I like the way Macron explains why such and such… is necessary/unnecessary etc etc… sadly many folk are too daft to understand the logic… 
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How, exactly?
Maybe he cheats at cards?
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He’s the President FFS 
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Immediately made me think…
From this informative thread:
Of course but the two thirds majority was false. Two thirds of the electorate didn’t want him as president but voted to keep Marine out.
Macron , as thé gilet jaune protests showed went too far too quickly which was unacceptable to many. He could have chosen a more softly softly approach and pushed his policies through with some patience.
That’s democracy 
He did what he said he would do and had the majority to do it.
Who’d be a politician eh? damned if you do, damned if you don’t 
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The point I’m making is that it was a false majority. Problem he may have is that people will abstain or vote for Marine due to his handling of the vaccines etc, assuming it will be him and Marine in the second round.
I understand that Peter but it’s more than just the Presidential election majority isn’t it… he gained the National Assembly as well following his election otherwise there would have been a hiatus in his program of change.
While I don’t disagree with you necessarily at all, reading your comment it struck me, could you imagine what sort of a pathetic individual you would have to be to vote for a hateful racist to be in charge of a country because the other candidate, who’s not a hateful racist, was a little bit slow in getting and giving coronavirus vaccines? At least the idiotic Americans had 8 years of brainwashing to get them to vote for that orange POS, someone so precious they’d vote for a racist because of a vaccine really is either very troubled, very evil, or both perhaps.
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Yes Kirstea which means many , myself included maybe will abstain rather than vote for an extremist or a sitting President who has let me down.
That’s why I’m hoping the Republicans or PS make a comeback.
Nothing about the greater good then Peter… LR are soiled goods thanks to M. Sarkozy and François Fillon both being convicted of criminal activity and ending up with jail terms.
Pity really, I liked them both as politicians… still, that’s life as they say.
On a side note, FF and I share the same birthday (not the same year though) 4th March - tomorrow 
How so given the short time each administration has?
Well done, have a good day tomorrow.
The next Republican candidate could well be Michel Barnier, the EU negotiator.
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Abstain? You can be sure extremists won’t. That’s the Achilles heel of democracy.
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I think one of the difficulties is that Macron promised a lot of thinking about doing differently, but in fact he’s mainly perceived as simply cost-cutting. Let’s face it pensions reform is always difficult as you’re changing things where many people already have years if not decades invested.
But he could have continued along the simplification of auto/micro-entrepreneur status, eg reducing accounts to annual not quarterly, or introducing a ‘pilot’ status for the kind of small business many people start in the UK or US as a sideline (restoring furniture, decoration). He has actually simplified things for me by suppressing RSI and putting URSSAF in charge of the lot, but it wasn’t well communicated to prof liberale how it was going to work and there are still a number of loose ends.
From French family friends in the middle echelons of the civil service I gather that systems are a huge problem. Typically everyone built their own and while some things - tax for example - are excellent systems, anything to do with the self-employed is wretched, and the ANTS migration appears to have forgotten large numbers of non-typical types of exchange (foreign licences, adding new entitlements) which the site handles badly.
Yes, I think he made a mistake with Castex. Philippe was very, very competent. We’ll see. Vaccines are gearing up and he is sensibly pushing them to the areas in greatest need. Maybe the idea is to bring Philippe back before the elections… or am I being too cynical?
One of the reasons for changing from Philippe to Castex was that Philippe was becoming more popular than he was. Presidents don’t like that! I imagine Philippe will be thinking of standing in 2027.
Having just got French nationality I will have a vote next year. At the moment it is hard to see who might emerge on either the centre right or centre left to challenge Macron. I can’t see myself wanting to vote for either Mélanchon or Le Pen.
Macron made a bad mistake in slagging off the AZ vaccine and now they have a real struggle to get people to accept it. Bearing in mind the shortages, it is quite a failure that in February they received 1.75m doses of AZ but only managed to use about 200k.
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To be honest this was my view, an abstention is not actually an abstention at all, but rather a vote for which ever candidate wins as it does nothing to actually sway the vote. All those ‘never Clinton’ and ‘Never Corbyn’ voters voted loud and clear for Trump and Boris even though they abstained as they did nothing to stop it, so abstaining on a vote with Le Pen on is increasing her chances of winning in my personal, non technical, opinions are like a*seholes, view of the issue. The only way to stop a candidate is to vote for someone else.
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