Old Socialist wades into the shit !

May 5, 2023

How quickly the ‘Jupertarian Politics’ of Macron was discarded by Macron, and by The Economist. Now rendered as:

Headline: Emmanuel Macron hopes to reinvent himself in 100 days

Sub-headline: France’s president would also benefit from curbing some of his own instincts

During his audacious first bid for the French presidency, in 2017, Emmanuel Macron would scold supporters at campaign rallies who jeered when he name-checked his rivals. “Don’t whistle at them; let’s beat them!” the 39-year-old pretender urged the crowds with a smile, adapting a slogan borrowed from the high priest of political positivity, America’s Barack Obama. French politics, Mr Macron argued forcefully then, was in need of benevolence and collective endeavour not obstructive division. It was time to move an irritable, rebellious country to a more stable, consensual place.

The above paragraph is a re-writing of History, nothing new for The Economist. That now discarded grandiose nomenclature of ‘Jupertarian Politics’ was the blind for the Neo-Liberalization of France. It was abandoned with the appearance of the gilets jaunes protests about fuel prices. The Macron extra-constitutional Pension Reforms have now galvanized the working class and the middle class, into a full scale Rebellion in France. Macron’s ‘audacity’ as argued by this political rag is more self-serving myth-making. I’ve put in bold font the last two sentences of this shit!

The Economist writers/editors are Stalinists by nature, they re-write a History Made to Measure:

Six years later, France seems stuck in an impasse. The French are once again fired up by revolutionary rage and seem convinced that the country is run by an anti-democratic despot bent on destroying the bedrock of all that the French cherish. The opposition trades in a form of declinist misérabilisme. The grotesque effigies of the president’s head in a noose, or The grotesque effigies on the cobbled streets of Paris, glorify violent revolt. On May 1st an armour-clad policeman was set alight by a Molotov cocktail. It was the low point of the 13th one-day strike against Mr Macron’s modest decision to raise the minimum pension age from 62 years to 64, which is now law. Petrol-bombing troublemakers represent a minuscule minority. But 63% of the French want to keep up the struggle against the new law, and 72% say they are unhappy with Mr Macron as their president.

The Economist writer, or writers, produce a collection of hysterical crescendos: the country is run by an anti-democratic despot bent on destroying the bedrock of all that the French cherish. The Rebels are a minority: The grotesque effigies… who glorify violent revolt… armour-clad policeman was set alight by a Molotov cocktail… Petrol-bombing troublemakers …

Read about the historical record of the French Police here :

The Reader is in the melodramatic territory of Sydney Carton as played by Ronald Coleman in A Tale of Two Cities, as he ascends to the guillotine declaiming ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done;’

A selection of quotations from the remainder of this screeching political document:

…

The latest instrument of choice for protesters is more prosaic, but no less symbolic: the saucepan. A few years back the gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) adopted high-vis fluorescent jackets to mark the fury of those who felt invisible and ignored by the president. This time, protesters stage casserolades, or concerts of banging pots and pans, to signify discontent at his failure to listen.

…

Every evening, images of real war and extreme hardship on the European continent are beamed into its living rooms. Yet France has turned the raising of the pension age to 64 into a national psychodrama. Forget the coming upheaval of artificial intelligence, or quantum computing, or the worrying level of southern Europe’s water table. France is heading to the barricades to fight yesterday’s battles. And its re-elected president is portrayed, absurdly, as an autocrat for having gone ahead and done what he said during his campaign that he would.

…

Militant unions care little for the culture of consensus. Among the books prominently displayed for sale during a recent day of protest in Paris were Lenin’s “The State and Revolution” and Alan Woods’s “The Ideas of Karl Marx”.

…

Mr Macron lost his majority, mishandled his pension reform, alienated even moderate union leaders, and found himself having to push the law through parliament without a direct vote. The advocate of consensus-building between the left and the right ended up driving a bulldozer through the centre of French politics

…

Where does this leave Mr Macron, who has four more years in office? Guiding and nudging the prickly French out of their comfort zone is a challenge for any leader. For the president, his “100 days” is a way of buying time, giving people a chance to let off steam and countering the populist charge that he is disconnected.

…

A new prime minister would make sense only if he or she could reboot the government. Without a formal coalition, bill-by-bill negotiation will render tricky anything but the most uncontroversial reform.

…

The Economist offers in its final paragraph – confronts Macron as an insufferable Anti-Democratic Neo-Liberal… its too late for a mealy-mouthed political character analysis, of this utterly failed Technocrat. Just more shit!

Mr Macron is a serious, intelligent, ideas-driven leader, who thinks ahead and knows where he is trying to take France. But he is also someone who reckons he knows better than everybody else, and has trouble concealing it. This makes his connection with the French tense, and his governing style solitary and abrasive. In this respect, the saucepan-banging is a broader metaphor. For there is a big difference between talking and listening, not to mention believing that your interlocutor has something useful to say. If a reinvented president is to emerge from the “100 days”, it might usefully be one who has also learned to curb his own instincts

Old Socialist