"Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has announced that he is dissolving the national assembly, and calling for legislative elections on June 30 and July 7.
The French president said that he can’t pretend nothing has happened, that the outcome of the EU election is not good for his government and that the rise of nationalists is a danger for France and Europe."
Hey, uhh, Europe? Can we talk?
Look, I know the way the left has been handling immigration has you upset, but could you please take a closer look at the absolute freaks you’re electing today?
I mean, just take a good look at the United States, circa 2017 through 2020. Did we look like electing an absolute freak worked out for us? Did it fix our own immigration problems? Did it make electing your own Donald Trumps look like a good idea?
I just cannot comprehend how anyone can look at post brexit UK and think “yes, I want the same for my country”
It’s truly bizarre. Every couple of decades or so, either the United States or significant chunks of Europe decide, “What the hell, let’s give the right-wingers another chance, they say they’ll fix immigration,” and then we end up cutting funding for services and giving tax cuts to the rich. They pull this shit every goddamn time, and we keep falling for the bait-and-switch.
It seems to be coinciding with economic crises, the rise of wealth inequality due to covid is leading to a rise in fascism, it happens always.
The recent success of the European far right is precisely because they’ve revised their image to get rid of the freakshow aspects. The days when you could dismiss these people just by calling them “absolute freaks” are over.
But the freakiness is still 100% present in their platforms and ideologies. They’re just dressing nicer now.
Unfortunately, “decorum” is really the only thing keeping some folks from hopping on board those movements, not the policies themselves.
No… No they are all still freaks. Did you just take off your “they live” sunglasses or something? The Freakshow aspect is in the ideological makeup.
That’s terrifying
Not true, 95% are still freaks, optically and mentally.
We love copying the USA.
The US won the Civilization cultural victory 70 years ago and the world has continually gotten worse as a result.
We might need a Ghandi with nukes…
Best we can do is Modi
30 years, no?
As an American, I would argue that the United States didn’t win the Cold War, the Soviet Union just lost it.
And making sure to tell the USA how stupid they are at the same time.
A bit hypocritical, eh?
If you look a little closer, it’s not. Educated European people do not want to copy American culture, or at the very least try to pick out the good stuff. They are those who criticise the US for the bad stuff, though.
Our dummies, deplorables, low class people on the other hand have eaten up American culture hook line and sinker, they are culturally in sync with basic bitch Americans and their lifestyle and hobbies (minus guns because of laws)…music, movies, food, holiday destinations, political views, clothing, hobbies is all copied from the US. American soft power works wonders on soft European brains. These are the people who don’t criticise the US but the US shouldn’t take that as a compliment, because they’re morons.
So there is a huge class divide in Europe between people who want to turn Europe in the US, end those who think that’s not a good idea. No hypocrisy.
Educated American people don’t like the way the US is right now either haha
I know
Not really hypocritical, not all of us are Fr*nch
Unfortunately
*our lower classes (in terms of education) do
We’re at the USA obesity levels of 1995, now tell me it’s just the ignorant.
I mean it probably starts there but with a third if a population voting far right, ignorants will soon be the biggest part of our countries.
It might as well be, that’s why the upper classes should look for an alternative.
Also, who is “we”? I’m not from the UK
We = Europe
In that case “we” are at 53%, the US were at least at 55% in the early 90s, which is 35 years ago. I think that’s a long enough timespan to make any comparison moot.
It makes me want to mock the EU considering how much, deserved, shit the US gets. But this is just depressing. I would much prefer the US to be mocked as we get our shit, hopefully, together. Not fucking join us.
Are they electing our Trumps or are we electing their Mussolini? Shitty people being shitty is not a US exclusive, but you’re right.
As Saint George says, garbage in, garbage out
I’d actually give the Catholic Church a few points in the “Good” column if they made Carlin a saint. He could be the patron saint of jesters and fools.
Russia is the biggest winner when far-right sentiment increases
That’s why they are funding and supporting far-right parties in almost any Western country. The AfD in Germany is a good example, their MPs were literally caught receiving money from the RuSSians. Their MEPs also work for the Chinese intelligence service btw
I am from the U.S. so I don’t really understand how this works, or what the significance is. Can anyone EILI5?
“dissolving parliament” means they’ve announced a general election. Parliament won’t meet any more, and all the existing members of parliament will go home and begin campaigning
The UK is going through the same thing. The Prime Minister dissolved Parliament about two weeks ago, and elections are going to be held of July 4th. (An odd choice, but apparently elections are always on a Thursday in the UK.)
Can anyone EILI5?
Sure. A lot of people voted for bullies who can talk themselves out of consequences.
The Far Right movement is gaining momentum because many of their own people are getting tired of the “immigrants are more important” mindset their country is creating. Many of France’s own people are getting ignored, so that the political parties in charge can focus on helping poor immigrants from other countries. Well, France’s own citizens are getting tired of this, and have started to vote in more people who have a “French People First” mentality (similar to what Trump wanted to do, and everyone called him a racist for being “America First”). So, the party RN (National Rally) wins and now their going to get rid of all the current members in Parliament, and have a new vote to get people in. I think that’s what it means?
These takes are always so dumb. “It’s immigration”. Then why do these parties also want to get rid of public access television and radio? Why are they trying to limit investigative journalism? Why are they limiting independent research at universities? Why are the against public welfare systems? Social institutions? Juridicial safety? Democratic protections? It’s almost like it is something more…
There’s a difference between what the right-wing voters are wanting and what the right-wing politicians are doing. You run into the same problems with left-wing voters and politicians too. Not to say that they’re “both the same”, just that you can’t treat them all as one big hive mind.
There is a difference. But what you are saying is not true, bacause it was tested in Sweden. All parties in parliament, except three parties at like 18% votes in total, said the far-right party have always been correct when it comes to immigration (“always” including when they were an explicit nazi party), and switched to their line. If the voters understood and did not want all that other shit, they should have switched. They did not.
But there is a difference. The people who run the party today, who joined it when it was an explicit nazi party, probably have a certain goal in their mind where they need all these steps. The voters, in general, are just rationalizing why they vote for the steps.
But what you are saying is not true, bacause it was tested in Sweden.
I’m saying that the voters and the politicians they vote for are not one big hive mind. You’re saying that they are one big hive mind? And your example is that voters didn’t switch their support when their parties changed the positions? I’m not sure you’ve interpreted what I said correctly.
What are you talking about? I just agreed that there is a difference between voters and politicians, and then I elaborated on one such difference. In the same comment I also tried to highlight that this still means that it is not the “immigration” question they are voting for.
Ah. The problem is that you told me “But what you are saying is not true” and then basically agreed with what I’d said.
I don’t think the average person gives a toss about any of those things or sees them as adding any value to their lives. They believe that journalists are lying propagandists, universities are elitist and out of touch, welfare serves lazy immigrants and social and democratic systems have failed them. Noone really beleives in society anymore, the right would like to create a new one where they fit in.
It’s right wing governments pushing immigration to keep wages low, housing costs high, and replacing boomers in the workforce
Left wingers just want to make life better for their citizens
Yup, but people are dumb. We already have an example of what happens with no immigration, it’s Japan. It’s been economical stagnant for thirty years, and has lost even more quality of life than most countries.
An unprecedented move which could backfire as it did for Chirac in 1997. Macron is playing a dangerous gamble with the Fifth Republic… 🗳️🇫🇷
Comparing it to Chirac’s situation is downplaying how crazy te move is right now. Can you imagine how fucked up this is? Like “oh, the far right has more than twice as many votes as we got, it must be some sort of big misclick situation, lets check it out !”
I think it’s more that the situation is only going to get worse the longer we wait so he’s pulling the trigger now for the best conditions he’s ever going to get. Not great
The conditions he spent years building? Yeah, I’m not falling for that.
Like I said: a dangerous gamble with the Fifth Republic…
We all know how the far right has a hard time letting go of it’s grip on power, that’s for sure. But this ils no ‘gamble’, like he’d be cornered to do this, he led us here. He is deliberately playing with the french like they’re just paws in his self-centered game.
And by the looks of things it seems like I was right it has (so far) spectacularly backfired. Obviously we have to wait for the second round but…
Why is the right becoming more popular? What changed?
2008, the global financial crash, the subsequent shift of trillions of all the currencies towards the already-rich, then Covid hammering the final nail in the coffin of proving that governments care about the people only inasmuch as they provide value.
We’ve had sixteen years of people getting poorer and poorer, shit getting more expensive, and the news outlets they read pointing towards immigrants/gays/leftists as the problem.
The right take those messages and amplify them. They tell people that only they can speak truth to power, when the reality is far more nuanced than that. But people don’t want nuance, they just want to be able to pay their bills. The people aren’t stupid though, they know that the windbags can’t really change anything, but the status quo hasn’t done shit to help them, so fuck it, we’ll vote for the other guy.
“They’re all the same anyway”
2008, the global financial crash, the subsequent shift of trillions of all the currencies towards the already-rich, then Covid hammering the final nail in the coffin of proving that governments care about the people only inasmuch as they provide value.
I get the frustration, but where is the evidence the far right would care an iota more about people? Specially during covid almost every far right government did worse, in terms of actual dead people, than any left one
Sometimes people don’t vote by logic. They see stuf going to shit, hear grand promises of how “we’ll fix everything, the establishment is incompetent/evil”, and hope they’ll deliver.
That’s not the criteria, the criteria is whoever is the loudest in criticizing the status quo. And the far right is the loudest
The far right would make everyone poorer but wouldn’t change the class structure, so they are allowed to exist while the left gets suppressed. See for example how many of the titans of industry in west germany who supported the Nazis got off scot free (or with much commuted sentences) and got to keep their assets. The system works :)
Social media disinformation campaigns from the Kremlin and possibly also the CCP.
Powerful American people/groups spreading disinformation or funding political extremism is very different from the government doing it.
Money is power. Just because that shower have the sense to sit outside of the spotlight of political scrutiny does not mean that they are apolitical nor does it make the influence they cast not strongly American in flavour.
All the major media outlets have been bought by a few far-right billionaires. For some years now, propaganda has been omnipresent, 24 hours a day.
There’s too many factors to name in a brief comment, but here’s an interesting statistic:
In all recent European elections, all center-left parties that have tried to swing to the right on immigration to try and woo right-wing voters, have lost seats. No exceptions.
Edit: Clarified the swing on immigration was to the right.
Is this because they waited too long, or because the answer is something other than anti-immigrant sentiment?
For example, there’s this statistic that almost everyone dies shortly after having CPR performed on them. Paradoxically, that doesn’t mean CPR is bad: it absolutely saves lives. It’s just that they do it too late on a lot of people (and also perform it on a bunch of people who are going to die no matter what but that’s not the point of this anecdote).
Great analogy.
Could cost them their base without attracting new voters too.
Removed by mod
easy emotional messaging × a lot of funding from rich assholes of all types × great means of communication that can target audiences even in isolation.
Technology
The left is fucking the dog, is what.
WTF, why would he do that… This gives me David Cameron / Brexit referendum vibes.
Maybe he hopes that left-leaning voters will get mobilised by the election outcome today.
It’s a bold strategy, let’s see if it pans out.
Fantastic use for this
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
Hopefully they dump this creep on his ass and elect a leftist.
Lol, have you been following the news much?
I’ve actually been trying to keep away from it recently.
That shows because this article (even the title) tells you France will have parliamentary elections, not presidential. Macron will remain president regardless of the outcome.
Bluh. 😒
The reason the “far right” is gaining momentum around the world because of immigration issues. It has nothing to do with “racism” and “bigotry”, like people on Lemmy and Reddit claim. The Left and Liberals are too concern with helping everyone else, and not their own. Countries are abandoning traditional goals and support for their own citizens, and focusing on helping poor immigrants from all over the place. Sooner or later, your own citizens are going to get fed up.
That’s called xenophobia, and it’s a form of bigotry.
I agree with you, and yet… It’s winning them elections. We can be upset about it all we want, but it’s increasingly clear that bigotry and xenophobia are winning arguments in this era. We’re fucked if we don’t adjust. I’m not proposing we abandon migrants, but the one thing myself and the person you replied to likely agree on is that the left is increasingly losing sight of home and the average citizen, not in terms of rhetoric but in effect. We’re about to lose the EU and possibly lose support for Ukraine, see even more immigration restrictions, and see an empowered global far-right. The voters are telling us they have different priorities, which we need to focus on in a more altruistic way than the right. We have to be introspective here if we ever want to accomplish our goals.
Yeah blame the left which is in power in…. Oh right, nowhere. Essentially the voter has tried out all (somewhat) reasonable right politicians and since nothing works they now decided to try the crazy right wingers.
… or don’t introspect, blame the voters, and lose forever. It could not matter less what is true, it’s only what the populace believes. That’s politics. If our ideology can’t stand up to this, it must adjust or it deserves to fail.
… or don’t introspect, blame the voters, and lose forever.
This is what frustrates me most about a lot of the left-leaning parties and voters I’ve encountered over the years. They think that “well obviously we should be winning, we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys. People who vote against our position are either ignorant or evil. So we shouldn’t change anything about it and we should ignore the people arguing against it.”
Whether that’s true or not isn’t the point. The point is that you’re not going to gain any more voters with that strategy. A lot of the people voting against the left have very real and tangible concerns, and you’re not going to get them to vote for you by either telling them they’re wrong to have those concerns or that they aren’t even real in the first place. The left needs to provide them with real solutions to those problems.
Completely agreed. It’s the difference between your political views being an excuse for you to feel morally validated or being a mechanism to improve lives. If it’s the latter, it’s time to get to work. We’re failing and thus losing our ability to do what we stated. If it’s people being idiots, educate them. If it’s people being lied to, reach them. Regardless, we live in a democracy and the entire point is that the people get to choose and the people are rejecting us. We cannot fail to heed those cries.
We must create an inspiring vision that resonates with voters and alleviates their concerns. The stats clearly show people are concerned about immigration and the economy. The right has a cruel, but effective approach in just stopping immigration entirely and many, many people think that is a good idea right now. What is our better answer? I’m no expert and I don’t know, but that is in and of itself a serious problem. Why do I not have a Meloni I can point to as the beacon of my ideology, that has at least some of the answers?
nowhere
The French left has been a lot in power since the 80s.
And xenophobia is apparently a subset of racism, since it’s discrimination based on place of origin, and regardless of what the name implies, racism also accounts for place of origin alongside ethnicity so… Yeah, it’s racism.
It’s called poverty, I don’t know how you’re missing that.
France is not an impoverished country.
And there’s nobody poor in the United States! Nice and simple.
This is just such a false narrative. The issue is not a lack of funds to help our own citizens and refugees. The issue is that those funds are concentrated among very few very wealthy people. Those wealthy people would very much like us to blame the refugees.
It has nothing to do with “racism” and “bigotry”, … too concern with helping everyone else, and not their own.
Tell me you’re racist without saying you’re racist.
I’d say that’s close but more like they’ve concerned themselves with helping the wealthy and need to import more workers due to low fertility and as a way to suppress wages.
So now there isn’t enough housing and everyone starts struggling more because social programs have been underfunded for years and strain to the brink due to the greater load.
And what housing there is was bought up by investment firms during 2020/21 when people were losing their jobs, or having hours cut, and now more people than ever are paying well over the odds to rent a home because they can’t get a mortgage that would likely cost 2/3 what they’re paying in rent.
But no right leaning/conservative government is going to do a fucking thing about that because too many of them are either landlords, or have funds in those investment firms. So their tame papers run stories about an immigrant family being given a seven bedroom house in a fancy part of town.
^Nationalism. AKA racism and xenophobia.
The reason the “far right” is gaining momentum around the world because of immigration issues. It has nothing to do with “racism” and “bigotry”,
That’s… were you trying to be ironic? As mentioned elsewhere it’s xenophobia, which is almost certainly rooted in racism and bigotry.
The entire idea that we should “help ourselves” and not help “others” is racist.
It isn’t necessarily racist. “Ourselves” and “others” can be simply defined by citizenship.
France is one of the biggest offenders of imperialism in the past and continuing it today.
France owes it to help others especially the people they’ve hurt. Countries don’t have functional governments because of France
It’s not.
At least, not here. And it would still be bigotry regardless.
LMAO at the hate on this comment.
We can talk about immigration drivers, all night long, but the fact is that the host country is always resentful of immigrants. It doesn’t matter if that resentment is fair or true or justified, it exists.
Buncha children in here crying, “Racism bad!” Yeah. We know. Some of us grew up on Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. That doesn’t change countries seeing a bunch of poor people flooding in and taking their resources. And whether they’re actually sucking resources doesn’t fucking matter. It looks like they are.
And for all the whiners, how about you take in a poor immigrant family and take care of them yourself? Put your money where your mouth is?
“Uh no. The government should do that for free, somehow, and I don’t want to actually see or deal with it. Or I’ll leave a stern downvote!”
(And for the inbound haters, my wife is a brown immigrant, not even a citizen. Trying to get her youngest moved here.)
You completely fell for it. The problem is not being resources sucked away by immigrants, and there not being enough left for the regular folk.
The problem is the rich not having the same burden as the poor due to wealth not being taxed. It’s called having a shitty quality of life and high costs of living.
This argument is old and tiresome. It’s the same shit they try and say in the US. “hey, who cares about the immigrant problem, let’s go after the rich!” This isn’t about the rich, this is about who’s the problem for the average, middle class citizen NOW. This is about, why are things different NOW, and what can I do to change them? Many countries are bringing in immigrants as a curtisoy, to help those in need…but it’s effecting a class of citizens differently, and now those citizens are voicing concern. The rich will always be here, and that issue will always go in circles because the rich are helping many countries sustain an economy (we always want to attack the rich in the US, but in the end, what would happen if the rich stopped paying anything, and just left?). The argument of “it’s the rich people’s fault!” has been a battling call from the Left for 100’s of years…and they will always default to this, even when it’s clear that immigration is causing problems…
You are wrong and short-sighted, and I will tell you why:
- income disparity between rich and regular folks: if you look at graphs from studies on wealth inequality, it will show you how the rich get richer, while the poor get (especially relative to their cost of living) poorer. And by poor I mean the average folk.
- Immigrants have always been there: both the US and Canada have been built on the backs of immigrants, and are also kept afloat by them. Should we slow down a bit? Perhaps. Should we focus more on the regular folks that already live there? Definitely. But immigration and better social services for those already there are not mutually exclusive. Assuming there are funds for it
- The rich are lobbying the governments to do their bidding: The few hold all the power again, just like in feudalism. And they don’t want to give that up at any cost. This creates a perpetual cycle where they make money to gain power to make more money to gain more power to make… you get the ghist.
- The rich has a lower burden in taxes: A regular folk will get taxed on their income and purchases for a cumulative burden of around 45%. However someone rich will live off of their wealth creating more wealth instead, while foregoing income and thus income tax. Additionally when it comes to cost of living, even if a rich person would pay equal percentage in taxes to a regular folk, that 45% in cumulative taxes will leave the regular folk with say $5.5k to budget for everything on a 10k/mo salary, while a rich individual will have $55k to budget on a 100k/mo salary.
- Immigrants are not taking anyone’s job: In reality new immigrants work all the shitty jobs that no one else wants to or can take anyway. They are either low wage service workers or gig workers, or are actual skilled worker immigrants that are in high demand. Either way they are likely exploited in the low wage position or as the new hire.
Let me know if I should continue. Or maybe someone else will chime in.
So, what do you suggest countries do? Allow anyone and everyone to come in, and government should instead spend all their time and resources going after the wealthy? Are you saying, that if the rich stopped having money, and just…disappeared, everyone would be better off?
