"only" 355ish seats for en marche in the projections. maybe fairly healthy for democracy that theyre not getting 460.

the modems are melting down. bayrou is done and so are a couple other minister

Only in France could a guy wear a white scarf in that way and be accepted.

Three things in French politics are a certainty:

1) French public immediately hate their president
2) President has a mistress
3) French public do not elect someone with surname 'Le Pen'

Shuffle, Le Pen will never be elected president because the french people arent dum dum americans

I have to, very cautiously, agree. Le Pen is polling about the same as she got in the first round, which is 4 or so points below where she was for a lot of the last few years leading up to the 2017 election. Her party, now called Rassemblement Nationale, is in a state - there was a long article in mediapart the other week claiming they were close to bankruptcy, but am not going to get my hopes up. She's been getting about those numbers for ~5 years now and they're still an order of magnitude (in voting terms) away from enough to actually win her the presidency.

The note of caution is that even that ~23% is now probably the highest of any party - France still likes to spread its vote around and Macron is shedding supporters fast - and we're still at the point in the cycle where the mainstream press just spends its time ignoring or laughing at her and the party, which I always suspect helps them. Though I can't blame them as she and it are terrible.

It's not a 0% chance. In fact, while that scenario isn't impossible, the most likely runoff scenario is establishment candidate vs Le Pen

I would be very surprised if that was the run off, Melenchon has fallen back to about ~15% and the 20% he got in 2017 was a high water mark. It's a pretty common middle of the road view here that he's just as mad as Le Pen.

One thing that gets missed about 2017 and the rise of Macron is how massively flukey it was. France would have elected Juppé (Les Republicains) in a landslide if they'd had the choice, and he was about as establishment as it gets here - he even had to resign from government for corruption in the early 2000s! The take that Macron saved France from an extremist is wrong, Le Pen would have lost to anyone and that she wasn't losing to the ultra-establishment is down to spectacularly avoidable mistakes - a silly choice for LR to try a primary (which they won't again) and Fillon being a historically dreadful candidate.

As above not saying Le Pen can't win - as you imply her chance is if she's against someone equally unpopular to the majority of France so turnout is very very low in round 2 - but to doomsay now as if it's inevitable is just not justified.

Wauquiez is absolutely thinking he can win the presidency by keeping enough of the LR vote and stealing off of Debout la France and the FN. So far it doesn't seem like he's doing much other than continuing to shed a few centrists, but we'll see - he does have time and the seeming support of party activists for now.

However LR is still one of France's biggest parties, it runs Cities and Regions across the country, it's the main opposition in the Assemblée (where FN has so few representatives they can't even form an official group) and is the biggest party in the Senat. Even if it's currently behind Wauquiez he is seen as being on its right. It's very 'forward thinking' to say they will soon go quietly into the night leaving behind just an irrelevant rump.

it feels like the riots probably help him, but who cares? he already won, so the popularity stuff isn't that important

overall it seems like he doing a good job. a higher gas/diesel tax is a good idea too. but a lot depends on his labour market reforms actually working. and some things are looking like they will be, but not much have changed yet. if france has 5% unemployment by the end of his term then it will have been a success. if nothing really changes then it'll have been a failure. there's not much more to it.

Completely ignorant of french politics, why is Macron hated so much?

next election the socialists can run to the left of him. the republicans, or whatever they call themselves now, can run to the right of him. and he's still just about the most popular politician in the country, so maybe he runs and wins. it'll be fine.

just do a good job actually making sensible policies that you can build on. and don't worry about popularity. half the parliament are newcomers elected as part of lrem so it's not like they can go anywhere. they already won.

and maybe say **** the deficit and give poor/working class people some money a year or two before the next election. people like money, so it'll probably make them less angry.

think they hate all their presidents...

Imagine a guillotine chopping off a human head - forever.

Same reason folks in the US hate Hillary.

what even-

People standing up to this soulless scum warms my heart, watching Melenchon and Le Pen struggling mightily to handle this movement is double the pleasure.

Hillary and Macron is a fair comparaison. Same parasitic behaviour but Hillary wins thanks to her work in Lybia, Macron still wishes he could destroy a country.

He's emblematic of the establishment. He's a ****ing banker from a prep school raising taxes. The thinking doesn't go much deeper than that.

So what is this movement about? For me it looks a lot like "We want to fight global warming but we destroy **** if doing so hits my wallet."

Yeah me too, when i go past them i roll down my window and yell at them YOU DONT WANT TO FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING IT LOOKS LIKE, LOL YOU FOR BEING POOR

And then i hit the accelerator

This graph shows pretty clearly that when **** got real Chirac TOTALLY REDEEMED HIMSELF

I don't live in France, but I can guess, because I live in Spain. The gas hike is typical. More precisely, all over Europe ten years ago people were encourage to buy diesel cars, diesel fuel was cheaper, supposedly just as good emissiones, blah blah, so a lot did. Now diesel is going to be banned, everyone is going to have to buy a new car, and as a first step diesel fuel is going to be taxed to death. Basically this ****s over the ordinary to poor person who lives in the distant suburbs. Take public transport they say. But the commuter rail is a 25 minute walk the poor schlepp says, and I can't pay for fuel, and I can't park my car anywhere anyway, etc. So all these anticontamination measures - pricing to drive in the city, etc. - just become a flashpoint - because their cost is born mainly by those least able to pay it.

This is kind of a metaphor for the rest of life. Austerity is lived by ordinary people, government employees, etc. but the bankers who screwed everything up get relief on the rescue, don't pay a dime, and etc. People are fed up. They vote for someone new. Macron, Le Pen, whoever. New person turns out to be yet another ******* pandering to the usual power structure. So people start burning cars.

What comes next is anyone's guess, but it's not looking good.

Solid poasts

The usual power structure has been the EU and it's "directives" since 1992 and even more so since the Lisbon treaty.

Macron did a brilliant job at polarizing the people against this cancerous faceless organization, the coming european elections are going to be fun.

a lot of leftists itt desperately trying to justify rioting over gas taxes while the earth is boiling like it isn't the dumbest thing in the world

If leftists can't quickly understand why the people they take for granted aren't voting for them, then we are condemned to government by the extreme right.