The Gaming Den

How much should I be freaking out about the Front National leading in a poll for the French presidency? As I understand it, the Center-Right and Center-Left parties are both very insecure in their traditional roles as winners of the first round, and it is thus very likely that LePen can get to the second round. The Center-Right candidate is a liar and a thief, who said the only thing that would make him resign as candidate for president would be coming under investigation for corruption, and now he's under investigation for corruption and hasn't dropped out because go fuck yourself. And of course, the Center-Left is having a bunch of centrist traitors jump ship to make a bullshit new party with blackjack and hookers.

But while either the Center-Left or Center-Right could easily miss the runoff by being a bunch of fractious chucklefucks, Girl Hitler is still prone to lose to whoever she faces in round two by 20 points, right?

-Username17

Trump was never supposed to win in America, so who knows? My wife travels to France regularly so we pay a little more attention to the politics there than most Americans.

France has a lot of commonality with the United States and a lot of the cultural conflict they're dealing with is SECULARISM versus RELIGION. While France is traditionally a Catholic country, they took steps to limit the power of the church to influence politics. It may not be possible to be 'French' without being secular. Of course, there has been a lot of Muslim immigration to France, and people are OFFENDED at the public display of religion. Wearing a headscarf or a male student refusing to shake a female teacher's hand bother people.

In France, the 'freedom of religion' is almost the opposite of here. It's not that the government can stop you from doing what you want to do in private, but there's a 'hard stop' for the practice of religion in public institutions.

Ultimately, this means a lot of people that don't really agree with the Front National still want more to be done to preserve the French identity.

France didn't control Algeria the way, say, the United States controls Puerto Rico. They institutionally made it a full part of the country (like Texas). The laws during that period were inconsistent, wherein natives didn't have full rights in Algeria, but they did have full rights in the rest of France.

The odds of her winning are significantly better than they should be, and for many of the reasons that Trump won. She is a celebrity (her father was a famous political figure) and while her party was anti-Jew during his day, Muslims are a much easier target now, being both a larger portion of the population than Jews ever were and having visually distinct religious practices.

Short answer: nobody can tell. Analysts and polls have been shown to be unreliable, so we just don't have anything but "general feeling" to guess what could happen.

Long answer:

To keep it simple, let's see the chances of the major candidates of getting to the second round:
- Mélenchon: Very unlikely. It wouldn't be difficult for him to reach 10%, but getting higher is very hard. For many people he's still "extreme left" and "extreme left is as bad as extreme right".

- Hamon: Unlikely. Due to his link to the Parti Socialiste, he doesn't have the same "extreme left" tag, but is platform is still very leftist. If it wasn't for Mélenchon, he could get the 20ish percent that would make it possible to reach the second round but as it stands he's losing voters to Mélenchon and isn't able to reach far enough to the centre, especially with Macron there.

An alliance of Mélenchon and Hamon could hope getting to the second round, but Mélenchon is convinced he can succeed by himself, and his echo chamber agrees with him. Besides, he's got some major disagreements with Hamon. Meanwhile, Hamon considers himself as the de facto left candidate, since he's from the Parti Socialiste and the Parti Socialiste is the historical main left party.

- Macron: He's got his chances. Centre-left people see him as centre-left and centre-right people see him as centre-right, so he might be able to gather enough support to get there. However, he's now the main target of the right, so he'll be under heavy fire. He also seems to have media support, which is something many voters hate in France.

- Fillon: Maybe. He got caught for paying his wife and children with public money. Pretty bad when you're the candidate of virtue, rigor, etc. This meant some right voters will flee to Marine, while others will go to Macron. It's still possible for him to get to the second round, because since people hated the left president, they turn to the right.

- Marine: Very likely. She's got a strong support and it's unlikely to change. No matter what hit her, the attacks will be seen as attacks of the establishment against the outsider.

What to expect for the second round?

Hamon vs Marine: Many right voters have moved from "All but the extreme right" to "All but the socialists", very difficult for Hamon to win this one, unless he's able to get some of the disenfranchised voters who'd be likely to prefer a left alternative to the hard right.

Macron vs Marine: Macron, hands down. He's not scary enough for right voters, and is still better than Marine for everyone else.

Fillon vs Marine: Fillon, because the left voters would rather have him than Marine.

A second round without Marine: Still possible, but not with the current situation.

We're still a few months away, so anything can still happen. Generally speaking the French presidential elections get decided in the last weeks.

Blade wrote:Short answer: nobody can tell. Analysts and polls have been shown to be unreliable, so we just don't have anything but "general feeling" to guess what could happen.

Has polling for French elections been shown to be inaccurate in the past, or is this a statement you're making based on 2016's election upsets?

In 2002, everyone was surprised when Jean-Marie Le Pen got in the second round of the presidential elections.

Since then, they've been pretty reliable, but everyone could guess which way the wind was blowing.

This time, for both primaries, the polls were wrong. So wrong that in each case the winner was the one they dismissed as "the third man". From what I've read, they say that a lot of people just don't know who to vote for and decide themselves at the last minute.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/nicolemiles/ho ... le-like-me

"straight up Golliwog"

They still sell those around here. The soft toy store in a nearby tourist town has a whole specialist golliwog section. I kid you not. Hell I even encountered a completely random display of them for sale at a service station on a major interstate highway just the other day.

The soft toy place is the worst. You round a corner of teddy bears and bam, a wall of those things out of nowhere. Staring at you. I'm pretty sure just seeing that made me 10% more racist.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast ... story.html

It is apparently now possible to buy slaves for $100 a head, in Libya.

hyzmarca wrote:It is apparently now possible to buy slaves for $100 a head, in Libya.

ISIS was selling them for $25 in 2014.

https://dolphin.town/about

eee? eee!

Well, looks like Turkey is going all in on authoritarianism. Though there are apparently lots of claims of voter fraud.

And the speech is... wow. Part of the 'it's unofficial but we totally won' speech is about getting rid of all outside influences, and obviously how democratic the country is.

In other news:
The impacts are getting uncomfortably close.
I was stuck in traffic because of a Bomb Threat no 5 kilometers from here today <.<

So, in two weeks France will - barring a much worse but also significantly less probable outcome - elect Macron as their president. The left has been thoroughly rebuked, which after Hollande's betrayal is not particularly surprisingly. Macron is simply a higher dosage of the same bitter poison Hollande was offering but without the window dressing, and I suspect the people of France will find it no more pleasant to swallow. But he could get lucky - the Great Recession is quite a ways back now, and even in economics time does supposably heal all wounds. It's possible he will stumble into undeserved validation and create a new, enduring brand for exploitative centrism. Or perhaps he will fail, and the only one standing with any credibility going into the next French presidential election will be Le Pen - after all, if people have given up on policy entirely and are just voting against spineless fuck-ups and traitors, then it's Le Pen's "turn" next. Democracies do not always survive such turns.

Well, whatever happens, we have taken yet another step away from reforming the EU under sane conditions. The Macron of today seems likely to throw its weight mostly behind Germany in the push for economic madness, and a nationalist France would not constitute "sane conditions."

Bank of England declares war on grammar nazis. No longer shall the tyranny of proper punctuation be tolerated!

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39745057

New leader of French far-right party quits over accusations of Holocaust denial.

Yay. Or not.
Makes no real difference if you replace one with another.

Well, when Marine pretended to take a softer approach and then stood down, that could have gone either way in either "losing a few crazy people who want full Fruckoff and nothing less" or "Gaining some credibility as some decide they like the Far Right ideas in general, just not that level of crazy".

But follow that with this and you basically have "FN are disorganised bell-ends* and their party room is utter chaos with actual monkeys leaping around the room and throwing actual shit at each other, not a word of hyperbole here." as the headline. It's hard to draw votes when you keep flipping leadership and making it look less and less like you know what you're doing. Whether that's because it's 100% true or because Murdoch spins it as such and the majority of your populace are too dumb to really be allowed to have opinions.

It is probably safe to breathe a sigh of relief that France is only getting another term or so of centrist assholes who will probably manage at best to not make things much worse. As opposed to electing New Hitler, and then forming the Grand Alliance of Cockbags with England.

*I don't know what the French term is for this. Anyone who speaks French, please provide this information.

Koumei wrote:*I don't know what the French term is for this. Anyone who speaks French, please provide this information.

Apparently, "noeud"

I'd say "Tête de noeud".

I'm not looking forward to 5 years of Macron, but it beats 5 years of FN. Let's just hope that it's not just postponing them. There's still the unknown of the legislatives elections, that will decide which majority Macron will have to work with.

To me, the EU seems to parallel the Articles of Incorporation that bound the United States together prior to the adoption of the Constitution in 1789. I don't know that the EU is workable because it allows members too much latitude in some areas. The United States is more comprehensively connected by the Federal Government, and we still have a lot of pressure about what should be legislated at the state versus the national level.

People have talked a lot about how the future is in a unified world government. I think people thought the EU would be a step in that direction. I'm curious to see if they can resolve some of these issues and find a way to cement these relationships into a 'single state'.

The problem with the EU is not that it allows members too much latitude. The problem with the EU is that the power it wields is already highly disproportionate to the level of democratic accountability to which it is subject - i.e. that it doesn't allow members enough latitude for what it is. It either needs to lose a bunch of power or it needs to be massively reformed. Now, as it turns out, you have a better chance of reforming the senate to weight for population than you do of reforming the EU. Both are fucking impossible, but the margins of control required to do the former are substantially smaller than required to do the latter, so the first of those impossible pipedreams is more likely than the second. Internal reform is not realistically on the table.

It is, however, possible for the EU to lose a bunch of political battles and walk away cut down to size. If Tsipras had won his game of chicken, the EU would have been forced into a much more passive and accomodating position in future conflicts and the EU would have been a better institution for it. Instead, the EU won and will be all the stronger and crueler for it going forward. So, doesn't look like that plan's working out either.

It is also possible to externally reform the EU. The euro isn't a unilateral construct of EU creation; it's a treaty that a bunch of countries got together to sign which bolted the euro onto the existing EU, and its powers could be reversed in the same way. The fact is that Theresa May isn't wrong to want to negotiate a new treaty to supercede the EU; she's just the wrong person in the wrong country with the wrong values. It should have been Tsipras in Greece.

But ultimately the only future for the EU which isn't a hellhole of rolling economic crises for at least some of its members is one in which it starts decisively losing its political battles or members start demanding new treaties. I am no longer even remotely amenable to the argument that we need only "weather the storm until sanity prevails." The French election - one of the few member states which tried to moderate Germany's madness in this crisis - is between a centrist and a nationalist. The storm is getting worse. We need leftwing euroscepticism, because it's the only possible mechanism left to derail this clusterfuck without entirely sacrificing our values.

Remember: Hollande was a traitorous shit-weasel, but ultimately his austerity program was crafted with the intentions of meeting deficit reduction targets set by the EU. The fall of the French left - and thereby the rise of Macron and plausibly even Le Pen - are in part the result of EU meddling in the French economy! If the left had found its balls and told the EU to suck them, there's a chance this could have been avoided. It is time to accept that being complicit in the starving of Greek children is, in fact, hurting us politically.

DSM wrote:The problem with the EU is that the power it wields is already highly disproportionate to the level of democratic accountability to which it is subject - i.e. that it doesn't allow members enough latitude for what it is.

The EU is actually very democratic in concept. It does whatever the MEPs tell it to do and those MEPs are in fact voted on. Even shit like the commission is composed of elected representatives from various regions.The EU as a whole has as much or more democratic legitimacy as any of the member states. The problem of course is that very few people in Europe actually vote on this shit and even fewer actually know what they are voting for.

But this is not a problem that gets any better when you chop things up. Look at the United Kingdom: the country actually fucking leaving the EU. Their current prime minister has no democratic legitimacy at all. Theresa May's programme never got put to voters at all, and when her faction was put forward to the British electorate it fucking lost. Twice.

The Tories run the government at this point, but remember that they ran a campaign based on bizaro world reality where despite having presided over what is literally the worst economic recovery in the history of the nation (which is coincidentally the oldest nation in the world), they were presented by the media as the economy party. What the shit!? And the faction that actually won that deeply dishnest campaign is the Cameron faction, which very notably Theresa May is not in. And Cameron resigned and Theresa May was appointed Prime Minister without a vote after the Boris Johnson faction managed to pull the wool over the electorate's eyes a second time. And Theresa May isn't in that faction either!

May and Juncker are both evil, but the reality is that to the limit of the fact that European Electorates are deeply uninvolved and horribly ill-informed, he actually did win an election and she fucking didn't. He has more democratic legitimacy than she does!

Yes, the EU is basically terrible. But that is because the European people actually keep voting for terrible things. Demanding democratic accountability isn't the answer. There is democratic accountability. The European people voted for horrible austerity measures by large measures. It's a failure of the system, but it's much deeper than having the will of the people denied. The people got their will. Their will is fucking terrible.

-Username17

I'm reminded of one of your previous posts Frank:

A thing to wrap your head around is that politics in the UK is insanely small scale and bullshit. The Mayor of London gets more votes than the Prime Minister. That's not even a joke. Sadiq Khan got 1,148,716 votes to become mayor of London, and Theresa May got 35,453 votes to become MP for Maidenhead. The current prime minister of the UK has never received more votes in an election than a second decimal point rounding error of the vote share of the Mayor of London. Fuck, the third place Green Party protest vote candidate for Mayor of London got 150,673, nearly five times the votes Theresa May got in her best performance. If the machinations of parliamentary intrigue sound super small time and like amateur hour bullshit, that is because they are in fact super small time amateur hour bullshit. A Parliamentary District is so small and bullshit that winning it is like successfully getting onto the school board of Santa Cruz, California (Sheila Coonerty's vote total of 29,345 votes would have been the winning total in a majority of parliament seats).

-Username17

Interesting note, the Vice-President of the European Commission got less than half the votes Theresa May got in your example there. Not even enough to be an elected politician if not for party affiliation.

And yeah, we did vote for Austerity here during the economic crisis. But then again, we didn't really have a choice either. It was either vote for a Trump equivalent or vote for austerity. I mean even the centre right party was claiming austerity would hurt our economy but we needed to do it anyway because of EU agreements.

But yeah the European Union is very democratic. That is why their track record with referenda is so good.