Politicians braced for backlash as Europe turns against austerity. At the end of last month, 5,000 people marched through Dublin to protest against the imposition of a €100 (£80) household tax that the Irish government was already struggling to collect from voters sick of austerity measures imposed on a stagnating economy.
HISTORY: How did they occupy this place in French society? POLITICS: why they haven’t been stopped. France’s electoral hangover. 0EmailShare.
Carnage as Europeans refuse to take their medicine. Protestors clash with riot police during a large anti-austerity demonstration in Athens last year.
Photo: AFP LONDON: Europe's political centre is starting to crumble. Elected governments have already been swept away - or replaced by EU technocrats without a vote, indeed to prevent a vote - in every eurozone state where unemployment has reached double-digits: Spain (23.6 per cent), Greece (21 per cent), Portugal (15 per cent), Ireland (14.7 per cent), and Slovakia (14 per cent). The political carnage has been striking. Ireland's Fianna Fail, creator of the Irish free state, has lost every seat in Dublin. For more than two years, Europe's mainstream political elites have been battling to save the single currency, seeking its salvation in a German-scripted program of austerity and legally enshrined fiscal rigour that curbs the budgetary sovereignty of elected governments.
Related: Islam + Left - Michael Brull. The Left should be firmly and unapologetically secularist.
The Left, rightly in my view, has historically stood for classical Enlightenment values of rationalism. We should support people thinking for themselves, rather than believing in irrational and empirically dubious dogmas. We should support people challenging undeserving authorities, rather than offering them deference or outright obedience.
Related: Islam + Left - Tad Tietze. Michael Brull makes two key claims that lead him to confusing issues of principle and strategy for a Left forced to deal with political Islam’s influence.
First, he argues that while ‘[p]olitical Islam can take many different forms’, it is not anti-imperialism, it is not feminism, and it is not socialism – and he backs this with examples of reactionary policies and betrayals by various Islamist formations. If the argument were about whether the Left should import Islamism into its politics, there would be nothing to debate. We should not: we must remain fiercely critical and independent of any reactionary policies and actions. But today the organised Left is almost everywhere a marginal force, and organisations well to the Right of us play a major role in resisting imperialism, dictatorship and neoliberalism, however inconsistently. Tad Tietze response. The wave of revolutions sweeping the Arab world represents a sharp break from almost a decade of defensive struggle against triumphant neoliberalism and neo–conservatism.
Philosopher Peter Hallward calls it an opportunity to break the pattern of TINA (the notion that ‘there is no alternative’ to the relentless assault by ruling elites on their peoples), while Slavoj Žižek celebrates the revolution’s appeal to the ‘eternal idea of freedom, justice and dignity’.34 Yet some are anxious that the revolts will be hijacked by Islamist political currents bent on imposing sharia law, oppressing women and homosexuals, and crushing hopes for freedom under theocratic rule. The spectre of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has been raised not only by Western leaders but by some sympathetic to the uprisings. In my view, building united fronts with Islamist currents around specific issues is an inescapable part of any potentially successful Left politics in the Middle East. Michael Brull response. Perhaps the most astonishing thing in Tietze’s essay is his dismissal of ‘a naïve adherence to secularism as a progressive force in the modern world’.
It reminds me of Emma Goldman’s meeting with Lenin, during which he informed her that ‘free speech … is, of course, a bourgeois notion’. Goldman reeled in horror: ‘Free Speech, free Press, the spiritual achievements of centuries, what were they to this man?’ 45 All I can say is: yes, Tad, secularism is a progressive force in the modern world, and has been for a long time. I would be amazed if he disputed that in Europe, or if he was willing to compromise secularist values in Australia. Round One - French elections 2012. Rather dangerous Monsieur Hollande. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Left Front and the Fascists. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Left Front and the Fascists posted by lenin I don't have time to digest and analyse this as thoroughly as I would like, but yesterday's elections in France deserve some kind of discussion on the blog.
Following his victory in Bradford West, George Galloway's article in the Morning Star argued that the conjunctural factors making his success possible were the same that are undoing the neoliberal consensus in France and Greece, and shortly across the EU. There are, caveats aside, obvious parallels between Galloway and Mélenchon; we will see whether a UK equivalent to the Left Front emerges. If yesterday's election results in Paris are anything to go by, you might think this a rather worrying comparison. Jim Wolfreys French Elections - Jim Wolfreys - 25th April 2012. Left must lead fight against Le Pen. The leadership of the Front National (FN) around Marine Le Pen has tried very hard to ditch the party’s fascist image.
There has been a fight inside the party to enforce this line and to play down elements most associated with its fascist past. France rediscovers the allure of shaping its own singular destiny. It seems that the French presidential elections are once again providing their most sceptical neighbours with a delicious opportunity for ridicule.
In the estimation of much of the British media, this is a contest – the first round of voting takes place today – characterised by populism and demagogy, dangerously lacking in pragmatism, and in which 30% of the vote threatens to fall to extremists. The schadenfreude is unsurprising. French society has always been as vilified as it is envied for its apparent independence, its munificent welfare state, its glowing infrastructure and the supposed quality of life of its inhabitants. Surely, after the reality check of 2008, France is at last waking up to the harsh truths of life in the global economy? On one level, it would seem that this election is indeed proof that France has woken up.
It's true that there are key differences in what each proposes, Hollande offering a clear social democratic alternative. ‘France now more racist than 5 years ago’ Extremism’s on the march in a declining Europe. Emma-Kate Symons The ultimate winner of the first round of the French presidential election is undoubtedly Marine Le Pen. Or as the new poster girl of the European extreme right told her dazzled, dancing devotees in Paris: “Whatever happens over the next 15 days, the battle of France has just begun, nothing will ever be like before.” Close to one in five voters backed the heir to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front crown. The much better than expected result embarrassed pollsters and political figures who had underplayed the popularity of the “Blue Marine Wave”.
It is an unprecedented score for Europe’s most spectacularly successful far right anti-immigrant, and now firmly anti-capitalist, political movement. Marine Le Pen: neither Left nor Right, just a chain-smoking, race baiting opportunist. Marine Le Pen is a triangulator par excellence Expect the newspapers to be full of the end of La France. Against her better judgment, that hysterical madame has voted in the presidential elections for a socialist first and an ineffectual conservative second. She also gave twenty percent and third place to the nationalist candidate, Marine Le Pen. The Left will say that it's 1933 all over again. Only instead of an Austrian corporal threatening democracy and liberty, we have a chain-smoking Frenchwoman clippity-clopping down the Champs Elysees in leather boots – lighting her Gauloise with a burning Koran.
Seen from another angle, Marine’s victory is no victory at all. Given how far France has shifted to the Right on immigration, it is surprising that Marine didn’t do any better. Marine Le Pen: France’s Woman in the Wings. The Lone Star State has led a surprisingly progressive overhaul of its incarceration system. The story behind the bipartisan push that GOP contenders may be extolling come 2016.
It appears Rick Perry is going to run for president again in 2016. Perry, 65, will leave the governor’s office next January after serving for 14 years, beginning in 2000, when George W. Bush resigned to prepare for the presidency. In recent months, Perry has appeared in both Iowa and South Carolina. Le Pen voters grapple with their role as kingmakers. Alain, a repair man, was up a ladder fixing shop signs and, as he put it, "working like a dog to earn 900 pounds a month and still barely feed the family".
France election: Hollande takes lead into second round. 23 April 2012Last updated at 10:01 GMT French President Nicolas Sarkozy says a "crucial time has now come" for the people of France French President Nicolas Sarkozy faces an uphill struggle in the second round of the presidential election, after coming second in Sunday's first vote. François Hollande on top but far right scores record result in French election. Le Pen shocks France as far right hits historic heights - FRENCH ELECTIONS 2012. Rick Santorum Doesn’t Like the French, But America Increasingly Does. Rich irony in French election farce.
French election blog 2012. Seumas Milne. Elysée. France's future: A country in denial. The French election: An inconvenient truth. Marine Le Pen and the silent army of unusual suspects. A Tragedy in Toulouse - By Eric Pape. PARIS – Just as the week was beginning in southwestern France, on March 19, a man appeared at the entrance of a small Jewish school in Toulouse wielding a pair of powerful guns, including a semi-automatic pistol. As parents dropped off their children on the sidewalk, or left to take younger kids to other nearby schools, the first shots rang out -- every parent's worst nightmare. He continued into the Ozar Hatorah middle and high school, where he shot at adults and children, witnesses said in French radio and television interviews, sometimes at nearly point-blank range. Trapped Between Neighbours and Politics: The Painful Position of Europe's Jews.
Marseilles “It’s hard to be a Jew.” Michèle Teboul tells me this with a self-effacing smile, because she knows that hers is not the face of hardship: Her clothing business is doing well, her children have good lives and she’s happy living in the dense cultural mosaic that is Marseilles. French election plunges into ‘obsession with immigrants’ Samia Ghali has spent her whole political career waiting for a French election to turn its attention to the lives of her 100,000 poor, mainly Arab constituents. Now, as the presidential election descends into a debate about immigrants and Islam, she is wishing the topic hadn’t come up. French right focuses on 'radical' Muslims - Features. Sacking Sarkozy won’t be enough. Sarko French Connections. France election 2012: Nicolas Sarkozy bans cheese from Elysée Palace. France election 2012: Nicolas Sarkozy accused of using Islamist terror swoops to boost campaign.
Merkel distances herself from Sarkozy’s fiery appeal to right-wing voters. Is Sarko fini? Sarkozy - What's French for U-turn? Face to face with the far right: meeting Marine Le Pen. François Bayrou: stuck in the middle and mind-blowingly boring. France election 2012: where on earth is François Bayrou? François Bayrou: The disappearing third man.
Eva Joly: wrong message or wrong messenger? Green party's 'strange' Joly struggles to win over voters. French voters leaning toward 'Monsieur Normal' for president. Francois Hollande win may dent Angela Merkel's dominance. Enter Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Jean-Luc Mélenchon moves from left to centre stage in battle to be president. Mélenchon: the poetry-loving pitbull galvanising the French elections. M.guardian.co.uk. Irish Left Review · The French elections and the poll surge of Left Front candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon MEP. French voters warm to Left party's maverick. Jean-Luc Mélenchon's policies are no far-left fantasy. Jean-Luc Mélenchon: "There is Nothing More Anti-capitalist Than 'The People First' " - L'Humanité in English.
The Mélenchon phenomenon: Aux armes, citoyens. George Galloway and Jean-Luc Mélenchon expose a huge political gap. Bradford points the way / Features. Melenchon pays the ransom of success. Jean-Luc Mélenchon paye la rançon de son succès. Mediapart 2012 - Le grand entretien avec Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Meeting de Mélenchon à Marseille: près de 100.000 personnes réunies sur la plage du Prado.