The Elections in France, 2017

[broncofan]

So free trade alone makes a healthy economy does it?

That whole part of my post about the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions? I take it you did not understand that. Who ever said that free trade alone is sufficient to make an economy strong? But the fact that it ALONE is not sufficient to make an economy strong is not an argument in favor of tariffs and other trade barriers.

Again an analogy. If eating healthy foods ALONE is not sufficient to prevent heart disease would that mean someone should not eat healthy foods?

[holzz]

well it's a fact France's economy is shit and has been for years. so i understand why Le Pen wants to sort it our and has proposed the measures she has. I'm just saying maybe some protectionism would help her and her country if she becomes President, that's all.

[filghy2]

GDP per person in France is actually pretty close to the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...PP)_per_capita

It is true that France has a much high unemployment rate, but that can hardly be due to free trade given EU members all have the same tariff rates (that's what a single market means).

It's fitting that you seem to be a Trump fan, given you have very similar personality traits - ie inability to let anything go or to concede any error, unwillingness or inability to learn anything, lack of any coherent logic.

[flabbybody]

doesn't sound like Tuesday's 4 hour debate changed too many minds. A Macron-Le Pen runoff in May seems likely.
The real question: Who cares ?

[filghy2]

The real question: Who cares ?

Why do you say that? Did you have the same view about the US election?

[holzz]

GDP per person in France is actually pretty close to the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...PP)_per_capita

It is true that France has a much high unemployment rate, but that can hardly be due to free trade given EU members all have the same tariff rates (that's what a single market means).

It's fitting that you seem to be a Trump fan, given you have very similar personality traits - ie inability to let anything go or to concede any error, unwillingness or inability to learn anything, lack of any coherent logic.

When people say they know, but in reality they don't, I don't usually "concede" any errors. Nor do I "learn" things from people who cite nonsense, and then pretend it's reality. Just as an overview of this conversation, you said that free trade is necessary for a healthy economy. It may be favoured per current economic thinking, but it's not necessary nor required. No economist says that free trade alone is the path to economic strength, and France's issues alone won't be solved by more of it.

So per my original point, I see little "extreme" or "racist" with her policies. She wants to control immigration, make it harder to be a French citizen, and take measures to strengthen the economy.

[Stavros]

Marine Le Pen like most Presidential candidates in France for the last 200 years is 'dirigiste' and committed to maintaining the leading role of the State in France's economy and society. Taking France out of the European Union, if it came to that, would not alter the regulations the French state imposes on business to protect jobs, rights at work and pensions; it would not change the working week, it would not change the commitment to health or education, or the percentage the State owns in transport, arms manufacture, telecommunications and other leading industries. Ironically or not, Emmanuel Macron, more likely to win the Presidency than Le Pen, is committed to a degree of deregulation to 'free up' the French economy and make it more open and flexible to European and global markets but is thereby more likely to spend most of his Presidency in a war with Labour unions that he is destined to lose. The French never embraced the Conservative 'free market' illusions of Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl, and voters anyway will mostly vote Macron because they oppose Le Pen. But challenge their 'entitlements' and you need much more popular support to defeat the unions than exists in France, whereas Thatcher and Reagan both succeeded in smashing the unions in their countries.

Marine Le Pen is credited with transforming the Front National, but she could have left this divided union of ex-Poujadistes, crude nationalists, Jew-hating fascists, Catholic/pro-Catholic/anti-Islamic extremists, and formed her own party, as French politicians have been doing for over a century. In the end, her decrepit Jew-hating daddy is still Honorary President of the Front National, Le Pen has received funding from Russian banks close to Putin (as are all Russian banks!) and praised Putin as a 'Christian leader' in Europe even though most of her supporters in the North and the so-called 'working class' are not religious (as opposed to the FN voters in the South who are mostly Catholic). As she said in Lyon launching her campaign "The divide is no longer between the left and right but between patriots and globalists!" -and she sees Putin as a Russian patriot.

She shares the same Brexit fantasy we have seen in the UK -France outside the EU will be free to impose its own laws on immigration, free to trade with the rest of the world, free to control its own currency. One wonders if Marine Le Pen knows anything about the French economy given the chronic pattern of growth and stagnation (immobilisme as it is known in France) evident since industrialization began in the 1830s. Currently stagnant, France remains one of the most prosperous economies in the world, its productivity rates are higher than the UK, it has more savings per head than the UK, but at least once a decade turns in on itself to ask what it means to be French, as a result of which the conclusion is usually confusing.

Crucially, the reputation of France with a Le Pen victory would be damaged, confidence would be shaken, internally and only raised externally in those powers committed to getting rid of representative democracy. The economic consequences in the short-to-medium term of leaving the EU in general and the Euro in particular would be disruptive to a degree not seen since the French economy was all but destroyed in the First and Second World Wars. France has always found a way out of such crises, but does it need this horrible liar to lead it into an abyss of mass unemployment and stagnation before it can stand on its two feet again?

As usual the Financial Times has a fair set of stats on the French economy, though they should be read in the context of the period since 1830.
http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2016/04/2...oes-in-charts/

[Stavros]

Further to my post above, the weekend has seen 'a surge of support' in the polls for the left-wing candidate Jean-LucMélenchon now ranked third most popular candidate after Macron and Le Pen.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...sidential-race

It is still hard to call at the moment, because one assumes that Mélenchon will take votes from the Socialists who appear destined for their worst election year since the 1960s, but probably not eat into Le Pen's loyal base. All this could mean is that the margin of victory for Macron over Fillon and Mélenchon is a narrow one, but that he will still be the preferred candidate in the run off with Le Pen that he is expected to win.

But of greater interest is the prospect of the National Assembly elections in June producing an outcome that will give the Assembly a different complexion from the one elected in 2012, not least because of the emergence of new parties on the 'centre-right', the predicted melt-down of the Socialist Party seats (currently 22) and the unknown factors surrounding both Le Pen's Front National and Macron's party En Marche! Macron is in a weak position because while his Presidency can motor on as a media exercise, he has no national party organisation of any depth to transform those votes into the seats he needs in the Assembly if he is to become President and have a loyal base in Parliament. As for Le Pen, the Front National has just 2 seats in the Assembly, and while the party is expected to do better in the elections in June it could still fail to reach double figures. If the outcome of the elections is uncertain now, it may not be that much clearer in June.

[filghy2]

Welcome back Stavros. Those pointless 'debates' with holzz were getting tiresome.

A key question your last post raises is what capacity Le Pen would have to implement her agenda if she does not have a majority in the National Assembly. I don't know much about the French political system, but I assume that withdrawing from the EU and the euro can't be done by executive fiat and would require legislation.

[Stavros]

Welcome back Stavros. Those pointless 'debates' with holzz were getting tiresome.

A key question your last post raises is what capacity Le Pen would have to implement her agenda if she does not have a majority in the National Assembly. I don't know much about the French political system, but I assume that withdrawing from the EU and the euro can't be done by executive fiat and would require legislation.

Thanks, I have been taking time out following an operation, various outpatient clinics to follow. All very tedious but part of the process of growing old!

In answer to you query, the mechanism in France for invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, as the UK has done (last month), is different because membership of the EU is included in the Constitution, so leaving the EU would require a Constitutional amendment. In France, Article 89 of the Constitution gives the Parliament -the combined Senate and National Assembly- the power to approve the change. Depending on the clause, the President can then offer the Constitutional change to the general public in a referendum -Le Pen's favoured course- or convene a special 'National Congress' in which the Senate and the National Assembly meet in a joint session and vote on the change, but have to pass the measure with a three-fifths majority.

Le Pen's problem could be that even if she won the Presidency, her party may not have enough Assembly members, or supporters from other parties, to approve the change. It is however, possible that in a political earthquake Le Pen could win both the Presidency and the National Assembly, but could still lose the referendum, should it happen, as most French voters when asked support the EU, though polling may have changed since the onset of Brexit.

One other course would be to use Article 11 of the Constitution whereby the Prime Minister asks the President to submit a Referendum bill to the Assembly. Georges Pompidou did this on behalf of Charles de Gaulle in 1962 when de Gaulle wanted to change the way Presidents are elected. De Gaulle had been elected through an Electoral College in Parliament in 1958, but in 1962, with his party in majority in the Assembly, he submitted a referendum bill that was approved by the Assembly, held and supported by French voters, and led to Presidents being elected by direct suffrage in a two round process of voting.

Again, the change in 1962 was possible because de Gaulle's party was in majority, it is doubtful if Le Pen will have that. In earthquake terms, she needs to go from 2 seats to at least 22, and while this is not impossible, it doesn't seem likely.

The problem at the moment is that there are undecided voters, and voters who may abstain. It is not clear if the recent surge of support for Melenchon will take votes away from the National Front as well as the Socialists, though most agree the Socialists are doomed. If anything, this means the first round could produce the winning candidate by a margin of less than 5%. A further paradox is that if voters want change, the two candidates of change are Macron and Le Pen, and while Macron, stealing policies from Fillon is pledged to reform French labour, Le Pen is more interested in immigration reform and the EU, and one should not underestimate the prospect that if French workers think their jobs are more threatened by Macron then Le Pen, that would be a reason for voting FN. 'Marine' has invested in a make-over in the last two or three years which downplays the Front National (removing the name of the party from posters, for example) and its history, this is very much a personal campaign.

I don't know if it will hurt her campaign, but once again the ghost of Adolf Hitler rose up to say Hi to everyone. Not long after she appealed to French Jews for support, she made the stupid claim that French officials collaborating with the occupying Nazis had not been involved in one of the most notorious incidents of the occupation, the round-up of 13,000 Jews (most of them immigrants rather than French-born) who were taken to a cycling velodrome in the south-west of Paris (known as the 'Vel d'Hiv) from whence they were transported.
“I think France isn’t responsible for the Vel d’Hiv, Marine Le Pen said, adding, “I think that, in general, if there are people responsible, it is those who were in power at the time. It is not France". The evidence of French collusion, however, is so clear one wonders why she made the statement at all, other than to note her following remarks -“We have taught our children that they had every reason to criticise France, to see only the darkest historical episodes perhaps. I want them to be proud of being French once more.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017...time-round-up/

It might help people in public life to think twice before they invoke the ghost of Hitler and the Nazis, it never seems to work well for them, because they can't get simple verifiable facts straight, and appear to be deluded, or to have a dark agenda of their own.