This is a new world political trend. Elections are won by populists. In their rhetoric, they act against the rich. And protect those who are poorer. They do not have an exact ideology and program. Only a vague promises that everyone likes.

the hard left is such a joke



on one hand le pen is hiring fascists. on the other macron might lower spending a couple of percent and reform the labour market. tough choice.

Looking back in the polls at the % of Mélenchon voters who'll switch to Le Pen it seems to have grown as his vote grew - it was 8% back in early March. Possibly his gain in the last month was more from Le Pen voters switching than one might imagine. Either way am certainly not impressed by his period of consultation about whether to issue a voting recommendation, and his vote being so close to Fillon's in terms of their 2nd round split just can't be a good look.

Almost certainly wrong to characterize the Melenchon Round 1, Le Pen Round 2 voters as the hard left. More likely they're the "change" / "shake things up" voters with no real ideology. The disappointing thing about that diagram isn't so much the people who flipped to Le Pen, but all the abstentions from the second round. I bet you will find some hard left people in that gray section, and they are wrong!

A super low turnout is what I'm rooting for, it'd be the best thing to unlegitimize those equally stinking
pieces of trash.

Judging from the Trump experience it is only rhetoric. Far right types seem to be much the same as the conservative establishment when they get into power. Perhaps enough people understand that in France to prevent a Le Pen win.

It would have been interesting to see Melenchon would have been any different.

I give her 10 % of winning

That's roughly where the bookies are.

On the polling data it is actually much less than that. Most were expecting some kind of far right polling bias but it seems she actually underperformed the polls in the first round.

If the polls were that accurate for the 1st round, is it a good idea to bet on vote percentages for 2nd round?

You'd think so. An actual election should be more representative of what should happen in a subsequent election than an opinion poll.

The supposed blame for the failure of polling in the UK General Election, Brexit and the US election was down to a lack of accurate representation among the poorest and least educated in opinion polls. Very poor and uneducated people just did not want to talk to opinion pollsters at all.

In any actual election you would expect to see this effect if it exists. It doesn't appear to exist in France. It may be the opinion pollsters have tightend up their methodology-they were certainly trying very hard to do so by all accounts. So you'd expect the second round to go with the opinion polls also.

The Marxist left, which I'm guessing is pretty close to what you mean by "hard left" would be entirely consistent with that.

Marxists believe essentially that capitalism will eat itself, then you get revolution. So a Marxist would be ambivalent about this election at best and some may actually vote for Le Pen.

Macron will just slow things down-Le Pen will create so much bad feeling revolution becomes a real possibility. For the same reasons some left-wingers in the US (Susan Sarandon actually went public on this) voted Trump because they want to see the country burn.

Very poor and uneducated people voted for Cameron?

This isn't 1789, people aren't starving and despite her numerous bad points neither does Le Pen wish to starve them. There is no realistic chance whatsoever of a revolution, let alone a "real possibility".

This reminds me so much of the type of nonsense parroted by Young Socialist friends of friends in the 1980s.

They didn't have to vote for Cameron for the polls to be wrong. They have to be disproportionately sampled as Labour voters when in actuality more vote UKIP or abstain than the sample shows.

As for your comment about revolution, I'm telling you what Marxists believe, not what will or will not happen.

That said, the correlation between extreme poverty and revolution isn't that strong and it is non-linear. At a certain level of poverty people are too weak to resist. Political activism is time-consuming and requires resources. People in the Soviet Union were not starving when they took to the streets-nor in dozens of other cases around the world.

There's an additional question of what revolution is. It may be legislative rather than violent or some combination of the two. Some might argue it could be neither.

There's some merit to the argument that our form of "capitalism" is just socialism for the rich.

The problem with this analysis is that it works on the assumption that there is something wrong with capitalism and it can be fixed. It can't. This is how things are going to be under a capitalist system.

When you put so much power into the hands of a small number of very rich people then they are going to use that power to influence legislation in their favour and against that of ordinary people. There is nothing to stop them in the long run. The unions did for a while, but ultimately, capitalists control capitalist states, not politicians or the people.

The armed forces certainly suffered from extreme poverty, and fomented the revolution:


Russian Revolution 1917

Poverty is a factor in revolutions. It isn't the sole factor and there isn't an obvious linear relationship, that was the point.

Most scholars agree that Marx believed revolution didn't have to be violent.

Personally my guess will be that any effective revolution is neither legislative nor violent but will be focued on dismantling corporate power. To some extent this process has begun.

I agree with your view and understand your passion. Though I think you don't actually need to go as far as you say: if the billionaires were simply paying the standard rate of tax they were supposed to, social programs would be no issue.

The difficulty comes with changing the system. Polticians are owned by the corporations. I don't believe electoral democracy is the answer. The recent US elections showed what happens when a genuine public champion slips through the cracks and becomes a contender.

Shuffle nailed it.

If Obama was GOP and doing all of the drone strikes, the left would be in arms over these acts of aggression and trying to get him to minimize the strikes. But because he was a Democrat and was supposed to be an opponent of unchecked aggression, these things slipped through the cracks and became the norm.

The loss of freedom had been a slow, incremental process for over 200 years. Due to Trump's lack of subtlety and political intellect, that has been changed. The change has been so drastic that the true patriots have been awoken and are now opposing this regime.

The main problem with this is that we waited too long. We no longer have the ability to control the wants and desires of the elite because of our complacency with what he had at that time. We will learn how little power the many have over the few in the long run. Sure we might win a battle here and there but we're losing the war. Yeah, we screamed about how bad repealing ObamaCare would be and we won. But the desire to repeal and replace won't go away. The next GOP President will likely be a bit smarter than Trump and know how to get it done with less resistance. If that one won't, the next will. Generations will pass with the same issue and as the scales tip towards the government and away from the people, they will get what they want regardless of the people's desires.

The same will apply to other Democratically elected governments such as France. If MLP somehow wins, close to half the population will lose their **** and protest more viciously than ever before. But if Macron wins, does that mean that France will become a better country? I think people are more likely to respond to a Macron win by saying, "Thank **** we didn't elect that Nazi ****" rather than, "Good thing Macron won. France is going to change for the better now."

It just means more of the same for France. Rather than having the rug ripped out from under them with MLP, the French people will continue to very slowly lose their rights with Macron.

shuffle should take his show on the road and try to convince the jeremy corbyn thread that a hard left choice is the way to prevent rightwing xenophobia and authoritarianism.

"winning" with 3M fewer votes... now that's just good democracy in action!

nobody believes corbyn is in favour of the eu fwiw. he spent all his life opposing it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politi...European_Union

I don't see much evidence of that in France, the UK, the US, or elsewhere in Europe. What happened to Sanders and is happening to Corbyn is fairly typical.

The problem isn't so much with democracy as the impossibility of democracy in a capitalist state. Money can buy advertising, the best spin doctors, bribes to key electoral demographic and most crucially the ability to control the news agenda. Genuine reformers are never going to be able to win power faced with all that.

Your post above is a good example of that. The media spins Corbyn as anti-eu to the left and pro-eu to the right: he is neither. The current conservative administration has cut defense spending more deeply than any one can remember in British history, yet it is Corbyn who is derided as the peacenik. Even as someone who is clearly intelligent and independent-minded, your views have clearly been influenced by clever agenda-setting on the part of the media.

The establishment tried an old trick of putting an establishment candidate up against an establishment monkey, then claiming a mandate for the establishment candidate. The unexpected result was that in this case the monkey won. That gives you an indication of how pissed off people are.

However, an establishment monkey is still part of the establishment. I find it somewhat surreal to see Trump described as "anti-establishment" when he's been the most recognizeable face of corporate America for decades.

The end result of all this was much the same. The establishment won. The election was over when Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic primaries. The actual presidential election reminded me very much of the sham elections they have in Iran.

With regard to Corbyn's pacifism: some logic should put this one to bed. People have accused Corbyn of supporting terrorism. He has also been accused of pacifism, often by the same people. The two things are obviously mutually exclusive.
I can't find any support for either notion. He wanted talks with the IRA, which everyone eventually agreed on. He described war as a last resort-which is the comment of a sane human being and means nothing for all practical purposes.

I disagree Shuffle, I think that even the most boorish Americans won't be able to ignore the record breaking hot summers we are going to have in the next few years. This will fuel a demand for the most pop culture climate change politician to take charge. Therefore, I predict that Al Gore will be the next President of the United States. Unfortunately, the ignorant masses will have waited too long on electing the climate change President. As the poles become closer to the equator in mean temperature the oceans will stop mixing which will lead to an Anoxic event and the extinction of the species due to hydrogen sulfide toxicity.