French Presidential Election : First Turn Today

[Rabid]

Just so people know, today is the first turn of the French Presidential Election (how it works [FR]).

Here are the Candidates :

Eva Joly - "Europe Écologie Les Verts / EELV" (Green/"Ecology")
Marine Le Pen - "Front national / FN" (Far-Right/"Xenophobia")
Nicolas Sarkozy - "Union pour un mouvement populaire / UMP" (Economically-Liberal Right/"Corporate Puppets")
Jean-Luc Mélenchon - "Front de gauche / FDG" (Egalitarian Left/"Humans First")
Philippe Poutou - "Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste / NPA" (Far-Left/"Capitalists Go Home")
Nathalie Arthaud - "Lutte ouvrière / LO" (Trotskyist Far-Left/"Back to the USSR")
Jacques Cheminade - "Solidarité & Progrès / S&P" (Lyndon Larouche offshoot)
François Bayrou - "Mouvement démocrate / MODEM" (Economically-Liberal Center/"Eternal Loser")
Nicolas Dupont-Aignan - "Debout la République / DLR" (Conservative/Gaullist Right/"A certain idea of what is France")
François Hollande - "Parti socialiste / PS" - (Center-Left/"Social-Democrat")



Last polls, a few days ago, showed Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande at equality with each other, with scores between 24-27%, followed by Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon with scores between 15-17% each.



The first results will be officially announced this evening, around 20h-21h local hour (GMT+2).

[Starglider]

I liked this piece from the BBC;

From the moment he took office in 2007, no French president in modern times has been the object of such blatant dislike. It is an animosity quite distinct from opposition to his actual policies. All leaders expect hostility for the things they do. Few get it in such measure for the things they are.

"There is an irrational hatred of Nicolas Sarkozy among much of the public, and it is playing a major part in this election," says Jean-Sebastien Ferjou who edits the news website Atlantico. "I say 'irrational' because that is what it is. Polls show that if you ask people about this or that policy of Sarkozy's - but don't mention his name - they will tend to support it. "The reforms that have defined his period in office - raising the retirement age from 60 to 62, relaxing the 35-hour working week, overhauling the universities and altering the tax system to encourage overtime and home ownership - have done little to impress voters."

For Ferjou, the main reason for the hostility is that Sarkozy was the first French leader to declare himself unashamedly on the political right.

"It is ironic because in fact he is ideologically totally unstructured. His talent is for energy and movement, and it is impossible to say what sort of intellectual history he comes from," says Ferjou. "But he sent out a message very clearly that he was not embarrassed about saying he was on the right - and this set off a huge backlash of hostility. You have to understand that for years the right in France has totally abandoned the intellectual debate to the left. For so-called 'right-wing' parties, the only argument they put forward was that they were better managers than the left. They could run things better. But they had surrendered in the battle of ideas and values. Sarkozy ended that complicity, and people hated him for it."

The tone for this "Sarkophobia" is set in the cafes and cultural salons of bourgeois Paris, where the president is routinely viewed as vulgar, money-obsessed, semi-racist and dangerous. Recently the film director Mathieu Kassowitz said that if the president made it to round two of the election, it would show that France was a "neo-fascist collaborationist" country.

A recent survey on European leaders put Nicolas Sarkozy as the most well-known figure in Europe, but also, as its least liked. In his five years in power, the energetic French President has managed to leave few people indifferent. From the start, he struck a very different figure to his predecessors: here was a French president suddenly in awe of America, fond of bling and money, and in favour of deregulation and capitalism. His whirlwind affair, in broad daylight and under the glare of paparazzi, with the top model turned singer Carla Bruni after an acrimonious divorce with his second wife, did certainly enhance his profile on the world stage. But what his colleagues, such as David Cameron, may remember most about Sarkozy is his manners: quick but abrasive, forceful but unpredictable, and above all, fiery.

The entertainer Christophe Aleveque said in an interview that Sarkozy is "dangerous… from another planet… a fool who believes his own lies… psychologically not normal". "If he loves money so much that is fine, but it is his problem, so may I suggest he get a job in a bank or something. And leave us alone!" he said. Five years after he celebrated his 2007 election victory at the pricey Champs-Elysees restaurant Le Fouquet's, this is still held up as a symbol of his supposed jet-set lifestyle.

However as his supporters grow tired of pointing out, senior Socialists are regularly seen dining in expensive Paris eateries. President Mitterrand had no shortage of wealthy friends. In 2002, the wife of the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin told a magazine profiler how she did her shopping at Le Bon Marche - the Paris equivalent of Harrod's food hall. But being a sophisticated display of wealth, that was considered acceptable.

For the right-wing lawyer and polemicist Gilles-William Goldnadel, the roots of the anti-Sarkozism lie in a public culture still in thrall to the allure of the left. "It is that old tradition - revolutionary, romantic - which will attack anything that smacks of money or privilege," he says. "And it's allied to a journalistic profession that is overwhelmingly on the left. Polls show that 80 to 95% of journalists are on the left or far-left, and with their obsessive focus on the so-called vices of Sarkozy, they are pushing the same agenda."

Another interpretation of Sarkophobia is offered by writer Andre Bercoff, author of La Chasse au Sarko (The Sarko Hunt). He says the real reason people dislike the president is not "Fouquet's or bling-bling or all that nonsense. It's because he broke the rules of how to be president.

"When de Gaulle set up the Fifth Republic, he created a presidency that was very like a monarchy. And since then all presidents, of left and right, have been happy to go along with that. But then along came Sarkozy who said, 'I don't want to be a king - I want to be a politician. I want to be like a football coach.' And the people really resent him for it."

For Bercoff, the other reason why the president is loathed is that he has told the French some inconvenient truths.

"The French were happy as long as they were ruled by a Mitterrand or Chirac, leaders who nurtured their post-Revolutionary belief that the French are a kind of chosen people for whom the normal rules of economics don't apply," he says. "There is still a widespread feeling in France that we should set the path to a new way of being. Look at the success of (far-left candidate) Jean-Luc Melenchon. "But Sarkozy punctured that illusion - and again people hate him for it."

Ferjou, Goldnadel and Bercoff all believe that Sarkozy has already lost the election, and that the prevailing anti-Sarkozism is a major cause. But at Sorbonne University, sociology professor Michel Maffesoli is not so sure. He agrees that Sarkozy is the butt of an official culture whose exponents in the media, universities and the arts are overwhelmingly hostile. But he draws a distinction between published opinion - the views of the intelligentsia - and public opinion. And with the mass of the population, he argues, the president has far more of a rapport than is ever acknowledged.

"French public life has been dominated for two or three centuries by the rationalist ideas of the Enlightenment. But these ideas, which we might describe as those that have shaped 'modernity', are now giving way to the ideas and values of 'post-modernity,'" he says. "Post-modernity, which is the condition our societies are moving into, is far more anchored around the emotional than the rational or intellectual. And Sarkozy seems to have grasped this instinctively. He is far more in phase with ordinary people than are the intellectuals who govern public life."

Maffesoli does not believe in opinion polls, because he says people know what they are expected to say, and so underplay their support for Sarkozy. "But in the voting-booth it is different. The booth is like a womb where people reconnect with the purely emotional. It means going with their gut rather than their brains. That's why I think Sarkozy can still do it."

It seems a bit of a long shot. Whatever Maffesoli thinks of them, the opinion polls are pretty categoric. But as Ferjou also points out: "More than 60% of people voting for Hollande say they are going to do it purely to get rid of Sarkozy." Perhaps not the most positive way to embark on a new political era.

While Sarkozy did do a lot to modernise archaic French labor laws, unfortunately he has been a supporter of massive endless bank bailouts and is helping Merkel to prop up the eurozone. A swing to the left in France can only be financed by printing money, which will hopefully break the Franco-German axis and allow the disintigration of the euro to proceed.

[Rabid]

While Sarkozy did do a lot to modernise archaic French labor laws

If by that you mean doing his best to break the Unions and more than 150 years of worker's struggle for decent wages and working conditions, then yeah you're right.

[Simon_Jester]

So, stipulating that Sarkozy is unpopular like this, why? I'd kind of rather hear this from a Frenchman than from the BBC. "The media hate him because they're leftist" doesn't strike me as a satisfactory answer.

And to me, it sounds like the sort of thing I'd almost expect to hear from a major news outlet in the Anglosphere by default, whether it was true or not. Because it's neoliberal received wisdom that hostile journalists are a pack of commies who are just trying to stop the state from Doing What's Necessary.

EDIT: I've been baguette-ninjaed!

Seriously, could you elaborate on that?

[Rabid]

- Reform of the 35-hours : deregulation meaning to weaken the worker's rights and to empower the employers to exploit the workers out of normal contractual hours without paying them just salaries (people basically working for free => unable to dispute this matter of fact without being fired => disguised slave labor). And generally pass "reforms" which reduce workers to a status of "human resources" to be discarded at will.
And he constantly suck up to the MEDEF and other associations of powerful "employers" ("exploiters" would be a better way to phrase it). His commitment to perpetually protect his friends of the CAC 40 has also been shown time and times again.

- Leftist French Medias : Each time the president is interviewed on TV the journalist only offer a token show of "opposition", whereas when someone not from the UMP (Sarko's party) and from the left is interviewed the journalists try their damned best to deform the interviewee's words and turn it against them. And something like 80% of the French medias (by titles, not by volume, and excluding the state-run medias whose Patron is directly nominated by the President of the Republic [sic]), all media combined, are controlled by two families, both well-known for their support of Sarkozy, and one of them (Dassault - as in the Dassault Rafale) being a major arm manufacturer.

- Sarko's way of "ruling" : Sarkozy around here is called the Omnipresident, because he has absorbed any and all functions of power. His Ministers are only figurehead, all decisions being taken and directed from the Elysée. THIS is what people do not like : Sarkozy is constantly pissing on the Republic, and show perpetual contempt toward the French people.
Furthermore, he has no respect toward the Separation of Power, intruding himself into the Legislative and Judicial powers whenever he feels like it.

[TC Pilot]

I'm curious how well the FN is going to do this time around without Jean-Marie Le Pen running. It's not like the ongoing Euro crisis isn't giving them plenty of ammunition this time.

Going back to the first post... what does FDG "Humans first" mean?

[Rabid]

Going back to the first post... what does FDG "Humans first" mean?

They aren't Human Supremacist, no, don't worry.

No, it mean that at a time were everyone is talking about economic crisis, austerity plans, recession & bad economic growth ; they want to place the Human back at the center of the stage, placing it at the center of every policies. The idea being to place the people's well-being AND the Ecological Crisis above all other consideration (they're greener than EELV in that they propose an "Ecological Planning", that every policies should take into account the good of the People and the Planet ; contrasting with the "laissez-faire" attitude of EELV).

In practice, this include a nationalization of the Banking sector and its subservience to the interests of the People (and not the other way around), the foundation of a 6th Republic based on the ideas of the "Ecological Planning", and other goodies like that.

It's all in their program [FR].

[Rabid]

I'm curious how well the FN is going to do this time around without Jean-Marie Le Pen running. It's not like the ongoing Euro crisis isn't giving them plenty of ammunition this time.

Not much, I hope, but the unofficials (& illegal...) out-of-the-poll polls show that Marine Le Pen is in third position, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in fourth position. Personally, I hope Mélenchon will beat Le Pen, and reach the third place (ideally, I'd love him to reach the Second Turn, but, well...).

[Starglider]

The need for reform can be summed up by this excerpt from an earlier BBC article (quoting the BBC here BTW because it is slightly harder for socialists to dismiss out of hand than other UK media);

Philippe Magne is the chief executive of Arcad Software, a small company that exports its computer programmes to 33 different countries, including the UK. He has 30 employees but is reluctant to take on more - for understandable reasons. "I own a small business," he said. "In 2008 I had up to 62 employees. But because of the crisis we had to reduce our wage bill. The redundancy payments were so high it almost bankrupted the company. "We need more flexibility for employers. When we lay people off in a small organisation like ours it's not because we want to cream off more profit, it's simply because we don't have the business. "When we get new business we need the power to employ people quickly without fear that we can't afford to lay them off in a downturn. At the moment hiring people represents a significant risk."

In the region of Rhone Alpes there are now 400,000 people without jobs - a 5% rise in a year. This mirrors the picture across the country. Unemployment has now risen for seven consecutive months (according to the last figures published in November) and the rate now stands at a 12-year high. Mr Sarkozy is promising to introduce new laws that will make it easier to agree these short-term contracts. But civil engineer Eric Poyet, one of many over-50s searching for a job, remains unconvinced. "I will be voting for Francois Hollande [the Socialist frontrunner]," he says. "We don't feel valued any more. The current government isn't doing enough for people like me", he says - adding that he can find short-term contract work, but wants something better.

And there you have it. Operating a modern software company similar to the ones I work for and with is virtually impossible in France due to archaic notions that a career should consist of parking your butt at one employer for four decades and then retiring. The fact that a large fraction of the population consider project-based employment to be inherently inferior is merely sad, the economic tragedy comes from the blind and authoritarian attempts to impose their notions of acceptable employment patterns on the young and still-flexible individuals. Hence;

Moreover there are now twice as many small and medium-sized companies (SME) across the Rhine in Germany. On average they employ twice as many people as the same sector in France.

The pain from having an uncompetitive workforce has been working its way up the economic ladder, hitting progressively larger companies;

The first quarter of 2012 was brutal for businesses in France: 16,206 filed for bankruptcy. A trajectory that may demolish the prior annual record set in 2009 during the worst of the financial crisis when 61,595 firms went bust. Since then, bankruptcy filings eased off: 58,673 in 2010 and 58,195 in 2011. But now the direction has changed—and worse, it is threatening a lot more jobs.

Bankruptcy filings aren’t clean, unlike GDP numbers which are adjusted and groomed and beautified in a million ways; they’re raw and ugly, but useful, like a grimy dipstick into the gritty reality at the bottom of the economic crankcase. Under French law, they fall into three categories: liquidation, restructuring, and “safeguarding,” an option since 2005 that allows debtors that are not yet insolvent, but can demonstrate financial distress, to benefit from the safeguarding proceedings—with the goal of keeping teetering companies from toppling.

While the increase in the number of the filings was only 0.3% over last year, the composition has changed and larger firms with more employees have filed. Tiny outfits with 0 to 2 employees, representing the vast majority of the filings (11,565), actually declined in number, many having been wiped out earlier during the crisis. But the larger companies with sufficient resources to survive the crisis were getting whacked: filings by those with 3 to 9 employees (3,490 firms) inched up 1.6%, those with 10 to 49 employees (1,028 firms) increased by 5.2%, those with 50 to 99 employees (69 firms) jumped 11.3%, those with 100 to 200 employees (40 firms) skyrocketed a sobering 73%, and those with over 200 employees (14 firms) jumped by 16.7%.

That larger firms are now crumbling at a faster rate is a sign of just how tough the economy has become. Unlike their German counterparts, they’re not focused on exporting to developing nations where business has been a heck of a lot better than in France or in much of Europe. The French auto industry is an example. It's in deep trouble, with nefarious consequences for smaller suppliers. But not just in France. The R-word—restructuring—is being bandied about with dire warnings of plant closings and mass layoffs. Exactly what you can't easily do in Europe. For that whole debacle, read.... Fiasco in the Auto Industry.

The companies that filed for bankruptcy in the first quarter represented 65,200 jobs that are now threatened or are already evaporating—up a breathtaking 16% from last year. Unemployment has grown for ten months in a row to 2.87 million in February, the highest since October 1999. Unemployment and underemployment rose to 4.28 million, the highest ever. Job offers sagged 9.5% from a year ago.

The socialist solution is of course to have the government employ more people directly, and to increase subsidies to giant state-owned and state-favoured companies. As France is just behind Belgium in having the highest total tax rate in Europe, unless capital controls and draconian confiscation are imposed (instantly breaking the eurozone) the only practical source of revenues is increased borrowing. A plan which will plough right into the European sovereign debt crisis and impending fixed-income market lock-up.

[TC Pilot]

They aren't Human Supremacist, no, don't worry.

Phew, I can rest easy now.

Not much, I hope, but the unofficials (& illegal...) out-of-the-poll polls show that Marine Le Pen is in third position, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in fourth position. Personally, I hope Mélenchon will beat Le Pen, and reach the third place (ideally, I'd love him to reach the Second Turn, but, well...).

Since I can't read French, I looked through a Wikipedia article on the candidates/parties and their platforms, and I have to agree with you. The FDG looks to be one of the best of all possibilities there.

[Rabid]

Okay, results are out. No big surprise as far as the two frontrunners go :

(going by memory until I can find the exact results on the web)

François Hollande : 28.40%
Nicolas Sarkozy : 24.[something]%

Now, the two follow-up are what is making me mad angry right now :

Marine Le Pen : 20.00%
Jean-Luc Mélenchon : 11.[something]%


Fucking piece of shit ! The bitch got even more votes than the polls supposed, and Mélenchon in the other hand underperfomed ?! WHAT THE FUCKING HELL ?

Goddamn...


Now, we'll see the second-turn, but seeing the scores, Hollande should pass - hopefully, he's the least of two evil right now.

That said, the game isn't over, yet. There's still the Legislative in June.

[Panzersharkcat]

Marine Le Pen : 20.00%
Jean-Luc Mélenchon : 11.[something]%


Fucking piece of shit ! The bitch got even more votes than the polls supposed, and Mélenchon in the other hand underperfomed ?! WHAT THE FUCKING HELL ?

Goddamn...

It's like how 20% more people voted for David Duke when he ran for the Senate than polls indicated. They didn't want to seem to the pollster that they were racists but when they got to vote confidentially, they made their actual choice apparent. It's not as big here but it's basically the same, I think.

[Rabid]

The thing is the polling institute already include correction in their formulas as far the FN goes - the amount of people saying they're going to vote FN is actually inferior to the score they display in their results.

What this mean is that she literally BLEW THE SCORES !


Fucking hell, I weep for my country...



Oh, another thing : official abstention numbers are only 19.70% of the registered voters.

[Rabid]

Another thing that should be taken into account : since the foundation of the 5th Republic, there has been only ONE Left-Leaning President (François Mitterand). The rest has been either from the historical Gaullist party and its successors (its latest incarnation being the UMP, before that the RPR), or in rare case the Center (Valérie Giscard d'Estaing).

[Simon_Jester]

The need for reform can be summed up by this excerpt from an earlier BBC article (quoting the BBC here BTW because it is slightly harder for socialists to dismiss out of hand than other UK media);

...

And there you have it. Operating a modern software company similar to the ones I work for and with is virtually impossible in France due to archaic notions that a career should consist of parking your butt at one employer for four decades and then retiring. The fact that a large fraction of the population consider project-based employment to be inherently inferior is merely sad, the economic tragedy comes from the blind and authoritarian attempts to impose their notions of acceptable employment patterns on the young and still-flexible individuals. Hence;

...

The pain from having an uncompetitive workforce has been working its way up the economic ladder, hitting progressively larger companies;

...

The socialist solution is of course to have the government employ more people directly, and to increase subsidies to giant state-owned and state-favoured companies. As France is just behind Belgium in having the highest total tax rate in Europe, unless capital controls and draconian confiscation are imposed (instantly breaking the eurozone) the only practical source of revenues is increased borrowing. A plan which will plough right into the European sovereign debt crisis and impending fixed-income market lock-up.

This is more or less the same received wisdom I've been hearing for ten years; the only reason I haven't been hearing it longer is that I wasn't very politically aware at fifteen.

I'd like to know what Rabid thinks of it.



For myself, I have to wonder: the "careerist" model of employment has been with us in one form or another since ancient times. When you say it's necessary that we get rid of it for the economy as a whole, I wonder how certain that is. Sure, GDP suffers and unemployment is high during recessions. But... is high mobility of labor really necessary, or is it something we can learn to live without the way we seem to be learning to live without privacy? What actually stops us from having a 1980 standard of living (broadly acceptable to most people in the developed world, allowing for advances in the quality of gizmos available for the same price in constant dollars) on a 1980 model of employment, using 2010 technology?

I am honestly unclear on why it is necessary, why it is impossible for anyone to choose not to do that.

Abolishing the careerist model has costs. Why can't a basically modern, healthy civilization decide not to go that way?

You can sneer at this as 'socialist' and 'ignorant,' but it's very rare that I see explanations for this, as opposed to seeing the trends of global neoliberal capitalism presented as the only way forward and damn the idea of there being any alternatives. And when someone tells me, in politics, that "there is no choice" but to accept their economic restructuring... I don't trust that.

[Rabid]

This is more or less the same received wisdom I've been hearing for ten years; the only reason I haven't been hearing it longer is that I wasn't very politically aware at fifteen.

I'd like to know what Rabid thinks of it.

I won't say it's rubbish, because there are some grain of truth in there, under a giant pile of dung....

HOWEVER. Beyond the gross generalizations and the usual Starglider-style Socialist-bashing fest, what SG fail to mention is that if some portion of the economy may suffer from too rigid employment regulations (which in itself is a claim that should be seriously discussed...), the VAST majority of jobs today in the economy are totally fine with a career-based employment scheme.

Here, we have two major type of contracts :

- The CDI - "Contrat à Durée Indéterminée" (Undetermined Duration Contract) : it's the permanent employment contract. An employer will have to face a lot of obstacle to fire someone with this kind of contract ; which is why a non-negligible number of them prefer to psychologically torture the employees they want to "fire", so that they will send them their resignation. The numbers of work-related suicides, cases of depression, and complaints of moral harassment are proof of that.

- The CDD - "Contrat à Durée Déterminée" (Determined Duration Contract) : These are precarious contracts, which are intended for the use Starglider is talking about - people with a "mission". The duration of the contract can be set to a fixed date, or the achievement of a particular task or mission.
In practice, it is used to shit on the workers, putting on them the pressure of "do as we tell you or we won't renew the contract" - the retail sector for example is very fond of it, as is to my profound disgust a large number of Public Administrations, which use temp workers, or has people who been working on CDD for them for the entire duration of their career. More than 700,000 people working for the French Administration are in this situation.


Furthermore, among other things, it's almost impossible today to find an apartment to rent, or take a loan if you don't have a CDI, even if your salary is higher than another person with a CDI.



Basically, what Starglider, Sarkozy and all that clique want to impose us, is to put everyone on CDD, so that EVERYONE will be living in precarious conditions, and will have no choice but to submit to the will of their corporate overlords.

[TC Pilot]

I'm stunned by how well the FN managed to do, even with all the problems rising out of the Euro crisis and the economic problems. Their showing in 2002 is looking less like a fluke and more like a trend now.

That said, what implications does this have with the run-off elections? Are FN voters going to vote for Sarkozy? Stay home?

[Pelranius]

Well considering that FN is still only 20% of the electorate, would Sarkozy be able to convince enough of them to vote for him without simultaneously alienating mainstream French society?

[OneEyedTeddyMcGrew]

I can't see Sarkozy winning the second round. I just can't. A sizable majority of Melenchon's voters and a decent chunk of Bayrou's voters will probably switch to Hollande en masse. Sarkozy just doesn't have the same support to draw upon. His only choice is to tack way to the right (He's alright done it to a certain extent, but it'll be "full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes" stuff now) but even that's a hell of a gamble. I'd be willing to bet most of Le Pen's votes consist of either the real far-right headbangers who see Sarkozy as part of the problem, or protest voters who will either just sit out the second round or go to Hollande as a "lesser of two evils" option.

Long story short. A very good result for lefties, a good result for fascists and an appalling result for neo-liberal austerity junkies. Despite the potentially worrying implications of Le Pen's success if you'd given me this option 24 hours ago I would have probably taken it.

[Rabid]

Here are the almost definitive results :


François Hollande - 28.63%
Nicolas Sarkozy - 27.08%
Marine Le Pen - 18.01%
Jean-Luc Mélenchon - 11.13%
François Bayrou - 9.11%
Eva Joly - 2.28%
Nicolas Dupont-Aignan - 1.80%
Philippe Poutou - 1.15%
Nathalie Arthaud - 0.57%
Jacques Cheminade - 0.25%




My interpretation so far, is that the high score of Marine Le Pen is tied to the fact the abstention score is 1/3 lower than what was expected (~20% +/-1% instead of being ~30%). There's high probabilities that much of the votes for the FN are only "protest votes" - that's my hope, at least.
I would otherwise have serious difficulties to swallow that 1 in 5 of my fellow countrymen, in the Nation of the Revolution and the Human Rights, in the country which has chosen to inscribe "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" at the center of its DNA, would fall so low as to be truly convinced that Fascism is the way of the XXIst century. I just... I can't.

And when I think that we had the courage, in the 1930's, to outright interdict such damaging movements to democracy, when everywhere else they were showing their toxicity, subjugating countries after countries ; and that now political correctness force us to allow the wolves into the sheep pen...

[OneEyedTeddyMcGrew]

Speaking as an outsider I'm not TOO worried. Concerned? Yes. Worried? No. I think the nature of the electoral system played a part in it as well since unless something truly batshit insane happened Le Pen was never going to get enough to force her way into one of the top two spots. Remember that even when her old man managed it in 2002 (and even then he only got in by less than 1% largely on the back of Chirac being seen as a complete crook and the socialists revolting en masse against Jospin) he was crushed like a bug in the second round by Chirac in the biggest landslide in French electoral history, 82% to 18%. To put that into context, not even fucking Napoleon III won by that big a margin.

Also, quite frankly, if things are still as fucked in 2017 as they are now then Le Pen getting the top job is probably going to be the least of Europe's problems.

[Simon_Jester]

Er, the name of the document which I believe you refer to is traditionally translated into English as the "Rights of Man" or the "Declaration of the Rights of Man."

That said, this is roughly the same proportion of reactionary idiots with muscles for brains found throughout French history, or anyone else's history. Compare to the percentage of Tea Partiers in the US. You can't get rid of the residuum.

They're not really very dangerous by themselves; in peaceable times most of them are just strutting and posturing and congratulating themselves on how 'hard' they are, so to speak. They only become dangerous if their ideas are socially accepted to the point where they can safely indulge in gang violence.

[Irbis]

A swing to the left in France can only be financed by printing money, which will hopefully break the Franco-German axis and allow the disintigration of the euro to proceed.

Ah, the Golden Idol of "flexible currency" again. Except, for all of its allure, no worshipper of it was ever able to tell me why UK and Switzerland, two bastions of FREEDOM from evil Eurozone, have such problems now. Has "devalue currency, and fuck the savings of common populace" thing not worked for them? Why they don't show Germany how stupid reliance on industry instead of having The City is to force them to return to Deutschemark?

The need for reform can be summed up by this excerpt from an earlier BBC article (quoting the BBC here BTW because it is slightly harder for socialists to dismiss out of hand than other UK media);

The agency currently controlled by Donald "Trump" Cameron's cronies?

You know, I lived in UK for two years, and if I had a penny given to me every time I saw some kind of lie about continental Europe in UK press/TV, Euro and EU topics in particular, I'd be second fucking Rockefeller.

Operating a modern software company similar to the ones I work for and with is virtually impossible in France due to archaic notions that a career should consist of parking your butt at one employer for four decades and then retiring. The fact that a large fraction of the population consider project-based employment to be inherently inferior is merely sad, the economic tragedy comes from the blind and authoritarian attempts to impose their notions of acceptable employment patterns on the young and still-flexible individuals.

Sad?

Here's a piece of reality check for you - here, so called 'flexible employment' papers you speak of are reality. You know how it turned out to work? Not 'flexible employment and big monies for all!' corporatist propaganda speak off, but people working 3 months on them, only to be fired and re-hired for 3 more months. There are people working 12 years already on such "temporary" papers, unable to change their situation because it's cheaper for employer, having shit medical coverage due to low costs of such contracts, and no possibility of planning for tomorrow. And you know what? Reality doesn't want to bend to acknowledge how great such contracts are and you can forget about getting bank credit for car or flat of your own while on it, leading to whole new class of impoverished people instead of strong middle class. There's a reason they're called 'Trash Papers' here, and there is a big popular support for reforming them.

You know what would have happened if you mentioned 'impose their notions of acceptable employment patterns' to people actually working on them? You'd be punched in the face, that's how happy they are about their current situation. Some liberalization might be needed, but certainly not in 'corporate wet dream model', sorry. Thanks but no thanks.

The socialist solution is of course to have the government employ more people directly, and to increase subsidies to giant state-owned and state-favoured companies.

Name one EUROFREE country that doesn't subsidize it's companies. Let me guess, USA? UK?

Somehow, virtually every big company in the world started as either state company, subsidiary of state company, or absorbing state money in creative ways to get rich. What's your example of non-subsidized company? Samsung? Boeing? Motorola? IBM? Siemens? Who needs big national companies anyway?

Ah, right, UK demolished them all. Remind me, how that worked for them? Or demolishing of Avro worked for Canada?

As France is just behind Belgium in having the highest total tax rate in Europe

Nordics aren't the evil tax rate bogeyman anymore with their 50+% tax rates? Colour me very surprised.