It looks as if Macron has got just under 2/3 of the vote in the French presidential elections. The turnout wasn’t that high. There’s two ways of looking at this; either France has rejected the far Right by a large margin in favour of a centrist who isn’t part of the system - or it’s worrying that a candidate like Marine Le Pen can get a third of the votes.
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Either way they made a better choice than the US and UK did.
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Once again, Continental Europe does just enough to stave off complete disaster.
I’m now left with relief but not hope. France’s problems remain the same.the power to fix them remains outwith the control of the President, and the ECB is intent on acting firmly in the short term interests of Frankfurt rather than the long term interests of the continent as a whole.
I hope that we’re pressing stop on the FN, but I fear that this is another five year pause.
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The ECB presumably sees the short term interests of Frankfurt as essential to the long term future of Europe; that after all is a banker perspective (stability - as our own wonderful T May says - even if it creates stagnation.)
But the main thing is that France hopefully won’t see the resurgence of right wing thuggery that happened in the US and the UK after their elections.
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I think they made the better of an unappealing choice.
And while it might make things worse for the UK as a consequence, that help to us would be because of harm done to them as a result, so, I’m still glad that they managed to hold that line.
The thing to watch, I think, will be to see whether this dissipates, or further enflames, far-right support there as a result.
For comparison, UKIP got 10% of votes cast at the last UK general election, and that still translated to the slim majority in the following EU referendum.
(Not that it’s that simple, but we still voted ‘out’ after our own far-right got a lower proportion of votes.)
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Finally. Fuxit avoided, some hope restored.
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Having written a suicide note, the UK can hardly complain if the French choose not to follow them over the cliff. We (the UK) seem to need another dose of reality as we do when our political classes go batshit, and watching the EU rub the noses of our politicians in what they created will give me great Schadenfreude. I’m sorry for the 48% but on the whole the 52% will suffer more.
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Oh, I’m certainly not complaining about the French deciding not to go over the cliff - far from it!
As for what it’ll take for us to find reality, I don’t know - I wish I did!
(Perhaps things will improve a little when Rupert Mudoch finally goes - he’s certainly a significant part of the problem, and his offspring don’t seem to be the same level of capability as the old git.
Frank Herbert has an old adage about how you control the person by controlling the information they receive, and that certainly seems to be truth from here.)
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Garbage in, garbage out.
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True, and that’s without all the fun ways that our squishy meat-that-thinks can be fooled, deceived or otherwise led down the garden path. Any of us.
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Alternately: it appears that support for fascism in the French electorate is roughly similar to that in the USA, but the less-broken nature of French political structures has so far prevented the fascist minority from seizing power.
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