Oh boy.

This timing is terrible for us in France. After seven years of Macron who made austerity measure after austerity measure and somehow made our budgetal deficit worse, I can guarentee you that everyone (the population) is sick of it and whoever gets elected in our current legislative will NOT go down the path of ‘reduce public expenses to reduce debt’ as it would be political suicide right now.

Je dirais même plus, qu’elle est avec le mal à droite.

(désolé)

All parties in the Popular Front are generally pro-Palestinians (in particular, Macron’s long-standing refusal to even acknowledge that Israel is doing any wrong has been particularly shocking to them, and a good chunk of the population).

In their program they say (translation by me from Le Monde’s article):

• they want to “act in favor of the liberation of the hostages detained since the Hamas’ terrorist massacres, of whom they reject the theocratic project.”
• they also say they want to “immediately recognize the Palestinian State alongside the State of Israël”
• they want to “cut (stop) the French government’s culpable support for [Benyamin] Netanyahu’s far right supremacist government to impose an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and enforce the ICJ’s [International Court of Justice’s] order, which unambiguously refers to a risk of genocide.”

As for taxes, there’s a lot of stuff (and I’m not translating everything on mobile lol). A lot of it boils down to revertibg all the terribly unbalanced and unfair tax policies of Macron like:

• reestablish the ISF: the tax on one’s fortune (generally seen as a rich tax) with a climate twist (not entirely sure what they mean by that, prob gonna make it even hugher if you things like private jets all the time)
• abolish the flat tax: this one’s a little complex and I’m really not an expert on this but it’s seen as very unqaid. A left MP in 2018 said when this taw was introduced: “Whereas an employee earning 1.2 smic [the minimal salary in France] per month who gets a raise will pay a 14% tax rate on it, a billionaire who earns ten million euros more through a financial transaction will only pay 12.8% tax on this new gain”
• reestablish the exit tax: that was a tax of “unrealized capital gains when taxpayers transfer their tax domicile outside France” (from what I understand, this was meant to fight against fiscal evasion like for when French company heads went to sell their assets in Belgium in which stock sale wasn’t taxed. It was supposed to bring about ~800 mil eurosin 2016 had the tax not been removed by then when Macron was Minister of Budget)

• new brackets to make taxes more progressive and fair

• increase their number to fourteen for revenue tax
• establish it in the CSG (generalized social contribution)
• add some more on heritage tax, as well as adding a maximum upon it

They also said they want to add a tax on products depending on how much they travelled throughtout the world (to be produced, I imagine), condition company subsidies to their respect of environemental & social norms (esp fighting discrimination within companies). They also want to tax financial transaction (I’m supposing they mean this at a EU level with the big ‘Tax the rich’ petition), agro companies super profits.

On a related note, there are lots of stuff they want to do for the lower strada’s budgets like:

• make the first few kWh of electricity free of charge each months.
• blocking the prices of some first necessity goods (food, energy, fuel specifically)
• establish minimum prices at which the agro industry will have to adhere to to buy stuff from farmers
• increase budgets for the creation of public lodgings to 1.4B euros (and increase by 10% the youth grants to help them find a place to live)
• revert Macron’s reform of the RSA (most basic and lowest income provided by the state that allows people to feed themselves if they don’t have a job nor any other gov income like the one for unemployement (post-firing/post-resign to help until the person finds a new job). Macron’s reform required that if somebody wants the RSA, they have to work at least 15 hours a week FOR FREE. You can guess how much the people who only had this, including the parts of the population who lives with a handicap took it)
• returning to a max of 32 hours per weeks for physically demanding or night jobs.

(Holy shit this took me one hour to write, hopefully I didn’t forget anything)

The Popular Front didn’t ‘name’ him (unless you mean the article). In fact, parties won’t ‘get’ to name anyone, that’s the prsident who will pick the PM. However, he has to pick a PM whom a majority of the National Assembly (being elected here) will support, lest it gets ‘censored’ (destitued) by the Parliement.

JLM is the leader of LFI (even if, particularly in the creation of the Popular Front, his detractors are slowly getting the better of him), and he was LFI’s candidate for the 2022 Presidential Election. What the article mentions is that a few days ago, he mentioned on TV that he feels ‘capable’ of endorsing the role of PM. That does NOT mean the rest of the alliance will suport him (in fact, there’s a 0% chance the socialists will).

The people who are more likely to be named as PM (if the Popular Front wins a majority of the Assembly), are either François Ruffin (also LFI, but highly popular, is the one who launched the movement for this Popular Front, and a detractor of Melanchon’s), or somebody more moderate without much political clout used to serve as the one on the ejectable seat when Macron’s term is over (and said PM is likely to have become unpopular by then).

For their program, I unfortunately wasn’t able to find a translation nor a summary in english (tbf, it was published just this friday).

Le Monde has a summary (in french) which you can translate with your favorite translator app if you want.

To my knowledge, while LFI (but in particular Jean Luc Melanchon, who REALLY isn’t even the cards to be PM) is certainly anti EU and made ambiguous statements on Russia as well as other countries, these views haven’t passed on to the Popular Front. They have been perfectly clear in their program that they in support of Ukraine over Russia, and that they would continue (and increase) sending weapons it’s way. This was the red line of the socialists, who are right now the biggest party alongside LFI, and supported by a majority of the rest of the aliance (esp the Greens).

The Popular Front is Pro-Ukraine, and against Russia. Diplo wise, on the question of the EU, they have said they want to get rid of the CETA (which has been a demand of the Left for quite some time, with good reason), and that they are lukewarm on the EU electricity market (which was really disadventagous to France because our energy prod is cheap, but prices are driven up for no reason in an high-inflation context), but they are otherwise pro-EU (remeber! The Soc-dems and the greens are a big chunk of the alliance!)

It’s unfortunate foreign media (but our medias do it too) present the Popular Front as a LFI++ that is ‘just as bad as far right’ when it’s a moderate left alliance against fascism.

The PCF is in IIRC

No. China didn’t do it ‘overnight’. They started their transition over 20 years ago. Try telling ANYONE bar the greens in the west that they should transition all cars to electric back then and see how they would laugh to your face.

The west is late because it lacked the vision to do it in the past, and is now paying the price by scrambling to do it late.

But, I suppose it’s better to be late than never.

*some. While as much as I heavily dislike this party and their positions, I don’t think they’re all just okay with fachism. There’s been a great number of high ranking officials from that party who denounced this proposal when it was announced out of nowhere on live TV yesterday.

Basically, Les Republicains (Trad-conservative right wing) is the descendant party of De Gaulle, chief of the French Free Forces and probably the most iconic french figure in WW2. This party has an history with fighting fachism, so this twist of position (which is not that surprising from the guy that proposed it) goes against the party’s tradition and heritage (ironicly).

It’s been making headwaves here, and he does NOT have the support of his party in this endeavour. If someone were to speculate, the more likely outcomes of this decision would be a party splinter or even the death of the party itself (considering that since 2017, they’ve really lost a lot of their electorate whose moderates went to Macron and extremists to Le Pen) than an alliance with Far Right.

Though honestly? There’s been so many twists in the past two days that anything’s possible at this point.

Ehh… a proper political analyst would probably add some nuance to that, but that’s a kind of how it feels (the austerity measures were like pills forced down our throats that only made us sicker). Keep in mind there are other factors in play like:

• billionaires buying out more and more newspapers/TV channels and giving far right way more coverage than any other party
• beyond wealth gap increase, inflation being on the rise + the disastruous state of the housing market made people poorer and poorer
• the soc-dems have messed up their presidency back in 2012 and the traditional right wing having imploded after a big scandal and Macron’s surge
• Russia apparently paying huge desinformation campaigns here

… and probably some more I forgot to add.

Honestly (that’s just my personal opinion but) with the way he’s been acting in the past few weeks after polls gave Far Right far ahead of his party, Macron’s been looking more and more and more desperate. He tried debates between his PM and the Far Right candidate, made a big speech 2 days before the election to plea against far right (a speech in which were pointed out his many contradictions), his PM intervined out of the blue in a debate between each party’s lead EU MEP (most awkward moment in a political debate I’ve ever seen, denounced by every journalist union).

His popularity has been dwindling (with reason) since 2017 and only won the 2022 elections by virtue of not being far right (and the people refused to give him majority in the parliement in exchange). In the past two years, he’s been enacting austerity measure after austerity measure several of which with zero approval, bypassed parliement to get them into law, and barely avoided having his governement destituted (by parliement) by the skin of his teeth. And you know what’s worst? His austerity measures didn’t even ‘save public finances’ because following each of them, he gave additional tax breaks to companies, which means our budget deficit is in a worse shape than it was in 2017.

Long story short, he’s been playing stupid games for the last few years, and the stupid price is that Far Right is now the first party in France and nobody has a clue on how to get them down bar them completely failing at ruling.

(Of course it isn’t just his fault that Far Right is on the rise, but he IS a pretty big cause)

Well, it’s a risky move. Especially since just tonight, Far Right won by a landslide in the EU Parliement elections, so it’s likely the results will play against him.

Many of us (in the french subs) think it might be an attempt on his part to get far right into power through the parliment to show electors that all they spout is bull, and make them to suffer hard losses in the 2027 presidential elections.

Edit: some news drop and he apparently believes he can make big wins in this one. We’ll see if this bet will pay off, but personally, I sincerly doubt it will ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

His party lost hard in the EU Parliement elections tonight. The last legislative elections in France were a few years ago, and this is the one he’s calling for right now.

Not PM, president. It’s part of the constitution to be able to dissolve the National Assembly.

Remeber when Microsoft banned some Xbox players for screenshots they took in singleplayer, local games? Because it turns out all screenshots were uploaded to the cloud without properly informing users?

Naaah… no way they’re going to do that again.

idk most politicians are a threat to the environement like AI (if not even more so with their moronic laws)

More or less, yes.

I think the issue is the same as Apple being anti-competitive about the AppStore. Sure, techically, both Steam and the PSN are platforms for selling games, but they’re each restricted to specific non-overlapping platforms (respictively PC and PlayStation) where there they have a (near for Steam, absolute for PSN) monopoly. Hence, anticompetitive behavior.

To my knowledge, this hasn’t been the case for nearly a decade, after the backlash they received specifically for it.

I don’t see why France would need more, considering they have 290 nuclear bombs, and are fourth after the US, Russia, and China.