Quick update on French politics after a weekend of official campaign launching:
Le Pen is holding steady at 26.5% and looks a pretty good bet to take one of the two spots in the second round unless something drastic happens. Small taster of her speeches:
"Islamic fundamentalism is a yoke France can no longer live under. Muslim veils, mosques and street prayers are cultural threats no French person … attached to his dignity can accept”; radical Islamist prayer centres will be closed down and hate preachers expelled.
Financial globalisation and Islamist globalisation are helping each other out. Those two ideologies aim to bring France to its knees.
I am the only candidate of the people."
Not channelling the political zeitgeist at all, Marine.
Fillon, of the right wing "The Republicans", interviewed on national tv/radio to say that he did nothing illegal with the €1m ficticious jobs payments to family memebers but apologized anyway. He pooh-poohed some other allegations but admitted he had put senate payments for assistants into his pocket (€25k). Claims it was a longstanding practice in political life. He said he had done nothing illegal (it's totally illegal) and was not under investigation over it (yet). He then launched his campaign the same evening and got slated for everything. His campaign's moral stance is "cleaning up politics", all his endorsements are old school cronies who people are sick of so he is freewheeling and unlikely to improve much on his current third-placed 19.5%.
Huge calls for him to resign but the candidate most likely to replace him is the guy he beat, Juppé, who doesn't have grass-roots support and has already been convicted of fiddling public funds on dodgy housing allocations.
Mélanchon, Left, did a funky hologram dual rally: physically in front of the crowd in Lyon, he was projected in front of a crowd in suburban Paris. No one could actually say what he talked about but he looked like a pillock doing it. He's essentially holding the left hostage with his 10% of the vote. The Green's Jadot (1%) is calling for a pre-election left-wing coalition. Add Bayrou's 4% and the Left have a chance but only if Mélanchon chips in his 10%, which he is adamantly refusing to do. Hamon needs a full 10% more than he's currently polling, despite a very strong (and more moderate) campaign launch. The only way he will get that is convincing Mélanchon to sit down with him, which is not looking like happening right now.
And Macron (second with about 23%) finally came out and presented something akin to a programme: Reform unemployment benefits to weight them towards those actively trying to gain employment; Reform taxation on large fortunes; Reduced charges for employeers & employees; Reform the strict working hours system; Improve state retirements; Invest in Education and grant more autonomy to schools; Cut departmental red-tape in the overly burocratic governing system; Invest heavily in the police force; invest in the cultural education and access to culture for young people.
So, despite trumpetting on about being a man of the Center, he's pretty much a man of the Left. There's nothing revolutionary in here, there's also nothing that will scare anyone but the 1% (large fortune taxation), there's also nothing that strikes you as being more indepth than a 2 minute chat about ideals. As the French would say, there's no "fond"(depth or base/solidity), just something floating on the surface. Still, until someone starts asking real questions, or there's a shift in the organisation of the left, he should breeze into the second round and rake in all the anti-Le Pen voters for an easy victory.