French elections 2017: completing the hat-trick?

No, I wouldn't vote that far right, and probably wouldn't vote right in a national election, but the mess that the PS is making of my quartier gives me considerable doubt about immigration and thus about how "the left" can be trusted to manage integration.

Are you referring to the Goutte d’or?

basically, L@ Ch@pe11e more particularly, but the Goutte d'Or is a five minute at most walk. we've been sacrificed by the city and by the state to have minimal police presence / disruption so that the migrants come here and not to the fancier parts of the city. meanwhile, the resulting lawlessness leads to more and more stabbings, drugs, street harassment of women (of my twelve year old daughter every day, for instance), not to mention filthy sidewalks and streets.

all these things lead me toward the right (plus I'm a practicing Catholic, one who favors gay rights (since the Church is obviously gay) but who is otherwise "pro-family". fuck the rich now and forever though.

What’s Wauquiez stance on gay rights? Can’t remember now how vocal he was during the marche pour tous saga (although I can pretty much imagine). Not that Wauquiez has any real conviction of his own.

I don't want to minimize your concerns, Euler, because I've witnessed them myself and, having grown up in Canada, I am consistently shocked by the street harassment my wife has had to endure over the years in France – it's frankly less of a safe country for women (and especially teenage girls) than Romania – but let's not forget that ex-ministre de l'Intérieur Nicolas Sarkozy aka Mr Kärcher abolished the police de proximité, among other things, which has only served to aggravate matters. The right has fuelled its (dog-whistling) obsession with security without ever doing anything about it. I daresay letting violence fester benefits them because they're perceived as the sole rational solution by default, just by virtue of their rhetoric.

That said, the PS and LRM haven't done shit about it either and I do agree with some on the right when they express disgust with the series of light sentences the perpetrator of the Strasbourg attacks received prior to his supposed 'pétage de plombs', for example – 'multirécidiviste' doesn't even begin to describe such a man. But what is to be done then? Increase the prison population, which is already bursting at the seams? Further empower the police, which is shameless in its racial profiling and a recruiting ground for the RN? Nobody has the balls to tackle the banlieues directly by openly discussing France's institutional racism – because the modèle républicain d'intégration is a fundamentally flawed system, to put it mildly – and so nothing changes. Despite the 'communautariste' boogeyman, there's no dialogue between communities, no willingness to improve anything, just the same finger-pointing over and over again. 'You need to allow yourself to be assimilated' is a mantra that can only end in violence, especially when it's aimed at the heirs of a colonized people, and doubly so when they're not even really allowed to assimilate in the first place. There are countless stories of 'good Arabs' and/or 'good Africans' who are still viewed as exogenous even though they're third generation French citizens and don't know the first thing about the so-called 'bled'. Ironically, that's the ideal, right? Saying farewell to your history forever and embracing the totally-neutral-and-totally-universal-French-family.

One last thing: I have been insulted by French people of Arab descent while in France simply because I'm white. 'Sale Français', they called me, which I found quite rich. My wife has been repeatedly called a 'sale pute française' by street harassers, so I'm very much aware that it goes both ways. But one way is considerably more violent than the other, because it has the option of opening up public discourse to a genuine confrontation with the nation's assimilationist model, and chooses not to for almost religious reasons, kind of like how so many Americans worship the US constitution. So as things currently stand, I'm going to continue pinning the blame on France's political caste: left, centre and right (and in that order). Sorry for the free-form rant, but it's something that drives me up the wall.

As for Wauquiez, I'm pretty sure he's a low-key homophobe. Like, he doesn't agree with the 'gay agenda', 'totally understands' where the Manif pour tous is coming from, and 'draws the line' at surrogacy or some such.

Hmm that’s another debate but does opposing surrogacy equal latent homophobia ?
Anyway, that’s a great take on the situation. I haven’t lived in France for the last 20 years (but I am French) but I never really hear local commentators try to untangle the clusterfuck of racial/community relations un France.
Re. Wauquiez - this guy will turn whichever way the wind blows. Because of Macron’s ascent, he’s now decided to go for the far-right demographic for whom RN is still too vulgar. A truly despicable scumbag

yeah I don’t know how to address race here. we’re immigrants who get assailed sometimes by français de souche for having American-accented French, and by arabes for being...non arabe. Here in my quartier one passes the buck : the mairies of the 18th and the 10th blame Hidalgo, who blames Macron, who says nothing. locals blame cops for being unwilling to bust heads, who blame judges for letting people off with light sentences. the prisons breed daech. Meanwhile it’s Obonoland and her left says we should welcome all the migrants here, who hustle contraband and fight in the streets. Meanwhile I work in the 5th and 6th and it’s gorgeous. And we live in the city, not the 93! rents are sky high here. I really don’t understand.

I'm a bit out of touch as I don't live in France anymore, but I did for many years and while I was there I was always struck by how incredibly corrosive the structurally high unemployment was and what a range of knock-on effects it has. Obviously it's toughest when you're trying to find work but also I knew so many people who were miserable in their public service jobs but who were too scared to try something different for fear of losing their job security. Apart from making everyone miserable that obviously also has the effect of making the whole system less flexible.

And of course there's the lethal combination of racism and unemployment which ironically makes integration even harder than it is in comparable countries despite France's ideological preference for integration over multiculturalism.

I have no idea what the solution is - the centre-right says there are too many financial and other burdens placed on employers wanting to employ people which may be right, but which doesn't necessarily mean you have to introduce more precarity into the system as in the US etc. - maybe there's something to be said for the Danish flexicurity model...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2021/06/08/ss-2021-6-8-14-5_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq0RglTN43wyGR-NQABDM7ErkcnEMN6jgniYeqwz6a86k.png?imwidth=480

u loves to see it!

Does anyone know how the 49.3 motion came to exist?

Awful stuff today. Sending my solidarity to french ilxors protesting.

The 18th Brumaire of Emmanuel Macron.