> You seem to suggest Manuel Valls has also been prime minister under Macron presidency (after having been under Hollande's), which he hasn't.
Thanks for correction. I thought he was prime minister of Macron, but that was in fact Edouard Philippe. I must have confused with Jean-Yves le Drian, previously Ministry of Defense (under Hollande) then Foreign Affairs (under Macron).
> and both wings being plagued with moral/financial scandals
I don't agree with all of their politics, but when was the last time you heard the NPA or LO (left-wing parties) had a financial/moral scandal? I've never heard of any.
> you may as well consider that the left/right dichotomy is broken, or that the parties broke it joyfully
Left/Right dichotomy (collectivism/capitalism) is as alive as ever, in terms of politics. But the "left" and "right" labels have lost any form of sense when parts of the left in the 80/90s started accepting capitalism, applying right wing programs (eg. neoliberalism) and then started to campaign/act on extreme-right ideas (eg. anti-immigration measures). But the media apparatus have not called them out on moving right and continue to call them "left" without any form of meaning. That's why we're so confused about the terms, at least in Western Europe and North America.
> more subtle and demanding understanding than just left/right, progress/conservatism, is not completely absurd either
Oh sure, we have to look at the measures behind the keywords. I think that was exactly my point to begin with: that just because you say "neither left nor right" doesn't mean you aren't very very very right-wing. And having a "progress party" with the leader's face placated everywhere and no actual discussions of the most pressing issues we face as an entire species is not giving me a lot of confidence.
> The media is usually biased towards left-wing ideology, with a globalist spin. Since Macron embodies both those ideals, it's easy to see why he gets helped by the media.
Ahahah, the good joke.
Most medias, everywhere world-wide are owned by billionars and follow the media-line of their owner. These guys are of course, conservative, right side, sometimes liberal .... but definitively not "left".
Qualifying guys like Ruppert Murdoch, Bloomberg, Dassault or Bollore (in France) of "left" ( or the medias they own ) is as idiotic as calling Trump a communist.
> I have no idea why the French would think that a banker who married his high-school teacher would be one of them. He definitely turned out NOT to be on the side of the average French citizen.
Maybe because the other choice was the daughter of a old extreme right dynasty from a party funded by old nazis and negationists. Maybe.
What is particularly worrying is that through a mix of bad economic results and an economic policy borrowed from the right-wing, the current government is incredibly unpopular. At the same time, the right wing has lost most of its credibility due to both numerous corruption scandals (and more coming to the surface on a regular basis) and infighting. With a completely withered left, this leaves the road wide open to the extreme right wing.
> the current gov is the previous gov… and macron has been in the,government before the previous one as its economy minister (and he was widely considered as its most important member) and before that he was in the comission atali under sakorzy. so we have the same people and the same school of thought governing france since 2008.
That's a very big stretch and also false. Macron was only appointed as minister of Finance in 2014, 3 years into Hollande's term, and it only happened because Hollande's initial financial and economic policies were turning out to be disastrous so a change was needed.
> and guess what ? theres a reason our gdp per ppp did not move from 2008 while other countries got wealthier. our wealth got distributed to shareholders
I think you need to update your talking points, GDP PPP has been going up (Covid being an exception) since the Macron years:
> then struggle even more to get a first appointment because doctors dont take new patients and now that everything is digital you cant even go there or call to discuss your case
You're confusing problems. There not being enough doctors and them not taking in new patients had nothing to do with "digital" or not. It's just that with "digital" you can actually know in advance when you can get a meeting with which doctor instead of having to make the rounds calling or visiting all doctors in your area. You cannot seriously tell me that this is a bad thing. And again, clinics and cabinets of multiple doctors still have assistants that you can call or visit to talk to if you prefer a slower and suboptimal way of doing things.
> reckon its better for you as a foreigner that did not live in france to see how it was before
When I arrived, universally all public IT systems were just shit. Like from a bad movie, designed by people who hadn't come close to computers, and written by people who won't use them and couldn't care any less. Again, ANTS, Impôts, Ameli, all those are new(or renewed) and with seamless making it easy to do basic administrative stuff without having to get an appointment at an office that only works 10-11:30 on Tuesdays on the third week of months, on a website that falls down every time there are more than 5 people on it (that was the case with my prefecture).
> doctolib only exist because massive money went in so that private shareholder can get wealthy using french citizen health data
They're not "using french citizen data", they're providing a service that uses it. Also, you keep saying "shareholders getting wealthier".. you know that Doctolib is private and thus we don't know about their financials and it's "shareholders", which btw includes Bpifrance (state investment bank), aren't wealthier for it?
> You are attacking the wrong target. You are missing the big picture.
This is rich comming from someone putting Melenchon, basically an old school socialist (in the werstern Europe sense), in the same bag as Le Pen and Zemmour who are as far-right as it gets in Europe.
I agree that the situation is not very readable, but at least let's try to have a point of view consistent with the political history of the last few decades.
> very unpopular globalist selling out the French people
Yes he was a banker before running for office. The left is pushing this narrative a lot. Forgetting that their leader is a millionaire who never worked in the private sector…
By whom? Some small portion of its detractors? Anyway, no need for spreading wrong ideas, regardless the number of people claiming them. French Wikipedia claims this but this is unsubstantiated. Qualifying it as "far" just serves the purpose of wrongly likening it to the Rassemblement National, which is convenient for Macron & its friends. Consequences of LFI or the RN gaining power are radically different.
Now for sure it's not "soft" left.
I believe you when you say LFI pushed this idea. That's very like them.
> Macron comes off as a privileged president that has no clue about what his citizens are going through.
Macron is a neoliberal, it was obvious things were going to end badly. Yeah raise the gas tax, cut pensions and let the free market solve everything. Doesn't work with public policy.
It was depressing seeing Mélenchon come in third in 2017.
>> On economic issues yes, but not on social and cultural issues. France is to the right of America on each of the issues I listed above except public religion. For example, France's abortion law (which generally bars abortions after 14 weeks) would not survive under Roe (which requires abortion to be generally available up to viability, which is 22-24 weeks). On color blindness versus race consciousness, centrist Macron is far to the right of American progressives: https://wset.com/news/nation-world/france-denounces-american.... Macron, in fact, has specifically attacked "woke" progressive ideology.
>> The only exception is religion--France is aggressively secular. But France is the exception on that front. For example, the UK still technically requires all schools to have daily prayers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_prayer#United_Kingdom. That law would be unconstitutional in the U.S. Likewise, public funding for religious schooling, which is common in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, etc., would be unconstitutional in the U.S. In another example, in Bavaria it is mandatory to display a cross on public buildings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreuzpflicht. By contrast, in the U.S. there was a big kerfuffle recently about whether it was permissible to have a cross sculpture on public property.
THANK YOU. It's so refreshing to actually see someone not treat leftism-rightism as a monolithic thing measured via free healthcare.
As far as I'm concerned, leftism and rightism are best understood as inchoate moral intuitions that are given form in things like culture, philosophy and various creeds, and those creeds frequently contradict each other. The world wished for by a postliberal paleocon and a libertarian transhumanist couldn't be more different, yet both are ostensibly on the right. Woke intersectionalists and TERFs literally run different patches of the same ideology, both solidly on the left, and are for all practical purposes at war, and the list goes on and on.
Treating them as monoliths is not always useful.
> For example, France's abortion law (which generally bars abortions after 14 weeks) would not survive under Roe (which requires abortion to be generally available up to viability, which is 22-24 weeks).
Similar thing in the Nordic country where I live: People are very pro-choice in terms of having abortion be available and an okay choice to make, but understand that abortion is a grave matter and the law reflects it, something that'd likely look really weird to Americans.
For context: dissolution of far-right groups in France under center-left government, or generally before Macron were rare since the 90s. The reasons :
- trying to kill the president (under a right-wing president, when right-wing didn't actually meant authoritarian),
- actually killing someone,
- terrorism (found bombs and shit).
Dissolution of right wing groups under macron:
- massacring gays around the pride parade (OK, that one is deserved),
- fighting,
- training,
- pretending/performative art (it was quite funny actually, I don't think it was on purpose but we laughed a lot)
----
Now, the reality about the 'left up in arms' having no problem with authoritarian government and calling the police:
A left-wing media was dissolved in Nantes for giving informations about when the next protestation will happen (basically). Also they explained how to transform a fire extinguisher into a paint bomb, which isn't nice, but I mean, they weren't militia at all.
'funny to see the left up in arms'...
Left-wing people in France called out macron authoritarian drift way before regular conservatives, way before that
I think the facts are a bit against you. Your idea seems pleasant at first glance, but fail to meet reality. I thought it was a new trend, but I read a bit recently about political theory, and one fascinating things was that some political ideologies are declined from example and experience, from material conditions, and from that is drafted an ideal. Other are declined from an idea, then try to explain why the reality doesn't work like that (it's often because of the francs-maçons or the jew, but sometimes it's internal traitors).
I will let the reader guess which ideology is which.
> The article in French says the same thing as I wrote before: "socialist parties" are no longer socialist:
That's not what the sentence you quoted says. Do you speak french? Just to know (respectfully) if we need to debate the meaning of that sentence, or if I need to translate it for you.
That sentence precisely means that there is a gradient.
> "I have family in Paris who have steadily become more and more reactionary as the FN (the French far-right) have been given more exposure, even before these attacks."
What makes you think there must be a causational relationship between these two things? Or for that matter, if we assume for the moment that one did cause the other, how can you be sure which caused which? Perhaps the FN has become more and more mainstream as a result of more and more French citizens drifting towards the right.
> "And it's not an "opposing viewpoint" to me, it's just completely harmful."
I don't really understand why being an opposing viewpoint and being harmful are mutually exclusive to you. You do oppose their viewpoint (very strongly it seems), so it surely is an opposing viewpoint.
> the 5th French Republic is going well since the 50s, isn't it?
Is it going well, though? There's never been so much inequality, industrial pollution is spreading everywhere (is there even a single river left you can drink in France?!), political corruption has been adopted as governing principle (see also: Jacques Foccart and the Françafrique scandals), law enforcement is plagued by nazism (French police was never denazified after WWII), and the social services De Gaulle was forced (by popular power) to implement have either been dismantled or rendered painful for both workers and users (healthcare/education/housing).
> Basing 21st Century politics on something written in the 18th century is... weird.
I agree in principle, but it's important to realize that the most important social issues we face today (including depletion of resources and pollution) have been fought against for centuries. We have a lot of lessons to learn from the past.
Last paragraph: "As is common in France and many other European countries, the French President’s office, known as the Elysée Palace, insisted on checking and “proofreading” all the president’s quotes to be published in this article as a condition of granting the interview. This violates POLITICO’s editorial standards and policy, but we agreed to the terms in order to speak directly with the French president. POLITICO insisted that it cannot deceive its readers and would not publish anything the president did not say. The quotes in this article were all actually said by the president, but some parts of the interview in which the president spoke even more frankly about Taiwan and Europe’s strategic autonomy were cut out by the Elysée."
> France needs reforms and has been postponing them for decades.
France needs stability a lot more than reforms. As a country, France still has a highly educated population, great infrastructure, a rich internal market and a solid canvas of small, medium and large business. France should be seeking growth through innovation and investment rather than constantly tweaking its tax code. France is however deeply handicaped by the euro. It is in my opinion the first victim of German dumping (the Hartz reform).
The whole France needs reform mantra is more rooted in ideology than facts. Macron is a Blairite who would rather fight the German by similarly depressing wages rather than confront them directly. It is a losing situation for everyone except the employers and will only lead to more inequality and more poverty in Europe. But well, guess who financed Macron presidential campain...
Thanks for correction. I thought he was prime minister of Macron, but that was in fact Edouard Philippe. I must have confused with Jean-Yves le Drian, previously Ministry of Defense (under Hollande) then Foreign Affairs (under Macron).
> and both wings being plagued with moral/financial scandals
I don't agree with all of their politics, but when was the last time you heard the NPA or LO (left-wing parties) had a financial/moral scandal? I've never heard of any.
> you may as well consider that the left/right dichotomy is broken, or that the parties broke it joyfully
Left/Right dichotomy (collectivism/capitalism) is as alive as ever, in terms of politics. But the "left" and "right" labels have lost any form of sense when parts of the left in the 80/90s started accepting capitalism, applying right wing programs (eg. neoliberalism) and then started to campaign/act on extreme-right ideas (eg. anti-immigration measures). But the media apparatus have not called them out on moving right and continue to call them "left" without any form of meaning. That's why we're so confused about the terms, at least in Western Europe and North America.
> more subtle and demanding understanding than just left/right, progress/conservatism, is not completely absurd either
Oh sure, we have to look at the measures behind the keywords. I think that was exactly my point to begin with: that just because you say "neither left nor right" doesn't mean you aren't very very very right-wing. And having a "progress party" with the leader's face placated everywhere and no actual discussions of the most pressing issues we face as an entire species is not giving me a lot of confidence.
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