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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Well a leopard never changes its spots.Does it
Daddy was not exactly exactly someone nice and is she doing a
Merkle.
Macron is not perfect but
It is not only a failure but a danger to the health of the whole of France.
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Perhaps I am reading different things. I did not see Macron “slagging off the AZ”… I read that it was felt there was not enough positive data … which seems a good reason to NOT do something…
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Well he would get my vote.
Le Penn no way
We’ll have to see if he has any opposition from other in his Party.
Your examples are good. I wish more people would get this. If you can’t hold your nose and vote for a centrist who disappoints you, you eventually end up with extremist, because extremists know how to exploit the weakness of democratic systems. It’s not eloquent or idealistic or pure. It’s just where we are now.
I’ll get my coat…
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Does that mean voting for anyone else but Macron (even if Marine Le Pen is the only other choice) or not voting at all? What is the french for ‘rock and a hard place’?
Entre la peste et le choléra
I’ve been following Macron quite closely…
He wasn’t my first choice as President, but from what I’ve see/read/heard… I don’t think he is a bad person…
and I don’t think he has his own personal agenda… as so many politicians seem to have these days in whatever country.
I view him as a man who is doing his best in a very, very difficult situation.
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yes you have said it
That is how it is
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