French presidential election, 2017

[Hot Pepsi]

French presidential election, 2017

Another one is "Everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn't end." That sounds profound if Sartre had said it or even Yogi Berra. But it was Tom Cruise's character in Cocktail.

[ursus arctos]

French presidential election, 2017

As expected, Fillon is strolling the second round.

He's up 70-30 with a fifth of the votes counted.

[Lang Spoon]

French presidential election, 2017

Assuming Merkel clings on, sounds like we have a meeting of Ordo Liberal minds in the Franco-German axis. Oh joy.

[Diable Rouge]

French presidential election, 2017

Looking at the electoral map, Juppé has lost virtually every département bar his own, one in Limousin, and a few overseas.

[Diable Rouge]

French presidential election, 2017

It seems Fillon would beat Le Pen in the first round, according to Europe Elects, also either Melenchon or Macron could be a contender if the other withdrew, avoiding a left split.

[linus]

French presidential election, 2017

The Mélenchon vote would not transfer that well to someone like Macron, who's more of a banker type than Fillon, it would go to far left candidate(s).

Le Pen must be pretty upset at Fillon winning, she might have had an outside chance against Sarkozy but Fillon is going to crush her in the 2nd round.

[ursus arctos]

French presidential election, 2017

Indeed.

It is very difficult to see how we get to a different outcome at this point, absent some kind of deus ex machina event.

[Gerontophile]

French presidential election, 2017

Is it paper voting? Because if it's electronic...

[Flynnie]

French presidential election, 2017

No chance of the left sitting this one out and raising two fingers to the system that produces right and hard right in a run off, n'est ce-pas?

I suppose that Rubicon did get crossed when it was Chirac versus Daddy Le Pen in 2002.

[Tubby Isaacs]

French presidential election, 2017

Ignore me. Laverte in another place has politely pointed out I thought Melenchon and Chevenement were the same person.

[E10 Rifle]

French presidential election, 2017

Maso's take

[Lucy Waterman]

French presidential election, 2017

The centre can't shirk the blame for all this, but neither can the left for failing to come up with an alternative that galvanises support.

In country after country, the growth of left-wing parties at the expense of social democrat centrists has not moved the consensus (or the Overton Window, if you like that sort of thing) to the left. It's led to them abdicating from any role in shaping that consensus, which has moved further to the right than it was before. The location of the Overton Window is decided in France, as it is here, by an argument between the traditional right and the new right.

[Geoffrey de Ste. Croix]

French presidential election, 2017

It really is a run off between the far right and the further right. Cargo Cult Thatcherism versus Fascism.

[E10 Rifle]

French presidential election, 2017

I'm not sure the Overton window, when it comes to matter of economics, is as entrenched on the right as it was a couple of years ago. The virtues of 'balancing the books', the evils of 'overspending', the 'tough choices' of austerity aren't getting anything like the trumpeting they were getting in, say, the 2015 general election. And I do think the (limited) successes of Corbyn and Podemos are part of the reason for that. It's dangerous to overstate this, because we're still losing overall, but things have changed.

But it's in the social sphere that the window's opening up over much uglier perspectives - the new acceptability of xenophobia and racism, and the failure to counter that with a loud and coherent message of hope and unity - where there are bigger problems.

And somehow, I don't think the Rachel Reeves/Dan Jarvis-esque response of wittering about 'Legitimate Concerns' over the foreigns is going to shift things positively in our direction.

[Lucy Waterman]

French presidential election, 2017

That has as much to do with the media being largely owned by right-wing organisations which has a significant impact on influencing public thought.

That's just an excuse, though. It's not a situation that's going to change, so it has to be transcended. Complaining about the media is defeatism.

[Lucy Waterman]

French presidential election, 2017

And somehow, I don't think the Rachel Reeves/Dan Jarvis-esque response of wittering about 'Legitimate Concerns' over the foreigns is going to shift things positively in our direction.

Well no, of course it's not. The pendulum has swung too far, while too many people who could have made a difference (on all sides of the left) remained unaware that there was even a clock.

[Diable Rouge]

French presidential election, 2017

Reginald Christ wrote: General question: Do you believe that an openly socialist party can never attain power again? That the only way a non-conservative government of any kind can win an election is by adopting the model espoused by New Labour and Clinton's Democrats?

There is a considerable body of centre-left political and economic thought (Piketty, Habermas and Sen) that addresses the issues raised by globalisation, the question being whether parties can translate their theoretical abstractions into an engaging political narrative, synthesising their conclusions with practical social experiences?

[Diable Rouge]

French presidential election, 2017

Like this, perhaps?

[Lucy Waterman]

French presidential election, 2017

Reginald Christ wrote: General question: Do you believe that an openly socialist party can never attain power again? That the only way a non-conservative government of any kind can win an election is by adopting the model espoused by New Labour and Clinton's Democrats?

Well, there's quite a gulf between Blair/Clinton and "openly socialist", the size of which depends on how you define the latter. Was Attlee's government "openly socialist"? There are plenty who will assert strongly that it wasn't, some approvingly, others as a criticism.

This quibbling about the terms of the question is an admission that I have no idea how to begin answering it. Which doesn't mean I think it's a bad question, but a fascinating imponderable.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

French presidential election, 2017

Hmm, According to the IMF, their primary issues with Greece are that a country that refuses to do anything about a state pension deficit of 13% of GDP, at the expense of the rest of the economy, is never going to recover. largely because they have no money to invest in social welfare for the working age population, education, health or infrastructure.

And there are eerie parallels between the rise of Thatcher and Fillon. And it has as much to do with the intransigence of the Left, who seem considerably more interested in people who are already in work than the 10% of people who are permanently unemployed.

It's worth comparing the labour relations history of Germany, Britain and France. In germany there has been fairly steady co-operation between employers and Unions, where the german unions were prepared to continually change working practice in response to economic developments, in return for gradual wage increases and good conditions. As a result Germany has a highly unionized, highly productive, well paid industrial sector, and services sector, combining a high degree of regulation with low inflation, steady wage improvements, gradually improving living conditions and a great degree of stability.

France and Britain have gone a different way, and by not being really into compromise, what has eventually happened is that by gripping on too tightly you end up crushing what you are trying to hold onto. the economic system Sputters to a halt and instead of gradual reform, and continuous growth, you get little in the way of reform, stagnation, then decline, until you reach the point where some sociopathic cunt comes along to sweep everything away and the baby goes out with the bathwater and suddenly you don't know where you are.

The 35 hour week in france was introduced in the hope that by reducing the working week by about 10%, they would have to hire more people. Instead they pushed up hourly quotas by about 10% and employment didn't really move. (effectively you have to get through the same amount of work in the shorter time) It means that in terms of labour productivity (GDP per hour worked) it means that France is slightly ahead of Germany, and 25% higher than the UK. (or that was the case in 2012)

I think that the left is going to have to grow a pair of balls, assess the state of the world, and put together a coherent plan, based in large part on the german economic model. They seem to have got the hang of the modern world a lot better than any other european country.

There are a couple of things to bear in mind. Europe has a looming demographic nightmare, and there's little time to address this, and the only way out of it to stop fucking around. Europeans are living a lot longer, and the proportion of pensioners relative to the working age population is going to start steadily rising. In countries like italy and Greece they're already there, and they've decided to deal with this situation by taking the piss. This is primarily why they are fucked. Pensions and aging population healthcare is going to impose certain measures on any govt that is seeking to avert disaster.

The first of those is to steadily increase the retirement age, and the second is to be really fucking careful about every increase you give to pensioners. The key is to make life as cheap as possible for pensioners, through services and accommodation aimed at keeping them in their own homes as long as possible, and able to live as cheaply as possible. This will also require a fundamental restructuring of the provision of health care. Do I hear the words "Substantial Inheritance tax increase" anywhere?

the other thing is to point out that the only way that you can keep the proportion of the population of working age up, is to essentially import young people through migration. Migration is necessary to stop the number of pensioners from quickly crushing the economy. The Left needs to make the honest argument for migration.

Essentially "Old people, without migrants there will be no-one to pay your pension, or wipe your arse when you can't do it yourself, so make friends with your new neighbours. They're really not that different to you at all. Younger people, Migrants don't depress wages, though they do prevent wage rises due to labour shortages, but that is supposed to be a bad thing as it leads to inflation, and arbitrary redistributions of wealth from the many to the fortunate few. Migrants don't take jobs from domestic residents, if anything they take jobs from each other, it's not a zero sum game. And migrants are substantial net contributors to the UK Exchequer, without them our economy will collapse." The thing about these things is that they are all actually true.

The first thing that the Left needs to do is accept one of the key aspects of keynesianism that you should only borrow for investment, or to smooth over a temporary downturn in tax income in a recession, and then when things recover, shrink back down that debt by balancing your budget. Labour repaid part of the national debt in 7 of their 28 years in power, the tories did it in four of their last 50 years in power. yet one of them is the party of fiscal responsibility. But Basically you can only spend what you are prepared to collect in taxes. the Aim here as with keynesianism is to avoid bubbles because they primarily fuck the poor, and they undo social progress, and crush social mobility.

so basically, stop fucking around, and agree a common EU basis for corporate taxation, and a common EU basis for the taxation of wealth So people can't fuck around by moving money around within the EU. Go through every single taxbreak your govt gives, and see if it is achieving the effect that it is supposed to. If not, Get rid of it. The Rich need to pay more tax if only to stave off world war III.

Crack down on the black economy. Every country has one. It fucks the workers in the legitimate economy and makes it difficult to provide services. Base your budgets for permanent expenditure on the money you raise from steady revenue streams like vat and income taxes. A common basis for corporate taxation should provide a steady meaningful stream of income. It is important to tax non domestic property as an asset, and to tax domestic property to provide local services. The left has to make clear to people that they can either treat houses as something to live in, and provide it on a cheap basis, or you can treat it as an asset, and suddenly it gets a lot more expensive, and you wind up transferring large amounts of money, from the many to the few.

There is really no excuse for borrowing for current expenditure outside of a recession. All you are doing is artificially inflating your economy, at the expense of increased debt service costs, and it means you are in a terrible starting position when you go into a recession. This is what has happened to portugal, and it is going to fuck them for a generation.

Competition law has to play a big role. Competition law as far as I can make out is one of the main methods by which our current elites transfer large amounts of money from the many to the few. Competition law is one of the key levers through which you can shape the modern Economy, and I don't think that the left has ever adequately grasped this. (look at the right's grasp of competition law in the media sector)

It's also one of the best means to improve economic outcomes either by reducing prices for citizens, or by making the operation of business more efficient, leading to everyone being better off. (The two main examples I can immediately think of in ireland are the Legal services sector, and the Insurance industry, who are fucking us blind. The IMF were screaming at the govt to reform these sectors all through the bailout, but they dragged their feet long enough to do essentially nothing. The Legal side I completely understand from a clientelist point of view, but I'm fucked if I know why they didn't do anything about insurance)

The thing is, that countries need to attract investment, and make their labour costs as low as possible. This doesn't necessarily mean low tax low spend. You can reduce wage pressures by addressing the major expenses facing workers, that lead to pressure for wage increases are a) housing b) childcare c) Education d) Healthcare e) care for the elderly, and oddly enough these are things that are much more efficiently, and cheaply provided by the State out of taxation. Someone on the left should have the balls to stand up for this.

If these are provided for free, or the cost is greatly reduced by state provision, then you don't have to be paid very much after tax to have quite a decent standard of living. it's not just fairer, it's more efficient. Also, since you are worried about the large number of old people, you are trying to make it as cheap and as easy as possible to have a family and raise them, and provide them with the level of education they need to survive in the modern economy.

The Left needs to provide proper regulation of the banking sectors, These are the cunts that do the most to create bubbles. They are the ones that need huge amounts of State money when they collapse and threaten to take half the economy with them. Fuck them. They are supposed to provide relatively cheap access to capital, and banking services to the people, not be a licence to print fucking money for shareholders and executives. And no fucking around with derivatives.

But mostly recognize that if the left promises things that it can't deliver, it gets punished, so recognize reality, and move towards coherent, progressive goals, based on trying to provide the best economic outcomes for everyone. The Current free trade set up has lead to a massive explosion in global economic activity, and our current standards of living, as unimpressive as they are are dependent on it. The key is to get this system to pay a lot more tax, and to share out its enormous benefits more fairly.

Essentially I think that the key to this is to frame the entire thing around the demographic crisis and climate change. That will get the attention of old people, and by framing it around making it as cheap as possible to work and live and raise a family you can get the attention of everyone else. The left needs to build a narrative based on fairness, and social mobility. not just because it's the right thing to do in a moral sense, but because it's also the correct thing to do economically as well.

oh, and someone on the left has to start pointing out at every opportunity that Right wing Economic policies are always and exclusively about transferring large amounts of money from the many to the few. Keep fucking hammering that as hard as possible. There's 30 years of fucking evidence for this in the UK. There's a lot of tory voters that lose out in the long run as a result of tory policies.

Oh and learn the difference between getting control of your finances and austerity. Austerity primarily involves an ideological attack on the state by pretending to close a budget deficit by cutting spending, where as getting control of your finances involves closing a budget deficit by raising more taxes as well as spending cuts. They're not the same thing.

[Lucy Waterman]

French presidential election, 2017

My medium term my-guess-is-as-good-as-any expectation for the UK is that there will be an unshakeably dominant Conservative Party, a lefter-than-its-ever-been Labour Party (where I'll be) and a hard-right populist force that is as near to fascism as makes no odds, both of which will struggle to get much more than 5 million votes apiece.

[anton pulisov]

French presidential election, 2017

berbaslug wrote: I think that the left is going to have to grow a pair of balls, assess the state of the world, and put together a coherent plan, based in large part on the german economic model. They seem to have got the hang of the modern world a lot better than any other european country.

But the German economic model only works when they have somewhere within the single market to export (i) their goods and (ii) their surplus. Take Germany out of the single market and the eurozone, deny them access to all those European countries that run a deficit, and Germany grinds to a halt overnight. So how can everybody aspire to be like Germany? It doesn't work like that.

Keynes understood this when he proposed the Bancor, which was an international system where countries like today's Germany would be fined for running huge export surpluses.

berbaslug wrote: shrink back down that debt by balancing your budget. Labour repaid part of the national debt in 7 of their 28 years in power, the tories did it in four of their last 50 years in power. yet one of them is the party of fiscal responsibility. But Basically you can only spend what you are prepared to collect in taxes.

Buy why shrink the debt? The UK doesn't have to adhere to bizarre eurozone fiscal rules that are based on the notion of government finances being akin to household finances. The UK has its own central bank and its own currency. As long as the economy is growing there is no need to pay off debt. A well run government with its own central bank and its own currency should actually never be running a surplus. They should aim to have, averaged over the long run, a manageable annual deficit that is a bit smaller than annual economic growth. As long as you do that, debt-to-GDP ratio doesn't grow. If a government runs a systematic surplus then they are essentially contributing to shrink the money supply and deflating the economy.

[Geoffrey de Ste. Croix]

French presidential election, 2017

In which sensible, centrist, realistic Labour continue to sound more and more like Front National every day.

@SKinnock We must move away from multiculturalism and towards assimilation. We must stand for one group: the British people. #progpolitics

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

French presidential election, 2017

hmm, in 2014 Germany had net exports of $260 billion, equivalent of about 7% of GDP. 30% of which is with North america, 5% is with south america, 18% of which is with asia, 3% is with russia, 2% is with africa. Essentially 40% of Germany's export surplus is down to the EU or about 3% of their gdp. Most is with outside.

Germany basically singlehandedly accounts for all of europe's trade surplus with the outside world. Germany essentially exports a sum equivalent to 40% of their GDP, and imports a sum close to 33%. France on the other hand Exported 20% of their GDP and imports 23% thought that gap has been falling due to low oil prices. France just isn't that into overseas trade which I think is probably a major mistake on their part. Having a strong export sector allows you to import economic growth from all around the world. If somewhere is doing well, you can sell them stuff. That really saved us over the last five years.

The thing about Germany is that the existence of Germany doesn't preclude the existence of other high productivity export oriented countries. (they don't even have to have a trade surplus) Exporting just means taking advantage of the single market and selling your shit in other countries around europe as though it was a single country, or to countries outside the EU. The aim isn't necessarily to have a trade surplus so much as aiming to encourage the development of high productivity manufacturing that is as competitive as possible. Then you can hang as much services on the back of that as you can get away with.

But Primarily I was thinking more about a more left wing model of German social capitalism. it would be quite interesting to see what the EU could achieve if only it were to tax corporations and exact an appropriate toll from the richest sector of society.

Buy why shrink the debt? The UK doesn't have to adhere to bizarre eurozone fiscal rules that are based on the notion of government finances being akin to household finances. The UK has its own central bank and its own currency. As long as the economy is growing there is no need to pay off debt. A well run government with its own central bank and its own currency should actually never be running a surplus. They should aim to have, averaged over the long run, a manageable annual deficit that is a bit smaller than annual economic growth. As long as you do that, debt-to-GDP ratio doesn't grow. If a government runs a systematic surplus then they are essentially contributing to shrink the money supply and deflating the economy.

well in the past interest rates used to be a lot higher. Also keynesian economics suggests taking money out of the economy when it looks like it is overheating. And also think of it as putting aside room for future borrowing. In the past that meant actually paying it back, whereas now you can shrink your debt by stopping borrowing and letting economic growth shrink it.

And the EU didn't pick the maastricht criteria out of a hat, or because they think that economies are like households. It's more to do with the ability to withstand the shock of a recession without going bankrupt and winding up in a bailout.

Essentially if you are meeting the maastricht criteria, and you enter a recession with a base line of no current borrowing, you can borrow up to 60% of GDP before you go bankrupt. but if you weren't borrowing for current expenditure before the recession started, your borrowing to boost the economy starts from a baseline of 0 rather than 3, so say borrowing an extra 7% of GDP to make up for a drop in tax income, isn't actually borrowing 10% of GDP, which gets you to that level of 120% of GDP quicker than you'd believe. 120% of gdp is when your interest rate goes above 7% and no-one will lend you any more money on the international markets.

This is what happened to portugal. They were basically meeting the maastricht criteria right up until 2004, when they lost control of their finances under barroso (and possibly connected to euro 2004) , and entered the recession at too high a level of borrowing, and everything spiralled out of control.

The way it's supposed to work is like Germany. Germany went into the recession with good control of their budget deficit and a debt to GDP ratio of 65% in the first year of the recession GDP fell by nearly 6%, so the German Government were able to borrow 16% of GDP over the first two years of the recession to turn that into 4.5% growth, then they eased off on the economic stimulus , the economy slowed, then gradually recovered a bit sluggishly. The debt went from 65 to 81% in two years, and last year was down to 70% and on it's way to 60% again, so they are ready for the next recession. This happened in quite a few countries across europe. Particularly in the east.The less dirt you were doing with Bubbles, and the closer you were to the Maastricht criteria the quicker a country bounced back from the recession.

Ireland created a massive bubble and went from a debt:Gdp ratio of 30 to 120 and bankruptcy in four years because of the banking collapse and the collapse in tax income. Now we're back to where we were in 1996 about a bit under 90% and going down.

Spain went from 25% to 95% because their bust wasn't quite so messy, but they haven't recovered, and haven't got control of their finances yet. unemployment is still absurdly high, and they are borrowing four percent of gdp to get economic growth of half that. That can't go on forever. Italy went into the recession with a budget deficit of four percent, and a debt to gdp ratio of over 100%. They went bankrupt in 2011, and the situation just keeps getting worse as they keep borrowing more and more money and look no nearer every doing anything to get a grip of what they are doing.

The UK can if it wants just keep printing money and borrowing money wherever they can, but given what they've been up to over the last eight years, and given what they've just done to themselves that could become very tricky. Their currency fell nearly twenty percent six months ago. That's going to feed into quite unpleasant inflation next year that is going to have the greatest impact on the low paid and pensioners. Printing money will only further weaken Sterling, leading to further inflation, which in the absence of strong productivity growth will see a return of stagflation.

The other thing is that right now the UK has a Debt to GDP ratio of 90%, which is likely to increase sharply over the next couple of years due to brexit. basically they can afford six years of borrowing at the rate of 2016 before they reach the point where it will be difficult to ever pay it down or grow out of it. Now that borrowing is going to sharply spike over the next couple of years, that reduces the number of years before they start getting into serious trouble. At this point their two options will be to either default on their debt, which will wipe out a lot of pension funds and a lot of savings in the UK, or inflate their debt away by printing money which will lead to hyperinflation, and I think we all know that that does little to foster a tolerant multi-cultural world.

I suppose the point is that borrowing is a useful economic tool for governments, but you have to use it very carefully. It is there to provide money for infrastructural development which will lead to higher economic growth, and it is there to provide a cushion when you go into an economic down turn. But There is a temptation in western Democracies for governments to use it as a source of free money to buy support from the electorate by providing a level of services that they are not prepared to collect enough taxes to pay for. Greece and Italy are two extreme examples of this, but this is also true of countries like Belgium and the likes. countries that would be in a radically better position over time if they were to have stopped spending a little more than they collect in taxes over a long period of time.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

French presidential election, 2017

I'm not sure the Overton window, when it comes to matter of economics, is as entrenched on the right as it was a couple of years ago. The virtues of 'balancing the books', the evils of 'overspending', the 'tough choices' of austerity aren't getting anything like the trumpeting they were getting in, say, the 2015 general election. And I do think the (limited) successes of Corbyn and Podemos are part of the reason for that. It's dangerous to overstate this, because we're still losing overall, but things have changed.

Actually in the UK it's entirely down to the Tory governments needs. Before Brexit the publicly stated need to balance the books lead to tearing strips off the welfare state, while cutting the top rate of tax and not collecting any taxes from corporations, and fuck all balancing of the books, while pretending that this was actually balancing the books, but would have to go on for longer because the problem seemed particularly stubborn.

Now the government needs to borrow loads of money to hide the impact of brexit, so the right wing newspapers are in favour of this because they're pretending that its the new normal, and the hope is that it can hide the negative impacts until the UK is safely out of the European Union. Then the 'austerity' can continue. Or if the need is to print money and behave like Weimar Germany, then the right wing press will support that too.

It's worth considering how the actions of George Osborne differ from the policy stipulations that the IMF has for countries in trouble. Usually these countries are in serious trouble because they were doing the dirt in some way, and it went horribly wrong, so they are in a position where they need to borrow lots of money, but because they've already borrowed so much money, no-one will lend it to them. They have to stop borrowing, and they have to start growing in order to shrink the amount of money they owe to manageable levels.

Their advice is increase tax collection (focus on collecting all taxes due) and increase the amount you raise. Cut spending, and try and reorganize the money that you do spend towards the productive sectors of the economy like welfare supports for the working age population, Retraining schemes to help the unemployed reskill, education. Also take a long hard look at your laws and regulations in order to make it easier and cheaper to do business in a country. That means tackling Insurance, legal, energy, and water costs as much as labour laws. All of this is aimed at trying to create the economic growth that will drag the country out of the shite that it's in.

Consider exactly how this differs from the economic policy of austerity that everyone was talking about recently.