Is it likely in your view that this will end in tears?
Considering the German alliances over time when it becomes almost like mating elephants… taking a period longer than any other species to achieve the final political result.
I was listening to Fabien Roussel on Inter this morning and he’s awful. I don’t like Melenchon terrible old sexist windbag, Jadot is a creep, the socialists are a joke, god what a useless bunch. Roussel really irritated me, but Zemmour and MLP and the rest of the swivel-eyed loonies on their end of the spectrum make me feel sick so I really hope LREM do well. That’s who I shall be voting for anyway.
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I see it rather less in personality terms than Véronique!
It’s interesting I think that they’ve agreed the electoral alliance but not a common programme (yet) - one thorny issue will of course be the EU - disagreement over which was the reason Mélenchon left the Socialists in the first place.
I don’t know much about German politics - but generally speaking I think Socialist/Green alliances are both positive and inevitable - and the politics of both are likely to move further left (for the same reasons voters are moving to political extremes - centrism is all about the status quo and not changing anything too quickly, but this is not a sustainable position in the climate/ecological breakdown we are now beginning to experience).
Coalitions between more centrist socialist parties and those further left - including the Communists in Portugal - have of course worked spectacularly well elsewhere.
I’ve been thinking about the ‘personalities vs policies’ issue. (My daughter told me off for saying I thought Mélenchon was a bit maverick, with the words ‘But who has the best programme?’ - and I had to admit he probably did).
But is it a weakness of the French, and American (etc) presidential systems that they focus attention on personalities rather than policies?
Mass media tends to do this anyway, of course, because for a whole range of reasons it doesn’t want people to think about politics as it really is - a struggle between adverse power and economic interests. But perhaps presidential systems like the Irish or Austrian that give far less power to a single individual help inhibit the focus on personalities, whereas France’s facilitates it?
LREM now rebranded as Renaissance - this - and the reasons given for it - seem to indicate that at some level Macron etc share my view that En Marche only succeeded because it was perceived as new and different.
The problem is, of course, that unless it shows itself to be new and different in practice - ie. unless this time Macron radically alters the status quo - it will continue to lose voters to parties that do offer - or seem to offer - real change.
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