Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Hollande

And…France Moves Hard Right

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On November 21, 2016

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Here we go again:

Fillon, who has said he will cut public sector jobs and rein

Francois Fillon

Francois Fillon

in government spending, won 44 percent of votes in Sunday’s first-round of voting for the center-right’s nomination. He faces a second-round vote against another former prime minister, Alain Juppe, who trailed him by 15 percentage points.

Polls had him in third place. He came in first. Maybe pollsters should stop polling until they figure out how they keep getting it wrong. Customers might wish to demand refunds.

Fillon thinks Thatcher is the best thing ever and wants to cut 500,000 government jobs.

A neoliberal’s neoliberal, in other words, who is also socially conservative.

Assuming he wins the nomination, he will likely wind up head-to-head against the neo-fascist LaPen.

Here’s how that works:

  • If Fillon wins, his policies will hurt the French so much that LaPen will likely win the next election.
  • If LaPen wins, well, LaPen wins.
  • The left is not a factor because Hollande has betrayed everything they stand for and alienated the left-wing base completely.

Frankly, France should leave the Euro, at the very least, and quite possibly the EU. They are not winning from it any more. Because only LaPen will say that, and because the left continues to insist on irrelevance as they relate to real problems, LaPen is the future, whether Fillon wins this time or not.

This is the twilight of neoliberalism. As I have said for many years, what follows will be an age of war and revolution. This is where neoliberal policies inevitably lead, and we are now on the bleeding edge of that new era.

There will be a chance to do the correct, kind things starting in four to eight years, when the weight of demographics favors young people enough. In the meantime, the old will simply have to age out of politics.

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Hollande Continues to Prove that a Fake Left-Winger Is Worse than Most Right-Wingers

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On May 11, 2016

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The majority of French citizens are opposed to the relaxation of labour standards that Hollande wants to push through, and there have been massive demonstrations against it. So what does Hollande’s government do?

France’s government announced Tuesday that it would empower Prime Minister Manuel Valls to bypass parliament and push through controversial labour reforms by decree despite widespread public demonstrations against the bill.

And the French people had a party at the Bastille when Hollande won! Hollande is a far more loathsome individual than, say, British PM David Cameron. Cameron ran as a right-wing pig-fucker who intended to destroy the social state.

There are other options than neoliberalism, but people like Hollande are too intellectually cramped and too much products of “there is no alternative” to even know what they are, let alone consider them.

The people who run France are a small and inbred group. They make Britain’s elites look inclusive. In 80s, the foreign aid community’s joke about the French system was that it produced the best second-raters in the world.

Hollande doesn’t even rate as a “second-rater.” He’s incompetent as a neoliberal technocrat, unable to game the system.

I am tired of very intelligent, highly-educated morons running the world.

I suggest the French go riot at the Elysee palace, and by riot, I don’t mean demonstrate outside.

Demonstrate inside. Perhaps explain, personally, to Hollande, a soft-handed courtesan born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who has never soiled his hands with hard labor, why his ideas are bad ideas.

This sort of bullshit will continue until it is stopped by ordinary people making a ruckus in the halls of power.

And they aren’t going to be allowed in because they ask nicely.

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The Bitter Harvest of Failure: France’s Far Right Takes the Lead in Regional Elections

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On December 6, 2015

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Thirty percent to 29 percent for the Republican/UDI coalition, with the socialists (who aren’t actually socialists), coming in at 22 percent.

Key grafs:

Many political analysts stressed the impact of the Paris terror attacks could have on voters’ opinions. They contributed to raise the popularity of the three main parties, but the far right has also especially benefitted.

Another factor was the fact that the social democrat government of Francois Hollande has been losing more and more support among the population for failing to solve the issue of high unemployment rates while implementing measures of economic austerity (i.e. restrictions on public spendings). (sic)

There is nothing worse for the left than “center left” parties who follow right wing policies like austerity.

As I, and others, have warned repeatedly, if other groups cannot solve the very real problems exaggerated by austerity, voters will eventually hand power over to real radicals with a mandate to do “whatever it takes,” and I do mean “whatever.”

The radicals may be to the left or the right, but every time someone like Hollande takes power as “left” and then wimps out on actually fixing things, it discredits the left.

The fascist right will continue to rise as the center, right, and center-left all hue to neo-liberal orthodoxy, which got us into this mess and cannot get us out of it.

And so, the men and women on horseback are coming. In America we have Trump, in France they have LePen, and there will be many others.

A government which continually fails the people will be replaced, one way or another.

We live in a pre-revolutionary and pre-war world and the risks are ratcheting up every year. It is this that those of us who fought the ideological wars of the early 2000s were trying to avoid. We wanted changes made that would not require vast war and revolution, because we knew, and still know, the river of blood from which such change is born.

We had our chance. We failed, as those who came before us failed. Aye, and those before them.

And so the world will convulse in blood and terror. The old regimes are not yet dead, but they are bleeding out, and as they do so, they continue to loot and fornicate, pretending all is well enough.

And why not? Those who made this world are the richest rich the world has ever known. To them, this is the best of times.

They will reap as they have sown, but those who failed to stop them, or rather, their children, will reap an even more bitter harvest.

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