‘Centrist’ president’s shameful pact with far right to enable appointment of Barnier – whose party came last in France’s elections with only 6% of vote
Huge protests have taken place across France against French ‘centrist’ president Emmanuel Macron’s appointment of bureaucrat Michel Barnier as the country’s prime minister. Barnier’s ‘Republican’ party came last in France’s recent parliamentary elections, with only six percent of the vote.
Macron’s manoeuvres to block the left caucus coalition, who received by a distance the biggest share of the popular vote, have centred on a shadowy deal with Marine le Pen’s fascist ‘National Rally’ (formerly the National Front) party for Le Pen’s MPs to abstain on Barnier’s confirmation vote.
France’s constitution, bizarrely, allows its president to appoint any prime minister that he can get past MPs – but this is the first time in the history of France’s ‘Fifth Republic’ that a French president has refused to appoint a PM from the biggest parliamentary bloc. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s ‘France Unbowed’, which leads the ‘New Popular Front’ left bloc, has launched impeachment proceedings against Macron.
Centrism and fascism are always ready to join hands to keep people oppressed.
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“….those who make a populism of the Left impossible will make a populism of the Right inevitable.”
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-machine-stops
Great! New Popular Front & Diverse working class+plus progressive middle class standing against the French “Extreme Centre” who flirt with the Grotesque French Far Right.
Interesting joint piece in the FT today (7/9/24) by two political imbeciles – the heads of the CIA & MI6 who it could be argued see things thru a Western Neo-Liberal Capitalist lens.
Socialists rightly criticised Nationalist Putin over Chechnya as the West turned a blind eye & lauded him then, and a US Ambassador’s cable in Feb 2012 (Chey Anderson, New Left Review Nov 23) warned what would happen if NATO encroached on Ukraine.
Anderson further argues that the US Neo-Cons want a Polish/Ukraine Corridor to the Caucuses & the riches beyond.
And in Palestine the US & Israel (as well as promoting arms sales) want to steal Gaza’s land, gas, oil & build a new canal in the Levant (and the West wants its share).
So Ukrainians & Palestinians are being slaughtered for profits.
And today the two political lightweight spooks are worried that the old order is under threat – hallelujah!
‘INTERREGNUM.
The old order, Neo-Liberalism is dying.
But the new cannot yet be born.
Perhaps we are all being tested.
And only the stars will ride the storm.’
Only the stars will ride the storm. Very apt Bazza. Cheers.
@Dave Thanks for the link
Have to say, I love the French for their ability to get off their backsides and protest. Even in the days before social media, they were capable of amazing displays of disobedience. Penalty point in licences? They just sat in their vehicles stationary. Speeding cameras? 80% destroyed. Lorry driver surveillance gantries? 100% destroyed.
Silly me, I forgot all about the Vichy. This ain’t over comrades. Fledgling flaps.
What goes around, comes around.
There are numerous types of protest. As Richard Murphy notes:
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/09/08/labour-is-revolting/
“Labour ministers are revolting.
So, too, are Labour backbenchers.
Ministers who have fought for so long to get into office will not accept the instruction that their job is to deliver cuts and not change. Of course, they are sending less-than-compliant messages to Rachel Reeves, and there is nothing Starmer can do to help her. If enough are doing this, there is nothing he can do to discipline them. Right now, his authority is at a very low ebb with them: a reshuffle is a long way off, and they know it.
His problem with backbenchers is even bigger. Take Rachel Maskell, MP for York Central since 2015. Her days as a shadow minister are over. She has not made it as the real thing. You can be sure she knows she never will get ministerial office now. So, she is leading the rebellion against the removal of the winter fuel allowance payment from most pensioners.
Why is she doing that?
One, because of her in-principle objection.
Two, because there are almost five years to go to an election, she has nothing to lose by doing so.
Three, if she doesn’t take this issue on now, then Labour austerity will guarantee she will lose her seat anyway.
Four, Starmer has already made himself look stupid by suspending some of his MPs, and he can’t keep doing it, so the risk of sanction is tiny.
So, five, she has nothing to lose.
And, again, Starmer is completely on the back foot with absolutely nowhere he can go in the face of justified criticism for adopting a policy that pleases no one.
This, though, for him is just the beginning. He’s already making a habit of this.
His Gaza policy has also appealed to no one.
His 300 or more backbenchers, plus most of his ministers, must be choking every time they try to defend the continuing utterly unnecessary two-child cap.
And if Reeves really does deliver an austerity budget, outright rebellion is going to be very hard to contain.
A very big, very shallow majority that leaves most Labour MPs realising that they probably have only one go at this and that Reeves and Starmer are already determined to lose them their seats at the next election presents Starmer with a nightmare that his policy of triangulation simply cannot manage.
Starmer has no room for fence-sitting. It’s already clear he must govern as Labour, or he and Reeves, and Labour itself will have their days numbered unless, that is, Labour dispenses with them both, and don’t rule that out.
Starmer has to be a visionary with considerable charisma and a bold deftness of touch to hold together the situation he has created. It is already clear that he is possessed of none of those characteristics and that his MPs, and maybe his ministers, know it.
Starmer already looks like a lame-duck prime minister, buffeted by storms, some of which are of his own creation. Things can only get worse for him.”
————————————————————–
One wonders who the alleged nom-doms will be voting to replace the pig in a poke Starmer in the not too distant future?
To paraphrase the legendary Blackadder: “Hubris works very fast these days”.
The same could’ve been said about kim johnson with the child benefit cap as rachel maskel with the heating allowance.
Like each and every labour MP still under the whip, I’ll only believe maskell when push comes to shove.
I’m also expecting to see a few names from those (johnson included) you’d have expected have to opposed the child benefit cap, wring their hands once more.
Never liked the way Maskell grovelled to the rich at Wimbledon
Trump ignored every protocol to swamp the Supreme Court
Boris the Clown lied to the Queen and the Country
Macron is proof that they all piss in the same pot
Democracy died in 2008 ‘Banks to big to fail’
Talking of piss pots…….
https://news.sky.com/story/sir-tony-blair-branded-despicable-by-fire-brigades-union-for-comments-on-grenfell-fire-13210600
…..here’s the behind the scenes de-facto leader of the LP and war criminal who is pulling Herr Starmer’s strings, excusing Grenfell – and by extension the Blood and Post Office Scandals among others – as merely naturally occurring cock up’s because nobody and no system of decision-making is “perfect”.
As though there was not a long-drawn-out process of systemic deceit, dishonesty, prevarication and lying – over decades by just about everyone involved in the public and private depravity and corruption of management and Government/government that these examples demonstrate.
Clearly, the reasonable anticipation of most reasonable people that Governments are not going to create Grenfell’s, Blood scandals or Post Office scandals in their wake, as the natural order of things, is seeking unachievable “perfection”; and those expecting such basic competence are never going to receive it. Ever.
An approach which reveals at least two certainties:
(i) That if ever Blair and his fellow War Criminals face the due process War Criminal trials they deserve to be put through, this will be their defence.
(ii) That every criminal act of this Government and its single transferable party counterparts across the Establishment – from supplying weapons for genocide to waging proxy and other wars and regime changes which have slaughtered millions – will be excused in the same manner as inevitable because anything else is unreasonably expecting “perfection”.
I’m surprised the worm tongued Billy no mates did think of this slimy excuse first to excuse the disingenuousness of the TINA he is supporting and touting as the only “realistic” model and, by extension, the highest natural order possible.
Starmer and Reeves have one job, to destroy the Labour party completely in time for the next election
They will then be paid an obscene amount of money by the Kleptocracy for services rendered
Yes Doug, that nails the swine.
Dunno why you say that Doug. Their job is to support America. The Labour party is selling us out to the yanks. But it’s not a new thing. Labour always were crap.
From elsewhere on the tubes;
An age ago, visiting Glasgow as a youthful Southern Englishman, I fell into a political conversation with an elderly resident, who remembered the 1930’s. “The Labour Party?” he began, “Ye only saw them at election time. All they wanted was your vote. It was the Communists that put the furniture back in the houses.” Yes, the bailiffs are still with us. The Communists aren’t. But perhaps it would be a good thing if there was somebody like them still around.
“Labour ministers are revolting.
Indeed.