Mélanchon is anti liberal EU and certainly not pro Putin. And he didn’t told his supporter to abstain or vote blank, he only said to not vote LePen.
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Possibly a local maximum.
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He gives me the vibe of being more flexible than that, not much of an ideologue. I think much will depend on the composition of the Parliament.
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If I may risk a tangent, this is an infuriating debate that’s been at play in France for several decades, across all parties, even though there’s no such thing as a legally defined “religious item”.
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New username, new logo, lost my old credentials…
When I was a kid I was taught about WWII, I lived in a small town in the countryside, and every year between the age 6 and 10 we visited the nearby hill where partisans were killed by the Fascist troops. There’s still a wall with the machine gun holes. The major was a partisan by the way and was him that was coming to the school to teach us tabout the lastd days of the war as a disbanded member of the Cavlary Division
They told about the Italian CLN. One of the parties was the Italian Liberal Party, that was, unlike the name could suggest to US citizens, was a conservative party.
So in Europe, it’s possible and normal that a conservative party is against neofascists, even id the party is neoliberist.
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There even were royalists in the French Resistance.
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At no point did I mention the citizenship of the terrorist attackers in France. What I actually said was: that they have North African origins i.e. come from families with immigrant background. More specifically immigrant background from ex-colonies! This was highly relevant in the French election because it gave fuel to LePen’s racist / xenophobic argument.
@Mindysan33 another thought came to me: Austria, Holland and France invest considerably more into educating and training young people than the US and UK (unless you consider paying for your kids to go to private school is considered and educational investment).
I wonder whether the recent election outcomes in Europe might be correlated (or even casually linked) with investment in education and training. Just a thought.
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So no colanders then?
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It didn’t look like they were far behind to me. With preferential voting, a different candidate could have won with second and third preferences…
If you would have voted against it, you would have voted against it. It’s an indication that you don’t consider either to be viable.
Let’s keep some things clear. A guy like Macron should be exactly the kind of creep a working class person like myself (and most everyone around here) should fear and fight against, in normal circumstances. The only reason why we even consider this to be some sort of “victory” is because he has been running against a truly nasty and vial opponent. And this is the choice we have been dished out over and over, libertarian or fascist…
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I’m in France at the moment, and the people who abstained (either through not voting or casting a blank ballot) were most certainly not supporting Le Pen. My take is that they’re just less conditioned to choosing the lesser evil than we are in America and they don’t want to be forced to compromise. And they’re not de facto supporting her either, since no one I talked to thinks Le Pen had a chance, but they’re worried about her feasibility in the next election so are making it clear that there’s a massive chunk of votes available to a better candidate. And furthermore they wanted to make it clear that Macron didn’t have a mandate.
And it’s interesting to hear them describe why they’re don’t like Macron. We in America think Bernie is to the left, but compared to the first choice of the abstainers I’ve talked to (Benoit) Bernie is a centrist. Further reading for anyone curious about Banoit:
But anyway, you can question the wisdom of abstaining, but saying “they were supporting Le Pen and they knew it” is over the top silly.
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My sweetheart and I feel ashamed for not voting yesterday. We were invited to a marriage this weekend, and couldn’t make it to our voting places, too far away from our current residence and from the wedding.
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I dunno. I mean, yesterday, yes, that was the score.
But if you expand the scope even slightly, either geographically or temporally, Stupid has a whole bunch of wins, and tons of points on the board,
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It’s not really a tangent, since political discussions of the laicite are particularly ominous (and not so concerned with secularism) when coming from a far-right ultra-nationalist party like the FN. This is one example of why they have to be trounced before voters start assessing the differences on any issue between the other parties – even if they’re all wrongheaded on it to one degree or another.
The problem is that debate has been settled for good in 1905 by Aristide Briand himself, yet every political party in France behaves like there is something up to debate, not just the far-right.
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Glad to know that pointing out sexist attacks in plain language is now verboten! Glad to know how much I’m valued here. /s
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Women exist. We’re discriminated against. It’s real. It’s not in our heads. If I said that race had no weight in the world, I would JUSTIFIABLE be shouted down, because of course it does. It’s part of the unspoken structures that shape the world we live in. Gender is the same, like it or not.
There were plenty of reasons NOT to vote for Clinton too. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a shit ton of misogyny aimed at her.
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Okay. I’m not sure why you’re addressing me since you’re clearly not interested in anything I have to say.
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Exactly. Just look at the images of how Macron choose to celebrate. The diversity of his team! E.g. the head of his Social Media team is of Moroccan origin, and the music they chose for the party. From the little I heard online it sounded like Afrobeats to me!
Imagine what the LePen version of the evening would have sounded and looked like.
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