You know what happens when fascism wins. FFS, EVERYONE in Europe MUST know.
If you consider neo-fascism the lesser evil, we have no common ground to discuss.
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Oh no, I don’t. The problem had to be solved before it got to LePen/Macron, just like it had to be solved before it reached Hillary/Trump.
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But it wasn’t in ether case, so at that point you suck it up and vote against the fascist, rather than stay home and pout.
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Perhaps, it was not the best analogy. I was thinking the presidential candidate Romney + Romneycare.
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I listened to/read some interviews with Edouard Louis, whose semiautobiographical novel The End of Eddy was published recently. He recounts growing up gay and “effeminate” in a poor family in rural France–in a town where domestic electricity wasn’t put in until the 60s, the major factory employer closed down 20 years ago, and FN has 50-70 percent of the vote. Louis says this is because the Paris-centered, centrist government just doesn’t care about them (parallels with how some people view the Democrats?):
“Today I don’t want to insult Marine Le Pen, I want to attack Manuel Valls [former prime minister] and François Hollande for putting my father in this situation. I accuse them directly. When I see my father voting for Le Pen, I am revolted by the current government and its failings. Of course, I’m revolted by the right, but I never expected the right to do anything for the lower classes, but the left… the left has stopped speaking about poverty, misery and exclusion. People talk about Le Pen winning the presidential [race], but the FN has been winning for the last 20 years because the left that should be representing people like my mother has abandoned them.
The book has been making rounds in the Anglophone book world, probably because it seems like a mirror of what’s happening in US/UK.
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NPR talked to a bunch of Le Pen voters; nearly every one said they were voting for her because “France should be France”, because there were “too many immigrants”, etc. It sounded like they weren’t voting for her as much as they were voting for Frexit.
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But Romneycare was the GOP solution to healthcare problems, precisely because it empowered corporations to deal with the problem, rather than relying on government to hash it out. Obama’s embracing the model shows just how much the democrats are willing to lean right.
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Her father would have fared even worse, Marine at least made an attempt to distance herself from the extremes of the FN, her father was an unabashed holocaust denier. Interestingly her daughter seems more in the mold of her father, will be interesting to see how that one turns out. The one time her father did manage to get into the second round he got about half the votes she just got (Chiraq took 82%). But while part of the reason she did well this time was that she portrayed a more mainstream face to the far-right, avoiding overtly bigoted rhetoric and focusing more on conspiracy-based anti-globalisation nationalism a la Trump, another part of it was the low turnout (the lowest since '69), it seems a large part of the far-left in particular didn’t bother to vote, who view Macron as too far to the right economically (and probably a smaller part of the traditional conservative right, who view him as too liberal).
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Got a time machine?
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Well, we know he DID worse in the 1990s. Times have changed, yeah?
I also question her “tolerance” of French Jews, given that she declared that they’d have to “choose” their citizenship. It’s true in public, she rejected her father’s undeniable antisemitism, but would she have if the question wasn’t now the Muslim question?
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And got demonized by both sides for doing so. Lose-lose rather than win-win. Our gov’t is a shambles.
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This is the era of shameless public bigotry. They’ve always been around, but they’re definitely having a moment.
Berlin fell 72 years ago. Generations now of voting age who only see a curious lack of older buildings in certain cities of Europe, without the visceral memory of cleaning up rubble, or who never give a thought to the billions of minor aftereffects, like why German business suits tended to be fused rather than stitched for decades after.
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I think that shows just how extreme the right has become. Enough Democrats celebrated and supported it that it got through. I have to say, the mainstream of one party is more extreme right now.
True.
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We have all got to hope that this time, moderate politics will do the right thing in power and actually do something about the issues that make large number of people vote for Fascists.
If Macron just does the same old rich-get-richer, austerity happy, privatisation quasi corrupt shittycrap that’s been going for like 40 years or so, then the FN and/or other skinhead Nazi boot boys will sweep in next time round.
I am not hopeful. Not hopeful at all. And I think Europe is going to eat itself.
Sigh.
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Someone on Beitbat claimed that France was going collaborationist again. I couldn’t be arsed to point out that, no, that would be the neo-fascists.
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Well, we can still pretend that they’re all protest votes against neoliberalism, something we can’t do anymore with Trump votes, now that the results of various polls have come in…
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That’s another factor here… apparently their far-left candidate – eliminated in the first round of voting – was very much a Bernie sort of figure, causing something like 23% of the populace (mostly younger voters) to abstain, which is unheard of in France.
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Well yes, that and Macron being very much a Hillary/Barack figure.
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