; he started supporting Macron early on though.

Yeah, there are a lot of things I don't like about him, even if there are quite a few people in LFI I have a more positive opinion of. I would be more prepared to support him this time round though, because the situation seems more desperate and he seems to compare (much) less badly relative to other figure than he did 5 years ago.

Is it a citizenship issue why you can't vote? I've no idea what the French rules wrt voting abroad are, but I don't think there is a time limit like other countries have

This seems to be most of the French Left's attitude - don't like Melanchon, but he's better than he used to be.
Why couldn't other figures step up to the plate?

Note that parochial boy did not say that "he was better than he used to be" but, rather, that he is better relative to other figures than he was five years ago. My read of the French situation is that basically all politicians come off as clowns and fools to a much greater extent than they did in 2016. Melenchon seems mostly unchanged so he now seems better in contrast.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

So the general sentiment in France right now is... for an entire political spectrum of different types of racists as candidates? A hard-Right racist of one sort, a hard-Right racist of another kind, a Conservative racist, a liberal racist, a left-wing racist...'

https://twitter.com/dril/status/841892608788041732?lang=en

French politics today

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I am shocked and appalled that CGT members who work for the railroad are refusing to vote for a candidate who has pledged to take income out of their pockets so corporations and elites can have more money! I do not understand this.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I am shocked and appalled that CGT members who work for the railroad are refusing to vote for a candidate who has pledged to take income out of their pockets so corporations and elites can have more money! I do not understand this.

Here we go, the workerist dungarees-wearing act again...do economists have their own union too?

In the end independent trade unions won't exist in an authoritarian society, be it Le Pen or Mélenchon. That's the difference we're talking about here. And Hungary is demonstrating that authoritarian rule is incredibly hard to reverse.

I am not arguing it is good that CGT members would refuse to vote for Macron over Le Pen. I am arguing that they will do so and that it should surprise no one that they would do this. Macron made the choice to make the election a referendum on his plan to increase the retirement age - he is responsible for this.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

We'll see if I am right about this soon enough: I suspect that polls will tend to mislead about the scale of vote transfers from Macron to Melenchon or other protest vote options while also underestimating the scale of vote transfers from Fillon to Macron. It has been 5 years since the last election and Macron is an extremely polarizing figure. Those who quite like him - and there are many on the right who now adore him - may very well have developed a false memory of voting for him in the 1st round. Those who despise him - and there are many who voted for him who despise him now - may very well have decided that they didn't vote for him in the 1st round.

The main reason to believe that this is the case: Macron is now "President of the rich", having a natural class base with natural class enemies, whereas, in 2017, he was an empty suit candidate appearing more similar in presentation and biography to a PS candidate than a LR/UMP candidate. This time, we should expect Macron to receive outlandish levels of support in, say, Boulogne-Billancourt. On the other hand, it's extremely hard for me to see Macron hitting his national average in working class suburbs of Paris, which he had basically done in 2017 (!!).

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I might as well add that there are good reasons why the French retirement age differs by occupation in France and that this isn't only the work of rent-seeking trade unions. While the system is a bureaucratic maze riddled with inefficiencies, the overall thrust is that manual workers can retire early. I'm not sure if I'd describe this as being sensible but it is true that manual workers are often, quite literally, physically unable to work past age 50 and above. It's surprising how often even seemingly banal manual occupations destroy the bodies of workers - this holds without even considering the most damaging ones. This is to say that there is a logic behind its design, that an idealist could decide that pension systems should work like this (though the idealist thinking like this would have to be a bit of a dullard).

For this reason, I am inclined to sympathize with the "privileged" labor aristocracy in France, which still exists in pockets among manual workers. There's basically nothing that I admire about French social policy or labor/employment law but it makes sense that those who benefit from protections would fight to defend the scraps they have. It isn't as if Macron will replace this with anything better...

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I suspect that one explanation of the strength of Zemmour's performance in affluent parts of Paris, which goes above and beyond what we would have expected, is that French Jews voted en masse for him. Will they vote for Le Pen against Macron? No, of course not, they are self-respecting people but they would vote for a disgusting fascist bigot who is one of their own - events have radicalized them...

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

To clarify what I meant when I said that Zemmour had done better than we might have expected in the Paris metro area, it's pretty clear that his base were LR/UMP partisans who preferred Le Pen to Macron in 2017 in the 2nd round i.e. the type of voter that Sarkozy aimed his candidacy at in 2007. While some of these people exist in affluent areas outside of Paris, it seems pretty clear that plenty of Zemmour voters supported Macron over Le Pen there - this is actually quite puzzling!