French elections 2017: completing the hat-trick?

The media have made their choice

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3_4Z8CXAAA3qfU.jpg

(it's about the broadcast of the candidates' meeting, caption from left to right: full live broadcast, partial live, delayed, nothing)

does anyone have any idea what would happen if Fillon pulled out? what would be the latest point at which another candidate could take his place as the Les Republicans' candidate? it would be something if this led to an 11th hour Sarko comeback, I suppose that's unlikely though.

Presumably just got even more unlikely...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38890993

maybe i'm just shook by brexit and trump but the right-wing firewall against le pen appears to be dissolving into thin air :/

I think there's a fair degree of wishful thinking going on here, but it's possible:

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/08/opinions/trump-european-populism-andelman/index.html

I'd like to think so. This tho:

Closing all frontiers and barring the desperate and needy is anathema to broad swaths of the French electorate. Moreover, the French are hardly inclined to make their own vast domestic Muslim population feel even more disenfranchised

is like, not true at all. "Broad swathes of the French electorate" don't give a shit what happens to Muslims or immigrants, I'd say in roughly the same proportion as in America.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/world/europe/france-albi-french-towns-fading.html

The visible decline of so many historic city centers is intertwined with these anxieties. Losing the ancient French provincial capital is another blow to Frenchness — tangible evidence of a disappearing way of life that resonates in France in the same way that the hollowing out of main streets did in the United States decades ago. A survey of French towns found that commercial vacancies have almost doubled to 10.4 percent in the past 15 years. As these towns have declined, voters have often turned sharply rightward. Albi is traditionally centrist, but the same conditions of decline and political anxiety are present, too.

Turn a corner in Albi, and you’ll pass the last school inside the historic center, abandoned a few years ago. Down another street is the last toy store, now closed, and around a corner is the last independent grocery store, also shuttered. Walk down the empty, narrow streets on some nights and the silence is so complete that you can hear your footsteps on the stones.

“If nothing is done, a substantial part of the French soul will perish, taking with it more than half the French population,” the businessman Charles Beigbeder wrote in Le Figaro recently, calling for a “Marshall Plan” for “peripheral France.”

Exactly like the UK then.

Though the sharp turn rightwards is debatable. As it probably is in France.

Still, we'll be okay, we're Brexiting!

I haven't been to Albi, had the idea of going this last summer when I was in Toulouse for a week, but the weather was off. It sounds like the problem is familiar to Americans: they opened a mall outside the town center, and many people prefer going there, as it is in the States.

I stayed away from Fillon's rally today, for which it sounds like right-wing Catholics were bussed in to hear (unsurprisingly nothing about it at mass this morning, since my church, mostly African immigrants, aren't the Catholics that the LR want). The weather's awful today, but that seems appropriate.

‪Fillon's capacity for self-important melodrama is just limitless‬

Lavish ad for Le Pen headed up by BBC's Hugh Schofield who's squeaked right-wing opinion into his French political analysis in the past - reluctant to link to it but: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/marine_le_pen

Don't think they're doing this for other candidates but would love to be proven wrong.

stoked for le madness

live feed of the debate with inadvertently funny live English language dubbing.

http://www.france24.com/en/livefeed

(funny to me anyway, but I'm easily amused)

the guy doing Melenchon is my favourite

omg

was trying to work out who Melenchon's voiceover artist reminded me of and then I realised it's the guy from Office Space

http://image2.funscrape.com/images/o/office_space-25299.jpg

"bad guys? i don't like ´em! never have! zero tolerance for lawlessness!" - everybody

er did hamon just suggest le pen is on drugs?? maybe i missed something

so proud of hamon and melanchon for their answers on immigration.

"No no, no no, no no, no no no..."

English dubbers getting into their role enthusiastically! Lol.

macron looks like a little boy up there :/

Fillon looks like he'd rather just be at the beach with a drink.

The bunch looks quite doloreux tbh

le pen literally just said that unemployment is the fault of the unemployed, because they haven't been looking hard enough. wtf. even my le-pen-leaning father-in-law would disagree w that.

how much does he hate muslims tho

oh lots! lots and lots. well not individual ones. mysteriously, every person he actually knows or meets - gay or muslim or anything else he has an ostensible, widely-declared problem with - he thinks is fine. "one of the good ones" i guess. but in the abstract? grr snap bite

le pen literally just said that unemployment is the fault of the unemployed, because they haven't been looking hard enough. wtf. even my le-pen-leaning father-in-law would disagree w that.

IIRC she said that that's what the unemployed are told

Summing up Macron's whole debate for you: "I agree".

OK that makes more sense! (Presumably on her way to blaming immigrants...)

By that point I was zapping around the dial, everything was just so infuriating, so I think I missed the setup to that. Macron has totally bought into the anti-immigrant narrative, totally bought into the burkini ban. He's spineless. To be honest he looked like you could knock him over with a feather. I fear for him against Le Pen.

I was really impressed with Hamon apart from the bickering he seemed unable to stop himself from entering into. He was confident, succinct, memorable. But I can't imagine anything he can do now will be enough.

My kids thought Macron was the clear winner, the only one who looked "presidential" in their eyes. They'd never seen Le Pen before & thought she was awful. But the real laughs were for Fillon, who seemed happy to lay back and zing.

Macron certainly wins the "most likely to be in an underwear ad"

Woops hit send to quick

Le Pen really sounds like a crank half the time, no matter how much she's "modernized" her language. On the economy her very first issue was that trucks travel too far to deliver food. And that France needs "food security". I mean, yeah I guess so? But it's like she literally imagines that fences will go up along the borders and nothing can go in our out and we need to live like cave people. She wants to pretend globalized transport and finance don't exist, she wants to wish them away by statute.

Is she perhaps using coded language to ensure farmers that they will get their national subsidies? I don't know, it just sounds like something someone in Denmark could say, and mean something completely different :)

Maybe so. My tenuous grasp of the language and culture is putting me at a disadvantage here :/

Lol for instance I have now worked out that Hamon wasn't accusing Le Pen of being addicted to drugs - he said she was addicted to the imagery of violence, to "crime stories"

I'm confused as well because I really thought Hamon was punchy, smart, strong, persuasive, solid - but all the commentary basically ignores him. Everybody's saying the two big winners were Fillon, for not, I dunno, literally melting into a bubble onstage, and Melanchon because he was funny.

Mélenchon and Fillon were both funny, but I don't think any of this moves voters in any direction.

Fillon's scandals just keep on getting better: Billionaire Lebanese businessman paid Fillon $50,000 to set up meetings with Putin & Total CEO

(http://bfmbusiness.bfmtv.com/france/fillon-a-touche-50-000-dollars-pour-organiser-une-reunion-avec-poutine-1126712.html)

holy shit

Also, the investigation for the main case about his wife's work has been extended and now include "aggravated scam" and "forgery".

i can't believe that he gets away with all that. that does not forebode well for the state democracy is in france. fillon seems to have nothing to lose, otherwise he would have given up a long time ago. he seems to be the incarnation of a politician who has completely lost the inner compass of what decency and honesty are.

Is he really getting away with it though? I mean, yes in a way he absolutely is, he should have been replaced by his party or at least he should have had the decency of quitting, so the fact that he's still here is a disgrace, and I agree that the state of democracy here is terrible, but before these scandals were known no one expected him to lose this election, it was pretty much a given that whoever won the right-wing primary was gonna be our next president. But because of all this shady stuff he's now trailing in the polls and it's doubtbul he'll make it to round 2 (of course crazier things have happened these past few monthes so you can never know, but it looks very unlikely right now).

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C7hGcOYX0AA7hcW.jpg

Latest poll from after the debate. Fillon's 17% still quite baffling tbh. Macron picking up steam.

my colleagues still fear Fillon more than anyone else, including Le Pen. her ceiling is clear, the thought goes, but Fillon's isn't, despite everything.

70% of le pen's voters are "solid" - vs about half that for macron. i can't imagine fillon's peeps are very solid but maybe this rump 17% are the die-hards, dunno.

Yeah I'd say for the most part the 17% are the die-hards + some folks who want right-wing policies and for some reason think Macron is too soft/lefty.

Maybe I'm crazy but if it comes down to Fillon vs. Le Pen I wouldn't bet on Fillon. A lot of people on the left will sit this one out because they don't want to choose between a shit sandwich and a sandwich made of shit.

As an immigrant I hope you're wrong. I doubt it will come to that though.

her ceiling is clear

heh

"Twenty-nine percent of viewers thought Macron was the most convincing, ahead of firebrand leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon with 20 percent, while Le Pen and conservative Francois Fillon were tied in third place, a snap survey conducted online by Elabe pollsters towards the end of the debate showed. Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon came in last."

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-france-election-idUKKBN16R1M5

Am I tripping out here or was there some other Elabe poll?