France 2017 Election Thread

chairman Thursday 24 Nov 2016

Speaking of, does anyone here know of any particularly good French news/analysis sources? I just use the the basics - Monde, Figaro, Monde Diplo, etc. But obviously NYT, Washington Post, etc. aren't the places you find the best English-language analysis, the same must be true of France.

Draugen Thursday 24 Nov 2016

I'd like to know, too.I just read the ones you mentioned, follow a few frenchies on Twitter(including Jacques Sapir, the author of that article) and occasionally check out the French threads on /pol/.

Ferdinand Saturday 26 Nov 2016

For French language stuff from the right:
http://www.revue-elements.com/
http://www.bvoltaire.fr/ (e.g. here is de Benoist on Trump's victory with some reference to Le Pen: http://www.bvoltaire.fr/alaindebenoist/evitons-de-racialiser-la-victoire-de-donald-trump,294162 )
http://www.radiocourtoisie.fr/
http://www.fdesouche.com/

German right:
https://jungefreiheit.de/

Welund Sunday 27 Nov 2016

It's true, you can't make a good bet on her anymore:

BETTING ODDS: Marine Le Pen is the second favourite to win power in France

Reuters

Nov. 17, 2016, 4:14 AM

France's far-right National Front (FN) leader Marine Le Pen poses in front of a poster for her 2017 French presidential election campaign.Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - France's far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen is now second-favorite to win power in next year's presidential election, just behind conservative Alain Juppe, British bookmaker William Hill said.

Former economy minister Emmanuel Macron launched his bid for the presidency on Wednesday, a move likely to take votes from mainstream candidates in a tight race that promises a strong turnout for Le Pen.

William Hill offered odds of 6/4, equivalent to an implied probability of 40 percent that Le Pen will become the next ruler of France. Juppe had even odds.

Odds express the ratio of the amounts staked by parties to a bet, based on the expected probability either way.

Bookmakers got a host of major political events wrong in recent years, including the U.S. presidential election, the Brexit vote, the British Labour Party leadership election and the 2015 British election.

"Having been hammered by political punters backing Jeremy Corbyn at 200/1 to be Labour leader, Donald Trump at 150/1 to be US President, Brexit and a Tory General Election victory both at 6/1, we're taking no chances this time round," William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe said.

The bookmaker was "making sure we keep Marine Le Pen's as short as possible," he said.

Hills offered 5/1, or a 17 percent implied probability, for ex-premier Francois Fillon; 8/1, or 11 percent probability, for Nicolas Sarkozy; 16/1, or 6 percent probability, for Macron; 28/1, or 3 percent probability, for Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

French President Francois Hollande was given odds of 33/1, an implied probability of 3 percent.

Kulturkampf Tuesday 29 Nov 2016

I do not want to sound so cucky, but Fillon wouldn't be the worse person to have at the reigns of France, either. Certainly, I prefer Le Pen, and I do think that Fillon would be too weak to really save France but in another sense wouldn't the work of Le Pen largely be sabotaged by other French politicians? Perhaps I am just trying to see the silver lining in the cloud if there is a Fillon victory.

Very refreshing to see that there is no serious Leftist candidate that appears to have a chance.

I have a question: are the Muslims & blacks of France a notoriously finicky and lazy voting bloc like in the United States? Does the French political left have to exert all their effort in getting their pets to show up for the vote?

Niccolo and Donkey Saturday 3 Dec 2016

The Establishment French Liberal take on Fillon:

François Fillon is as big a threat to liberal values as Marine Le Pen

François Fillon’s victory in France’s rightwing presidential primaries shows that liberal progressive values in Europe aren’t just confronting the ghosts of fascist-type movements. There is now a threat from a new type of reactionary movement. Anyone who thinks that Fillon’s success clears the ground for a resounding defeat of far-right ideas in France’s 2017 presidential race should think again. Fillon’s most active support base has come essentially from hardline, traditionalist Catholics – people who generally aren’t described as far right, in the sense that they don’t affiliate themselves with Marine Le Pen’s Front National. But some of their ideas do overlap.

The new reactionaries stand for “family values”, they dislike same-sex marriage, they are opposed to adoption rights for gay couples and – like Fillon – they reject the notion of a “multicultural” society. Their mobilisation on social media has been astounding, and apparently played no small role in Fillon’s surprise emergence this month. His opponent in the runoff, Alain Juppé, a moderate candidate who embraced diversity as a “happy identity” for the nation and combated anti-Muslim sentiment, found himself the target of online hate campaigns , some of which nicknamed him “Ali Juppé”.

European liberal democrats tend to worry about the danger coming from far-right would-be autocrats – but that’s not the full picture. The rise of ultra-conservative religious, Christian movements must now be looked at more closely. In France, pundits and parts of the media were caught offguard by it. In the US, white Christian anger has stood at the heart of the Tea Party and the Christian right – groups that have now gained a president-elect. A somewhat similar type of thinking seems to be making inroads in France , plugging into a historical legacy of deeply entrenched rightwing Catholic networks.

Further east on the continent, that religious and reactionary line of thought has long been prominent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia – a regime in tight alliance with the Orthodox church. The key message is that Christianity is under threat from Islam – and it resonates strongly in outwardly secular France, a country still traumatised by jihadi terrorist attacks. It is no coincidence that Fillon was publicly lauded by Putin . This wasn’t just because the Kremlin hopes to find a French presidential ally on foreign policy. It’s also because Putin detects in Fillon streaks of his own ultra-conservative ideology.

According to this world-view, liberal progressive values have brought western societies to a state of “decadence”, as a result of sexual policies and immigration. Witness how Russian propaganda has dubbed Europe “Gayropa”. That’s not far from some of the social media propaganda spread by some Fillon supporters.

As national populism and social conservatism make gains in Europe, liberal progressives might be forgiven for thinking they are fast becoming the political underdog, or even an endangered species. Donald Trump’s election was applauded by Europe’s populists and far-right leaders – a sure sign that more illiberal contagion is under way. But the threat does not just come from groups or politicians labelled far right - it is larger than that.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest
‘Fillon will now battle against Le Pen whom he expects to face in the 2017 presidential runoff.’ Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock
Radical Christian militant groups are hostile to social liberalism without having an obvious, direct connection to Europe’s dark past of fascist parties. Fillon will now battle against Le Pen , whom he expects to face in the 2017 presidential runoff. Yet it would be a mistake to think of him as the perfect antidote to the far right. Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, far-right groups across parts of Europe have benefited from the disgruntlement of the middle classes. Le Pen intends to capitalise on being the “anti-establishment” candidate – something Fillon, a former prime minister, can hardly claim for himself.

Comparisons with the Europe of the 1930s have been made, but they have their limits – armed militias aren’t exactly parading in the streets of European capitals. As the historian Ian Kershaw once wrote: “Trying to define fascism is like trying to nail jelly to the wall”. It’s because illiberalism comes in many shapes and forms that the fight for progressive democracy would do well to take some inspiration from past European dissident movements.

A few weeks ago, writers, artists and intellectuals from across Europe met in Bratislava at the Central European Forum , an annual gathering of people who cherish the legacy of dissidents such as Václav Havel , and believe it still carries many useful truths for today. Participants suggested that in these times of creeping authoritarianism and blatant intolerance, something akin to the dissident movements of the former communist bloc might now be reawakened. What’s needed are not new political parties but a wider, more inclusive grassroots approach, linking up Europe’s democratically minded beyond left-right criteria and beyond borders.

Of course, it is tricky to compare today’s liberal progressives to yesterday’s dissidents. Democracy the way we have known it may be in crisis, but it’s hardly as if a totalitarian police state – of the sort Havel experienced in communist Czechoslovakia – had descended upon us. Still, there is much inspiration to be drawn from Havel’s politics of hope. “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well,” Havel once wrote, “but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Charter 77 , the movement Havel and his dissident friends founded nearly 40 years ago, called for a new brand of activism against the autocracy of both communism and fascism. It stood for a new type of participatory democracy, “a free, informal, open community of people of different convictions, different faiths and different professions united by the will to strive individually and collectively for the respect of civil and human rights”. Charter 77 was not an organisation, it had no permanent body nor formal membership, and it was neither left or right.

Today, western progressive liberals may have to imitate some of this. Mainstream rightwing politicians are loth to confront traditionalists, for fear of losing votes, and many pander to far-right themes. (In France, Alain Juppé has been an exception, not unlike Angela Merkel in Germany.) In many countries, the partisan left has become too weak, having failed to reach out to the lower and middle classes. We may now have reached a point where only cross-partisan, cross-faith, grassroots citizen responses can effectively defend liberal democratic values. This means breaking out of cultural and identity silos, class warfare and left-right polarisation.

New reactionaries believe they can widen their reach more than the organised far right can do, because at first glance they aren’t as toxic or threatening to democracy. This will surely be Fillon’s strategy in France. Yet beneath that veneer of respectability, these groups carry a fair dose of bigotry and social regression. They celebrate “French values” instead of humanist ones. They want a nationalist creed, not a European one. They welcome Christian migrants, not Muslim ones.

If in the age of Brexit, Trump and nationalist demagoguery, the liberal order is now under threat, then Havel’s message becomes very relevant once more: it’s when the odds are stacked against you that it becomes important to “continuously try new things”. Progressive liberals across Europe would do well to start thinking like dissidents.

Niccolo and Donkey Saturday 3 Dec 2016

Possible French candidates from the left

The French president, François Hollande, left, has said he will not run again and his prime minister, Manuel Valls, right, has yet to announce whether he will stand. Photograph: Stephane de Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images

After France’s Socialist president, François Hollande , announced he would not run for re-election, his party will seek to prove wrong the pollsters who say the French left is too weak to make it through to the final round of the presidential election next spring.

The final is currently tipped to be between the right’s François Fillon and the far-right’s Marine Le Pen .

The French Socialist party, alongside other associated micro-parties, will hold an open primary race to choose its presidential candidate on 22 and 29 January and candidates have until 15 December to declare. But other candidates from the across the left have already announced they will run independently.

Candidates from the hard-left to the centre-left could now include:

Manuel Valls

Facebook Twitter Pinterest
French prime minister Manuel Valls. Photograph: Benoit Tessier/Reuters
Hollande’s prime minister and once his most loyal ally, Manuel Valls, has not yet announced if he will run in the Socialist primary race. Tough on law and order and a pro-business reformist from the right of the Socialist party, the 54-year-old is a little more popular with the general public than Hollande, but he is at odds with some of the left. He took only 5% of the vote in the last Socialist primary race in 2011.

Arnaud Montebourg

Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Former French economy minister Arnaud Montebourg. Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images
Arnaud Montebourg has already declared he will run in the Socialist primary race. Hollande’s former economy minister is firmly on the left of the party and lost his cabinet position in 2014 after denouncing Hollande’s pro-business shift. The former lawyer, who after leaving government did a management course at business school, says he favours a strong state to protect France’s industry from “foreign interests”.

Benoît Hamon

Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Candidate for the leftwing primaries Benoit Hamon. Photograph: Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty
The leftwing MP for Yveslines, outside Paris, has already declared to run in the Socialist primary race. Benoît Hanonserved twice as a minister under Hollande. But, as education minister, the 49-year-old quit the government in protest at pro-business reforms in 2014.

Emmanuel Macron

Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Emmanuel Macron, head of the political movement En Marche. Photograph: Jacky Naegelen/Reuters
A rebellious former economy minister and former protege of Hollande, he has launched a maverick, outsider bid for the presidency, promising to lead a people’s “democratic revolution” against a “vacuous” political system. The former investment banker, 38, who was unknown to the French public until two years ago, is not a member of a political party and has never run for elected office. He describes himself as coming from the left but wants to unite the left and right on a centrist ticket.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon

Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Jean-Luc Melenchon, candidate of the far-left coalition La France insoumise. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images
The charismatic firebrand is running on a radical left ticket and last week won the backing of the Communist party. A one-time Trotskyist and former teacher, he spent 30 years in the Socialist party, where he served as a minister and was once the youngest ever senator. He quit in 2008, arguing the party wasn’t properly leftwing. A former Socialist minister, he has emerged as the tub-thumping philosopher-leader of the radical left. He won 11% of the vote in the first round of the 2012 presidential election.

Christiane Taubira

Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Former French justice minister Christiane Taubira. Photograph: Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images
Christiane Taubira , Hollande’s former justice minister and a well-established political figure from Cayenne in French Guiana, hasn’t commented on whether or not she will run in the primary but a petition calling on her to do so currently has 70,000 signatures. The 64-year-old, who was an important voice on the left of Hollande’s government, quit after differences over his security measures after Paris’s terrorist attacks. As a minister, she often faced racist taunts from far-right sympathisers: at one rally, children waved bananas at her. A municipal election candidate for the far-right Front National was forced to withdraw in 2013 after likening her to a monkey on Facebook. She later told Libération that racist attacks “were an attack on the heart of the republic”.

Draugen Tuesday 6 Dec 2016

Valls just anounced he's going to run. Way too late for him, he has no chance, because people will just associate him with the President. Unless something extraordinary happens in the socialist primaries, the left will stay out of the second round.

Eddie Tuesday 6 Dec 2016

I personally support Fillon vs. Le Pen because he is anti-faggot while Le Pen is openly associated with queers.

chairman Tuesday 6 Dec 2016

If Fillon wins on a socially conservative and economically Thatherite platform, I think we can guess which of those two positions will be pushed and which will be quickly sidelined.

France 2017 Election Thread

10 posts