Sarko vs. Royal, Don't Read if You Don't Give A Phoque About French Presidential Politics

um ya, sarko is kinda very right wing (ok, maybe he wouldn't look too right wing in the us but for france he's very much on the right wing and closer to the far end than the centre). he's trying to kick out as many illegal immigrants as he can, wants to impose quotas on foreigners allowed in france etc.

as for fn, they had a terrible score in 2007, around 10-11% iirc. i mean i knew they were going to have a good score, but i think it came as somewhat of a surprise to most ppl that mlp managed to get this many votes. there's very low abstention (about 19-20%) which means that today 6 421 773 ppl voted for marine le pen, whereas in 2002, "only" 4 804 713 ppl voted for her father. so while they had a similar % in 02, the number of people who voted for them has dramatically increased. and this too at a time when sarkozy does everything he can to drain votes from fn to his party, whereas in 2002 chirac wasn't particularly trying to attract fn voters to his side

I think 10% in 2007 has to be put in perspective tho - 10% w/ a popular conservative running is comparable to 18% when the mainstream right-wing is unpopular. the nationalist issues aren't going anywhere so I can imagine marine being in exactly the same place 6 years from now.

i agree with you but only to an extent. once again with 6.4M ppl who voted for her, she got 1.6M more people to vote for her than the previous high in 2002! as for mlp, she is probably gonna be in the exact same place for the next presidential election. actually, according to some pundits, it's gonna be a lot worse. she has everything to gain from a hollande victory which is why she probably won't be giving out strong recommendations to vote for sarkozy. if sarkozy loses, those experts claim that ump will kind of implode and have to start anew. if and when this happens, mlp will continue to appear as a more and more credible option and she could rally quite a large number of right wing peeps around her. this would go well with her strategy these past few years of distancing herself from her father's racism/negationism etc. she might also change the name of her party to get rid of the negativity attached to the name front national. anyways, what i'm saying is that mlp and the fn are def here to stay, but man do i hate that.

wrt name-changing, the FN are talking about contesting the next parliamentary elections under the banner of "Rassemblement Bleu Marine" (geddit?):

Le Front national pourrait devenir le "Rassemblement Bleu Marine" en associant des souverainistes et des indépendants pour les élections législatives de juin, a déclaré mercredi Louis Aliot, vice-président du FN.

"Nous partons sous la bannière Rassemblement Bleu Marine", a dit le compagnon de Marine Le Pen sur Radio Classique et Public Sénat.

"C'est la marque pour les législatives. A l'intérieur il y aura les candidats du Front National, il y aura les candidats d'un micro parti qui vient de se créer et dont Monsieur Coûteaux est le président et il y aussi des indépendants dont Gilbert Collard est le chef de file", a-t-il ajouté.

http://www.lepoint.fr/fil-info-reuters/le-fn-envisage-un-rassemblement-bleu-marine-aux-legislatives-18-04-2012-1452679_240.php

there was an interesting bit in the recent jonathan meades documentary on france, where he showed how you can trace a direct line from the OAP - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_de_l%27arm%C3%A9e_secr%C3%A8te - and its concomitant right-wing "fatherland" type organisations to marine le pen

meades contended that the far right in france is forever impotent and its impotency is paradoxically the source of its continued attraction: the french right wing (like many right wings) constantly feels under assault, underappreciated, on the verge of extinction. he also contended that in france the far right never really changes, that it has nursed the same grievances and concerns for more than a century

(sorry i mean OAS, obv)

In 1972, Le Pen founded the Front National (FN) party, along with former OAS member Jacques Bompard, former Collaborationist Roland Gaucher and others nostalgics of Vichy France, neo-Nazi pagans, Traditionalist Catholics, and others.[4]

i agree with you but only to an extent. once again with 6.4M ppl who voted for her, she got 1.6M more people to vote for her than the previous high in 2002! as for mlp, she is probably gonna be in the exact same place for the next presidential election. actually, according to some pundits, it's gonna be a lot worse. she has everything to gain from a hollande victory which is why she probably won't be giving out strong recommendations to vote for sarkozy. if sarkozy loses, those experts claim that ump will kind of implode and have to start anew. if and when this happens, mlp will continue to appear as a more and more credible option and she could rally quite a large number of right wing peeps around her. this would go well with her strategy these past few years of distancing herself from her father's racism/negationism etc. she might also change the name of her party to get rid of the negativity attached to the name front national. anyways, what i'm saying is that mlp and the fn are def here to stay, but man do i hate that.

but isn't the flipside of this scenario a fairly empowered left? you can sorta imagine 2017 being 2002 w/ hollande instead of chirac.

Tracer, you can also trace them back to Royalists, Petainists, and anti-Dreyfussards.

What scares me about Marine is the fact that as blonde, middle aged woman w/o the paratrooper connections of her father, she may appear less threatening. Sovereignty fetishists, anti-Schnegenists, anti-Euro partisans; this sounds like the UK to me but it has a certain resonance w/French nationalists and there is some legitimate fear that the FN may be speaking to white working class ppl better than the Socialists, which is both depressing and frightening.

i see her as a nick griffin type who's using rhetorical tricks to make her out-and-out racism sound reasonable so that people don't hate themselves for agreeing with her

what I found interesting was how relatively young her voters seemed to be

Yeah, she's getting a lot of under-25 votes. Wtf? Sarko won the women's vote?!

maybe due to mélenchon?

oh it's more a demographics thing:

http://www.slate.fr/france/53951/presidentielle-vote-femmes

Cela peut s’expliquer notamment par un vote plus conservateur des femmes. «La situation démographique fait que les femmes âgées sont bien plus nombreuses que les hommes de la même génération», remarque les Nouvelles News. Selon l'Insee, elles représentent 58% des plus de 65 ans.

man french voting demographics so weird

le pen won a quarter of the 25-49 y/o women...which means like what, 35% of white women?

i wonder what a number like that means w/r/t french state/mainstream feminism, the burqa ban, and so on.

Bayrou supporting Hollande

it's over

Man, I would honestly vote 'blanc'. The trouble France is in and both of these guys are smoking crack.

he's pretty blah but I'm a sucker for class warfare and I think there's a decent chance he'll end up being a positive force as far as the eurozone crisis goes

Hollande seems like a ~cool dude~ but I don't know French so I could be rong.

Hollande has kind of surfed on an anti-Sarko platform all along and I think most people would be very hard pressed to tell you what his main ideas are. Not that he doesn't have any, its just that he's spent a lot of time attacking Sarkozy on his choices, results etc and far less talking about what he plans to do (and I meantalking about it in detail, not just in broad strokes). I'm not really a fan of him but will probably vote for him, not because I agree 100% with everything he says (but then again, who ever is 100% aligned with the candidate they vote for) but because i've come to truly despise sarkozy. I watched the debate with some people yesterday and Sarko showed off a lot of the things I dislike about him: changing his opponent's words so as to make it sound like his opponent is a fool, asserting with total confidence numbers that are 100% false all the while calling out every stat Hollande came up with as being false and saying that observers would show who was right (knowing full well that most people would mainly remember him disagreeing vehemently and never check back the next day to see if he was right or not) etc.

Hollande did manage to come up with some good stuff of his too, especially at one point when they were talking about letting legal immigrants vote in municipal elections. Sarkozy claimed that he couldnt agree with this because those legal immigrants were Muslims and they would vote for muslim leaders who'd go against the country's laicité, to which Hollande replied that it was very telling that he identified all legal immigrants as being muslims AND that there were a lot of French muslims who voted in elections without trying to change laws to go along with their religion.

On the whole though, the debate between those two was kinda pointless, the both of them attacking each other and what they had said or done or not said or not done, or on whatever people from their respective parties had said about the other party etc. Good thing Sarko didn't get his way and there weren't three debates because that would have been incredibly annoying to listen to them arguing like children for the most part.

Also iatee, i'd have said it's over from the day following the first round results. Ever since then all the polls show Hollande winning. Every redistribution of the 1st round votes between the candidates, with the smallest possible going to Hollande still had him winning. Its only in the past couple of days that his lead has shrunk a a tiny bit, potentially because people kept hearing that Hollande was sure to win which made some change their vote.

If I were Hollande, I would be focusing all my energy hating on Sarko too. That has to be the easiest and best way to win votes, no?

Anyway, Hollande is going to smash it. Considering that Sarko is so desperate in that he's reduced to trying to win over Le Pen's supporters with hilariously pathetic soundbites.

Also iatee, i'd have said it's over from the day following the first round results. Ever since then all the polls show Hollande winning. Every redistribution of the 1st round votes between the candidates, with the smallest possible going to Hollande still had him winning. Its only in the past couple of days that his lead has shrunk a a tiny bit, potentially because people kept hearing that Hollande was sure to win which made some change their vote.

yeah it's almost bizarre how consistent the polls have been, you don't really see that in american politics. I think there is less risk for some shocking result due to voter turnout disparities because almost everyone votes.

anyway rip sarko your wife was pretty and I kinda dug the grand paris project

changing his opponent's words so as to make it sound like his opponent is a fool,

I loved when Sarko chastised the Socialists for being behind DSK and Hollande said that they hadn't appointed him to the IMF.

I have always been committed to European integration and it's sad that it's become the bugbear of French politics. There was nary a real reformer among the candidates except perhaps the tepid Bayrou and the numbers behind Le Pen and Melanchon are proof of a certain tradition of delusion among French voters.

I don't think it's particular to france tho...that element exists throughout europe

Even Italy which has a tendency to be as ridiculous as possible has the Monti govmt.

the problem with european integration is also that it has become a scapegoat for most politicians. if something doesn't seem to be working well, there's a 90% chance they'll lay the blame on european legislation. and when most of the things you hear about europe are about how its ruinng stuff, well then you're far less likely to actively root for it. as for bayrou i feel kind of bad for the guy. he's seriously probably the only candidate who offered reasoned, well-thought through solutions to tackle the economic crisis, yet no one really cares about him.

tbh i feel like a lot about politics in france is being influenced by shows like les guignols de l'info. i'd be curious to know if the flamby nickname that stuck to hollande came from that show for example (flamby is a flan-like dessert). that show also ruined bayrou's credibility a long time ago with the bus du colza and other stuff. i'd really love to read an informed study on that topic.

hollande beats sarkozy, as expected. however he does so without handing sarkozy the beating that was talked about. 51.7% of the votes for him.

over 70% turnout is really impressive in the context of...everywhere else in western europe. is this par for the course in france?

The first round was over 80%, i think. Lower than 2007, though.

i'd be curious to know if the flamby nickname that stuck to hollande came from that show for example (flamby is a flan-like dessert)

flamby en flambé!

(annoyingly i don't think the expression "on fire" translates the same in french, and i have a suspicion "en flambé" isn't accurate anyway)

the turnout is not particularly exceptional for a presidential election, as its been over 70% most of the time. for other elections i'm pretty sure the turnout is just as bad as it is elsewhere

xpost : not sure what you're trying to say with en flambé there so i'm gonna say you're right to be suspicious there

i think he's trying to say that hollande is "on fire" i.e. "doing great"

that's what i thought but felt like maybe he was talking about a new dessert, flamby flambé

i'd be curious to know if the flamby nickname that stuck to hollande came from that show for example

It looks like it came from Jack Lang, though Montebourg has used it too.

i read somewhere that bruno gaccio (the guignols de l'info guy) used that name as a general comment on the PS but that he now regretted having made this a huge thing.