Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

If liberal media smear Mélenchon as akin to Le Pen, he stands far to the left of the mainstream (including Hamon) on questions of racism and Islamophobia. He strongly condemned the last Socialist government’s state of emergency, made permanent by Macron, whose measures encourage police harassment of ethnic minorities. He is also a stout opponent of French interventions in West Africa and the Middle East. "The Left should welcome Mélenchons"

Reposting Emmanuel Macron is a Silicon Valley-loving, union-hating, Third Way centrist. He’s no bulwark against the far right. "Emmanuel Macron is not your friend"

France "In the first round of the elections this year, the number of workers who voted for it [the Front National] was far ahead of any other party—37 per cent; in the second round, 56 per cent. As inequality of income and insecurity of employment steadily increased under the system of collusive alterna- tion, so have those willing to cast their ballot for the fn : 4.8 million in the Presidential election of 2002, 6.8 million in the regional elections of 2015, 7.7 million in the rst round in 2017, 10.6 million in the second round—the last gure, however, an arti ce of the distortions imposed by the double tour . Its real level of support is about a fth of the elector- ate, less than those—mainly workers too—who abstain, vote blank or spoil their ballots. 12 There was never the slightest chance that Marine could win the Presidency. Far from being a deadly threat to the system in place, the fn is an eminently functional part of it, clasping together all respectable opinion...

To the Varoufakises and the Masons who are hell-bent on maintaining/saving international liberalism Capitalism's noisiest enemies are now on the right

How mainstream racism, the racism of the establishment, in France, made Le Pen's racism manistream, and helped her get into the second round of the elections. "Go back to September 1984, when the Socialist prime minister, Laurent Fabius,  told a TV interviewer  that the elder Le Pen, a card-carrying racist and neo-fascist, was posing the right questions but giving the wrong answers. A few years later, the Socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, declared that France had reached a  “threshold of tolerance”  in terms of the impact of immigrants. In 1991, after  clashes  broke out between French police and youths of Arab and North African descent, politicians from the left, right, and center fell over one another to denounce immigration and bash French Muslims. In June of that year, for example, it wasn’t the elder Le Pen who decried an “overdose” of immigrants who brought to France “three or four wives, some 20 children,” plus “noise” and “smell.” It w...

No easy answers, just bad history A reply to  Why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism

France: penned in