France: the far left in power? – Economic policy

What was most worrying about the outcome of the French presidential election was not the appearance, for the third time, of the extreme right in the second round. We know that this was the objective of Macron, who was not unaware of being able to count on the hostility of the French to these extremist ideas – and on the weakness of his opponent – to win as five years ago. It actually happened, as it had to happen, with an indisputable defeat of the right-wing enemies of freedom.
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What was most worrying about the outcome of the French presidential election was not the appearance, for the third time, of the extreme right in the second round. We know that this was the objective of Macron, who was not unaware of being able to count on the hostility of the French to these extremist ideas – and on the weakness of his opponent – to win as five years ago. It actually happened, as it had to happen, with an indisputable defeat of the right-wing enemies of freedom. Today there is another risk, perhaps more dangerous in the long run. On the strength of his third place in the first round, Jean-Luc Mélenchon claimed the post of Prime Minister and succeeded in uniting around his party the debris of the French left crushed in the first round. We find ourselves with a new “union of the left”, which unfortunately does not resemble that of 1981. Because when François Mitterrand came to power, he did so as the leader of a union agreed with the communists, of course, but whose dominant party was socialist. And the wily French president had managed, even with a harsh and ruinous left-wing agenda, to make only marginal concessions to his extremist allies. When the masterful failure of this program had to be noted two years later, with successive devaluations and the ruin of the French economy, he was able to straighten out what could still be by sending his communist allies back into the opposition. before. The question is very different today. The party leading the coalition, overwhelmingly, is no longer a moribund socialist party and already very left-wing to the point that François Hollande does not even recognize himself in it anymore. This is the “rebellious France” of a Mélenchon more extremist than ever. The man is indeed an admirer of Chávez, a fan of the Chinese communist regime, an opponent of the freedom of the market even in its attenuated form retained by a European Union that he hates, and author of proposals tending to make France, on the plan of public revenue and expenditure, the equivalent of what Czechoslovakia was before the fall of the iron curtain. Added to this is a risk of a lack of freedom that is difficult to accept for the socialists of yesterday. Especially when the coalition will have to, like the Greens who are part of it, find a way to reconcile extreme neo-feminism (where we talk about controlling and sanctioning the sharing of household responsibilities for each family, etc.) with an alignment on the hardest Islamist theses, essential for the so-called “rebellious”. You should know that 70% of Muslim voters in France vote for them. Strange submission to non-republican values ​​for a left-wing party that claims to be so… rebellious! All this can of course, at first, suit Macron who may present himself, despite the total emptiness of his program and the achievements of his previous five-year term, as a kind of savior, the only one capable of avoiding the two extremes, fascism and communism. Two extremes which, moreover, have quite similar programs: both are enemies of freedom and, on the social level, we must have noted a certain alignment of Marine Le Pen with the programs of the far left, quite simply because they are chasing the same clientele. Perhaps the risk for democracy and the French economy is not for now. But one is struck to note that two out of three movements are no longer compatible, in these elections, with democratic values, freedoms and the free economy.