The Politics Thread

[Khan]

At this point, the British royal family would have been better off just going off to Aruba for an extended vacay. 

[DramatistDreamer]

The Reparations Committee of Aruba might look forward to the momentum a visit from the British Royals might bring. The Dutch government and the Dutch monarchy…maybe not so much.

[DRW50]

Edward and Sophie are the family who are supposedly closest to the Queen. I am not sure how much the Queen is still there, but sometimes I wonder if they are doubling down on these activities for her as I imagine she would take the loss hard. But it's the job of a monarch to accept and face reality. Unfortunately, as shown  with Andrew, that is something the Queen increasingly will not do...

At this point, as someone who was probably pretty pro-monarchy for a long  time, after everything with Andrew and Meghan Markle I think their time has passed. 

As for Miss Madison, that photo was leaked by a former friend/campaign person, which is not surprising as he is apparently a huge [!@#$%^&*] to everyone. He really screwed  up by going  around talking about Republicans inviting him to coke orgies. 

[DramatistDreamer]

No U.S. style horse race narrative, just straight up results. French voters can actually go to bed knowing who won the election. 

[Juliajms]

Why on earth did they go after the disaster that was Katie and Williams trip? Wild horses couldn't have dragged me on a royal tour after that. How much clearer can it be that they are not welcome?

[DramatistDreamer]

They live in a total bubble, is all I can come up with. Other than Princess Diana and now Harry, the rest appear to be completely disengaged from the people outside of their milieu. Still living in a “Past time Paradise”, as Stevie Wonder would say. They have a colonialist mentality, that somehow their former colonies remain vassal states and will fawn at their feet with the mere mention of kind words and flowery language. They need to get over themselves.

Maybe they believe that if they all repeat the same message, over and over, that will somehow make it true and people will believe them, despite the fact that their actions remain contrary to their words?

I admit, I am no fan of the Royal family, as they enriched themselves breaking the backs of my ancestors (much like England did). They just need to put actions behind their empty words or just go away.

Edited April 24, 2022 by DramatistDreamer

[janea4old]

Thank goodness Macron defeated the fascist.
However, next are the French parliament elections in June.
https://www.thelocal.fr/20220424/french-parliamentary-elections-when-do-they-happen-and-why-are-they-important/

[DramatistDreamer]

You wouldn’t know he even won if you listened to BBC news. To them it wasn’t a resounding win because Macron is respected but “not loved”. That his margin of victory was only healthy because he was the only candidate standing in the way of the far-right. Do they not remember that Macron had to beat out other candidates (including Mélenchon) to get to the runoff, while Le Pen barely squeezed into the runoff herself? And Macron being the only alternative to LePen, well, isn’t that how it works when there are only two candidates left? Never mind the fact that Macron is the first French President to be re-elected in twenty years.

Now they’re going on about the “unsexy” parliamentary elections. It appears that BBC suffers from the same media disease as the U.S.: a fever for a horse race narrative. If they can’t find one, they’ll create one.

 

They didn’t have much to say about Slovenia.

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[JaneAusten]

I used to listen to the BBC a lot more than I do now. It's been tainted like many others peddling sensationalism and horse race garbage more and more.

My neighbor returned from a trip to France - she has family in Dieppe, so I trust her feedback more than anything I read anywhere based on her conversations with family and friends she talks to there and reads from there. 

Honestly there was never a danger in Macron not winning and as she told me yesterday, it was expected.

Sure there is still a lot of anxiety especially in the poorer parts of France. Normandy has a lot of poverty and hurt relatively speaking. But too many people there understand the danger of Le Pen and that movement.

Now keep in mind her family are not extremes on either side of the political spectrum  but they were talking about Melenchon when she was there weeks ago. He and Le Pen were actually polling neck to neck and had the youth vote been higher he would have easily beat her. And they were even saying then about Melenchon's strategy will be rallying for the PM position. That was not a common discussion point in any of the media and still isn't, but they believe he has a very good chance of pulling an upset unless Macron can agree on and form a real coalition with real commitments. So time will tell.

 

[DramatistDreamer]

Sounds like the Brexit effect imo.

[DramatistDreamer]

[Cat]

I voted in yesterday's election (my mom is French). I've been hearing nothing but talk about Macron being a weakened figure and Le Pen on the cusp of taking power. The far-right, unfortunately, has been a mainstream movement in France for quite a while, and the last two elections should tell observers that. However, you are spot-on that Melenchon was within a whisker of stealing Le Pen's place in the second round. They are polar opposites when it comes to immigration, but the two do share some agreement on some economic policies. Both also side-eye the EU and NATO. And this kind of radicalism has attracted many. Many political trends at the moment across the world are heading in these radical, polarised streams, with people not so much wanting to fix the system, but break it and implement a new one.

I think Melenchon definitely wants to be PM -- if only to listen to the sound of his own voice! I don't have quite the starry-eyed view of Melenchon as some in the media do. A sizeable youth vote aside, Melenchon hankers for the good old days of Soviet communism and IMO that does not work. But if a disaffected France votes for his Union Populaire in the legislative elections, he has a chance of forcing a coalition on Macron. 

[JaneAusten]

@Cat Thanks for sharing.  All of it is very unsettling in many ways and not surprising.  I know elections are not the same as they are here but margins like that would be called a landslide here. That's not to say that the fringes have not gained more momentum - that's happened here but we have only had one mainstream party embrace the fringes - perhaps because that party was the most vulnerable or perhaps because they have never been all that interested in democracy period(The Jim Crow south of 100 years post civil war was more fascist than democratic and that wasn't so long ago).  But of course republicans here never want to talk about that nor does our own media, who keeps celebrating the worst of the worst - people like Ron DeSantis and of course Trump.

I'd be very interested in whether Melenchon is a doer versus a talker.   The far left here always talks about what should be done but there is never a real plan on how to legislatively get things done. The members elected at least in our legislative branch always seem to be the least interested in helping craft legislation and spending their time on social media and chastizing other democrats than the real threat.

 

 

[Vee]

Musk taking Twitter is awful news, among many chief reasons being it is almost certain Trump will be allowed back on, as goat man Dorsey retreats further into his ayahuasca vision quests rambling into the abyss about how he can 'prove' CNN engineered chaos in Ferguson.

That being said, I think it is ultimately transitory. Musk has the attention span of milk. He will get bored, break Twitter somehow and walk away in due course. It's not as if we don't have enough horrible shīt to deal with which is much more taxing.

[dragonflies]