French Politics

God, I hate Hollande.

That's assuming the current climate of terror goes on forever, which I doubt.

I also hope that Daesh won't last for a decade, what with being finally defeated and all, but the other reason the FN is growing is the financial crisis of 2008 that led to an era of economical struggle. It's funny - or maybe it is not funny - to see that during the "Glorious Thirty", from 1945 to 1973, when economy was booming, the working class overwhelmingly favored the communist party and left-wing ideas. The other parties' scores haven't moved much, except for the 20-something % of communists that became 20-something % of FN.

Nowadays, instead of struggling together, it is easier to find a scapegoat that will be designated to be responsible of said struggles.

"Nowadays"?

[[quote]]Short of everyone other candidate being outed as a pedophile or a serial killer, does Hollande have a prayer? [[/quote]]

I don't know, it wouldn't surprise me if half of the French politicians killed prostitutes in their spare time. Do we know what Christine Boutin's been up to recently? And Hollande would probably loose a popularity contest against the Zodiac killer anyway.

Boutin is still married to her cousin. That's all I know. The less I see her, the better.

Now, now, I know we're all under the shock, but let's keep our cool for the moment and wait until we see how things turn out. Although the whole "Respect national unity ? Screw that ! Let's already howl that we'd have done better than Hollande before the corpses even get cold !" is getting me very, VERY angry.

Also, holy shit, only now do I get the pun in yourlocation, Julep.

Ikr? I went for "so bad it makes you Facepalm".

I didn't believe one second that there would be national unity in this one. It happened in Nice, aka Estrosiland, aka France's Deep South. If Estrosi, Sarkozy and their friends didn't immediately shift the blame on the government, then people might realize that their already super elevated security levels compared to the national average were useless. And then question their entire pro-security rhetoric. And finally realize that there is no such thing as zero risk, unless you live in a futuristic police state.

Only in Parkour there would be freedom!

ISIS knifemen storm church in Normandy, perform 'sermon' in Arabic, kill priest.

PS: Use a different source — that one isn't liked around here...

The Daily Mail are literally Nazis. Take everything they say with a grain of salt, especially headlines.

French church attacked in the name of ISIS, priest slain.

I just linked what I was linked to first. Sorry.

Well, so much for Hollande's heightened security mode. Billions thrown away, no result.

I'm not really sure much more could have been done, actually. At least one of the guys was under watch for trying to go to Syria, but there wasn't anything more serious against him but "suspicion of association with a terrorist organization". Which isn't enough for throwing him into jail unless you go full Minority Report on the guy.

Yeah, it seems to be the current trend now every time some nutjob slaughters people: government announces new measures, while people complain that said nutjob should have been stopped/identified before/was known to the police/etc.

Problem is, in my eyes, if they end up arresting people because they are suspected of sympathies with the terrorists, then the terrorists will have dealt a serious blow to democracy around here. There has been a lot of restrictions to freedom already, and I fear it will only go worse when a right wing government is elected next year (I just hope it won't be too far right...).

I simply wish we would stop seeing the names of these nutjobs repeated over and over in the news. It only encourages the next ones.

Considering that Sarkozy pretty much calls for measures that would be pretty much anticonstitutional, I fear that ANY right wing government that might come out of next year's elections will be too far right...

Because, you know, instead of trying to fight the extreme right, it's far easier to mimic it as much as possible and try to siphon its electors. A tactic that is more and more failing and is only succeeding in building up a feeling of legitimacy for the FN, but who cares ?

Our prisons already are overcrowded enough as it is. And that's without accounting for the fact that many terrorist nutjobs became fundamentalists while they were locked.

The events such as the Church one are horrible, but I don't think we should lose our identity out of fear. If we start locking people up for no reason, we will get more jail conversions. Then, we will have two choices: either we release them, and they will do the very same thing we are afraid of, or we hold them for an unlimited amount of time - and at that point, it becomes hard to give lessons to Syria, Russia or Iran about Human Rights.

Especially since kneejerk sevurity measures are exactly what the terrorists are counting on. It "liberates the speech", increases drastically racism and hate, and brings them flocks of new recruits. In turn, they cause more terror attacks, which leads idiots to take even more drastic measures, and so on. Pure circlejerk, and instead of breaking it as they should have, the Socialists have enforced it, the morons.

The PS following the RPR (which became the UMP, then LR) on the dubious terrain of "security" is one of the reasons Le Pen (Jean-Marie, Marine's father) made it to the second round in the 2002 elections. But the PS learned the wrong lessons from that.

Not just on security. No matter what one may think of the El Khomri law, it's everything but socialist which only gives more power to FN's argument that PS and LR are the same thing and that neither care about the workers.

Oh yeah, the El Khomri Law. Good things the European Soccer Cup and those terrorist attacks happened so we could quickly forget about it, right ?

...

Man, my cynicism has been reaching new heights lately. I really need to seek help.

They weren't that blatant 15 years ago. But now, they're clearly implementing right-wing policies pretty much for everything and people are rightly pissed.

There's no guarantee that Sarkozy will be the LR nominee at this point, though, is there? The polls I'm looking at still show Juppé with a healthy lead, particularly in the second round of voting.

That's assuming he'll play fair and not rig the election. The guy has an ego the size of a planetoid ; he sure as hell doesn't like competition, and I don't think he'd be reluctant to the idea of abusing his position as party leader.

Edit : also, with the recent strings of terrorist attacks, EVERY SINGLE LR CANDIDATE asks for "moar security", to a ludicrous degree.

edited 27th Jul '16 1:18:36 PM by purplefishman

How can Sarkozy rig the election?

In my mind, France needs someone with the power and intelligence to veto any new security measures until some proof that they are useful is offered. Because the interminable string of attacks indicates that they don't.

I'm afraid no one matching that description will come out of any party that is not left-wing (that doesn't include the PS, they've betrayed pretty much every left-wing ideal there is).