French Presidential Election 2012

[mitsho]

Nothing. Hollande will change nothing. He won't even pretend to.

The biggest possible change I see is Hollande's personal relationship with Merkel and how that will influence the next steps in the European Union. The two are after all theoretically from opposing parties... For the rest, I honestly know not enough of French Politics to judge

 

[Kyriakos]

How are Greek parties polling anyway?

Well there is nothing stable, apart from the fact that the first party is going to be those who vote for no one at all.

Here is one of the polls from April:



ND is ahead, as in all other polls, but it is a Pyrrhic victory. Pasok is trashed. Interesting (in a negative way) is that the fascist party Golden Dawn gets up to 4.1%...

Goes to show that the Weimar Republic cannot be sustained.

 

[Mark Havel]

Question from an oblivious American: If Sarkozy loses, what happens?

The same thing that would happen should Obama lose the election on November: he'll won't be president anymore. Then, I guess Hollande will campaign vigorously for his party on the upcoming legislative elections to get a majority in the parliament. I also guess he'll quickly try to convince Angela Merkel to add pro-growth policy in the fiscal compact agreement that has been reached last fall.

Fundamentally, I don't think Hollande will change that much. Both of them (Hollande and Sarkozy) are actually rather close when it comes to defend Europe, the Euro, growing out of the debt and deficits. Despite his campaign's motto (Change happens now), Hollande has already repeatedly stated that he will keep a lot of Sarkozy's reforms : retirement, education. He'll only tweak them a bit to make them "more just". However, Hollande clearly plans to raise taxes on the rich first in a bid to try to balance the budget.
On a more formal point, I guess we'll end-up with a president who'll look like he's a real president and not some spoiled and over excited kid. Hollande's campaign is mainly based on being everything Sarkozy is not and I expect him to behave as such during his presidency.

I hope Hollande is aware that's is basically the mainstream parties's last chance to prove they can solve France's troubles. If French people felt he has failed in 2017, a far-right or far-left candidate like Marine Le Pen or Mélanchon will certainly be on the second round, maybe even with an actual chance of winning.

 

[Mise]

Well there is nothing stable, apart from the fact that the first party is going to be those who vote for no one at all.

Here is one of the polls from April:



ND is ahead, as in all other polls, but it is a Pyrrhic victory. Pasok is trashed. Interesting (in a negative way) is that the fascist party Golden Dawn gets up to 4.1%...

Goes to show that the Weimar Republic cannot be sustained.

How does your parliament get composed? It's Proportional Representation right? Does it have a cut off or anything? I'm just trying to work out how the hell you can form a government next time from such a split vote...

EDIT: Is that last one "other" or "undecided"?

 

[Traitorfish]

Will be less funny when the Greek communist party gets around 20%...

Are they really going to do that well? I always got the impression that they were a bit mental, still genuinely into all this Brezhnevite stuff that the CPF etc. ditched in the '80s.

 

[Kyriakos]

Well most polls claim they get more than 10%. 20% would be unrealistic, and it was a hyperbole, but the undecided are at 18% so who knows what will happen. And KKE is the party which openly calls for annulment of the debt in its entirety, so it is bound to sound popular.
Then again they also claim they would not ally with any other party, therefore pretty much making them irrelevant. They cannot possibly win the election by themselves.

Also i am not sure what sort of surreal state would come out of a KKE government, so it is best that it will not take place.

Other leftist parties also call for zero debt (declining to pay), but wish to co-operate. KKE still is the major party of the left, but it may poll near the next one in this election.

Problem is that the second traditional left party, SYRIZA (the name means "coalition of radical left") is way too radical to be a viable option to govern either, for example it calls for more rights for the nearly 2 million illegals in Greece. Generally things looks quite grim, but at some point i am sure the debt will be zeroed- it simply cannot happen any other way. Now if there is a short war after that, who knows. Guess i am lucky i won't be called to fight :/

 

[Antilogic]

Disappointed with the 20% Le Pen got. That's very worrying. I get that a lot is protest vote, but when nearly one fith of the votes go to that sort of nutcase, it is worrying.

The sense of déjà vu is creeping over me--I could have sworn I had seen this sentence printed on this forum or said to me before. According to the good ol' wikipedia, Le Pen get a strong showing in the last couple French elections: 16.9% and 10%.

 

[Leoreth]

Well naturally . It is usually the case that the more one learns about Green Parties the less likely one is to vote for them .

Didn't want to say it

The biggest possible change I see is Hollande's personal relationship with Merkel and how that will influence the next steps in the European Union. The two are after all theoretically from opposing parties...

It's Merkel, though, parties don't really matter for her (and she's bound to end up in a coalition with his self-proclaimed sister party anyway, so it's a good way to get used to it).

It's just that many of Hollande's plans for the EU will make her next months rather uncomfortable. I'm not that unsympathetic to his agenda anymore, I just hope they'll be able to achieve some sort of synthesis of their positions. Foul compromise or even deadlock wouldn't be good in the current situation.

Well there is nothing stable, apart from the fact that the first party is going to be those who vote for no one at all.

Here is one of the polls from April:



ND is ahead, as in all other polls, but it is a Pyrrhic victory. Pasok is trashed. Interesting (in a negative way) is that the fascist party Golden Dawn gets up to 4.1%...

Goes to show that the Weimar Republic cannot be sustained.

Could you break this down by camps? Are there even any? Looks very bad, though, when even a grand coalition would be unable to form a government, even if the respective parties didn't hate each other.

Or is there a x% threshold you have to pass to enter the parliament?

 

[innonimatu]

I thing that while discussing what a Sarkozy or a Hollande win would mean for the EU you're missing one big thing about these elections: two politicians who built their campaigns on a platform to abolish the EU won 30% of the votes from those who bothered voting. Which does not include those too disillusioned to do so.

And this in the EU's most central country. And this before France entered a economic crisis that it is bound to enter this year. This EU is dead. All that's worth wondering about is what will be the the date of the funeral.

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

Your optimism is refreshing innonimatu

on the third candidate (no advertisement for these people): that's what you get when you banalize stigmatisation, untolerance and populism.

@kronic: I guess the Dutch governement resignation has also something to do with the markets dropping.

 

[innonimatu]

That reminds me, any chance of that putting a nail on Merkel's "austerity treaty"?

And are the dutch having elections soon also, or can another government be put together?

 

[mangxema]

The sense of déjà vu is creeping over me--I could have sworn I had seen this sentence printed on this forum or said to me before. According to the good ol' wikipedia, Le Pen get a strong showing in the last couple French elections: 16.9% and 10%.

Sort of. This time it's the other Le Pen's daughter.

 

[Grisu]

Disappointed with the 20% Le Pen got. That's very worrying. I get that a lot is protest vote, but when nearly one fith of the votes go to that sort of nutcase, it is worrying.

It is worrying but hardly surprising....her father had rather solid numbers before her and she seems a bit smarter than him, managing to put a sane facade over the insanity that is the Front National.

 

[Mark Havel]

I thing that while discussing what a Sarkozy or a Hollande win would mean for the EU you're missing one big thing about these elections: two politicians who built their campaigns on a platform to abolish the EU won 30% of the votes from those who bothered voting. Which does not include those too disillusioned to do so.

And this in the EU's most central country. And this before France entered a economic crisis that it is bound to enter this year. This EU is dead. All that's worth wondering about is what will be the the date of the funeral.

This EU is not dead. Not yet.
Almost everyone is convinced that the EU cannot continue in its current incarnation. That's why Hollande will probably push to add growth and pro-job provisions in the austerity treaty. If he can't manage to do it, European economies will be asphyxiated in months and then, yes, I suppose getting out the euro and seriously rethinking the EU will be necessary.

Now, what you are saying is rather inaccurate. First, I think even Ms. Le Pen doesn't specially plan to abolish the EU and go back to the 19th century. She says she wants to get out of the Euro and indeed, the National Front's program is probably about considerably scaling down the European Union's scope. But every candidate has some ideas about the EU and most of them are about how to transform it to fit their ideas, not throwing it out of the window.
Second, the participation was 81%, which is among the highest for a presidential election in France. I'm fairly persuaded that most of the abstentionists are evenly distributed in the electorate. That doesn't mean that the 19% who didn't go to vote absolutely badly wants to see EU disappear out of thin air.
And third, I'm curious to know who is the second candidate wanting to abolish the EU. So far, the closest ones I see are Marine Le Pen (17,9%) and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (1,79%), so, at best, you're south of 20%. That's almost surprisingly low given the fact that EU policy and directives are our politician's favourite scapegoats when it comes to justify their inability to get things done.

 

[Leoreth]

two politicians who built their campaigns on a platform to abolish the EU won 30% of the votes from those who bothered voting. Which does not include those too disillusioned to do so.

So we can conclude that the French elections were full of populism. And?

 

[Akka]

Question from an oblivious American: If Sarkozy loses, what happens?

We get rid of our worst president since... well, ever ?

The sense of déjà vu is creeping over me--I could have sworn I had seen this sentence printed on this forum or said to me before. According to the good ol' wikipedia, Le Pen get a strong showing in the last couple French elections: 16.9% and 10%.

Yeah, it's rather funny, and I had this exact same discussion no sooner than today with some workmates.
Every single election since I can remember (which means about the second Mitterand presidency, back in 1988), the far-right is about 15 % - and every single time, there is a lot of talk in the media and people about how the far-right has made groundbreaking advances.

That's just stupid.

 

[Mise]

To be fair though 20% is a lot more than 15%.

 

[Akka]

To be fair though 20% is a lot more than 15%.

Meh, it's the same scale. It's pretty much a given that numbers in election fluctuate, or else we would not need elections. It's not a higher comparative difference than between alternating left-wing and right-wing elected presidents.

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

That reminds me, any chance of that putting a nail on Merkel's "austerity treaty"?

Hollande said he would try to renegotiate the treaty... if elected, which is not done yet. (beside the German gvt doesn't seem on the same page so I wouldn't expect a drastic change of direction)

 

[Leoreth]

Hollande said he would try to renegotiate the treaty... if elected, which is not done yet. (beside the German gvt doesn't seem on the same page so I wouldn't expect a drastic change of direction)

I don't think Merkel can afford to be stubborn if Hollande decides to push his agenda. The majority of the Eurozone opposes her position, and it's only her close relationship with Sarkozy that allowed her to paint it as a European, instead of just the German position. Merkel is increasingly without allies, especially with the Dutch government now gone, too, so I think she will have to find some sort of compromise with Hollande.