Okay I Should Definitely Be Sleeping Rn But ! I Need To Say This : I've Seen A Lot Of International (mainly

Okay I should definitely be sleeping rn but ! I need to say this : I've seen a lot of international (mainly American people) on the internet describing the general situation of the world as chaotic etc because of Syria and Korea and Brian fucking Thompson and France (which is what I'm going to talk about here).

First off, the current french situation isn't really that groundbreaking or anything new right now, the country has been in a political crisis for... a while now, at the very least since 2018-19 although in my opinion it started much earlier.

It has been really chaotic for now nearly five months, since Macron dissolved the Parliament and the acting government in June after the European elections (there was a political strategy at play here however it failed pathetically which is something I'll get to later) ; however this isn't something on the scale of what happened in Korea, not even mentioning Syria. The government and the people are just (much like in America) extremely polarised because of years of neoliberal political decisions and it's showing and slowing the government down.

Tale as old as time, I know.

However ! I ask of you to never say that the extreme left and the extreme right united among themselves to take the centrist government down. While the Rassemblement National is a far right party (who is currently being charged for stealing a shitload of cash btw, hope you like the taste of lawsuits Marine), our current President Emmanuel Macron and his party (I would give you the name but tbh they've rebranded so many times I can't remember what it is rn so let's just use the old one En Marche) are NOT a centrist party, and LFI, even more so the NFP are NOT a far left coalition/party.

Saying they were a centrist party was what carried them through the 2017 presidential election until it became abundantly clear if it wasn't already that they were in fact very right-wing.

Macron started out in the Socialist Party who is, these days, not very socialist anymore and who we can in fact barely call left-wing as they tend to have pretty much the same ideals as you guys' democrats (which are our centrists, basically, we have different political scales).

So, to summarise (I am warning you right now I have unmedicated adhd and am studying history with a deep love for political history this will be 5000 words long) nearly fifteen years of french politics to analyse what got us into this mess and why I'm asking you to not say these parties are far left parties, here's this :

There are a lot of different political parties in France. Anyone can create one, and so that means that the left's biggest problem for the past *checks notes* now a bit more than a century, has been division.

The socialist party and the communist party, which used to make up most of the left wing, separated in 1921 or 22 can't remember over the 3rd International and the Soviet Union. That created the historical division between far left and left : which one wanted to overthrow the government (in the 1920s the anarchists and communists which... to the left is still the same today actually) and which one thought elections were the best way to change things (the socialists).

The communists were big for a long time but they kinda got demonized after the Marshall Plan for obvious reasons, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, while they remained the French Communist Party (PCF for short) they kinda stopped actively having communist ideals and being a big party. Nowadays they still exist but are a pretty small party and aren't exactly big revolutionaries (nor, to be honest, big communists).

The socialists had their time of glory, the Front Populaire, in 1936. It was an alliance between all left-wing parties to forbid the far right from being elected basically, as they had just attempted a basically coup d'état but not really a few months earlier. The thirties were, for also obvious reasons, a pretty rocky time in Europe. They did very very good (i'm a leftist if you haven't noticed by now. Also, duh, this is Tumblr.) social policies for the first year but quickly had to stop due to various economical and military issues and resorted to a pretty default not doing much type of governing (I promise you, this WILL become the signature pattern of the PS or socialist party).

They were elected again in the 80s, and pretty much did the same thing, and then again in 2012, and by then they were hardly a left wing party anymore, mostly a bunch of at best left centrists politicians and at worst right wing opportunists. So a new party emerged called La France Insoumise (LFI) who is now the biggest french left wing party led by an extremely controversial figure who has a bit of an ego problem (they've also, objectively, made a bunch of shitty decisions on handling inner politics of the party but we won't get into that).

Forgot to mention this but there's also the Greens, Les Verts, an ecologist party with vaguely leftist ideologies. Their ecology program is pretty much the same as LFI's but it doesn't really hurt to vote for them except for the presidential election.

Now, the Republicans on the other hand (our Republicans. not yours. obviously.) used to be a left-centrist wing party but they slowly became a right wing one at the beginning of the 20th/end of the 19th century as the monarchists and imperialists got the fuck out of the Parliament and the socialists came in. This is a prime example of a political scale being tipped to one side (rarely seen this way around). What you need to know is that except for Mitterrand in the 80s and Hollande in 2012, the country has been exclusively led by these guys from 1959 onwards. Or, not necessarily these guys but similar parties (yes I'm looking at you De Gaulle). Nowadays they're extremely divided and the whole party is falling apart between far right and traditional conservative right.

The Rassemblement National which used to be called the Front National (so RN or anciently FN) is a far right party who was founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen and a few nazis. Yes, you did read that right. No, I'm not joking. Funnily enough Jean-Marie was in the Resistance, but I don't wanna know what goes on in that guy's mind. They're now led by his daughter (as the dude is on death's door now, but there has been some family drama there also), Marine Le Pen, who has worked very hard in the past few years to make the party go from outwardly racist, misogynistic and homophobic to covertly racist, misogynistic and homophobic.

This means that aaaall of the decisions that caused poverty and misery for french citizens, mainly the lack of funding that goes into public service and the abandonment of any and all rural areas has led a lot of people to turn to the now not as demonized as before RN.

On the other side the left wing has been eating itself alive since Hollande in 2012 because of rivalries between the Socialist Party and LFI, which has cost them several times the presidential election, and less and less people are voting since more and more people are losing hope in modern politics.

Which leads us to 2017 : the election of Emmanuel Macron as President. Macron was originally a banker and Minister of the Economy under Hollande, but he changed sides and left the Socialist Party in 2016 to create En Marche, a party that was supposed to be a centrist party but was quite obviously a right wing one.

As the left was divided, LFI's leader and the socialist leader were outvoted in favour of him and Marine Le Pen for a second vote to determine the President ; this was his strategy. As long as the left was divided, he would win the first round of voting, then the second, because he knew that left-wing people would ALWAYS vote for him against Le Pen.

A LOT of shit happened under his mandate (to name a few, COVID, the gilets jaunes etc) all of which were handled very badly, and all of his decisions were neoliberal shit as always which didn't help anything and made it actively worse. That wasn't helped by the guy's ego (I am not kidding most politicians are arrogant but this is like on another level this dude seriously, dead-ass thinks he's the smartest person in any room he walks in) and general condescending behaviour and statements (like when he said "I like train stations, because you meet both people who have succeeded and people who are nothing". yeah. turns out the nation he's supposed to be representing wasn't a big fan of that one. wonder why).

In 2022 most people hated his guts, but as the left was still divided because the fucking socialists can't admit they're not the biggest leftist party anymore and the threat of the far right in power was more present than ever, he got re-elected. The thing is, right afterwards the presidential elections is held the legislatives. They're the election of both the Senate and the National Assembly, so the Whole Parliament.

Normally, this would just be a formality, as a people who has elected a president literally four weeks ago is generally going to vote for his party. It's important to note here, than TRADITIONALLY (can you hear the anger in my voice yet ?) the President, when choosing a Prime Minister, is supposed to choose from the biggest political party represented in the National Assembly. When that party is from another party than the President's, we call this a cohabitation.

Cohabitations are always a messy but pretty fun time, as the Prime Minister, usually only a lackey of the President, is now a member from an opposing party and as he has, constitutionally, enormous legal power (that he, usually, as a lackey of the President, only uses to support the President's politics). The thing is we hadn't had a cohabitation in a long-ass time, because the amount of time presidents were elected was specifically changed to avoid them and put the legislatives right afterwards the presidential election. The other thing is, when the entire country is only voting for you because the only other alternative is the far right...

Now, in 2022, the biggest party elected was still the President's. However, it was only a relative majority instead of an absolute one, which meant that they had to have support should they want to pass any law. So, instead of finding allies, they chose to use a lovely article of the Constitution, the now infamous in France 49.3. This article means that on budget laws (and ONLY on budget laws which... is definitely going to be totally respected and not at all ambiguously used) the government (read : the Prime Minister) can make a text of law bypass the National Assembly and be automatically applied.

But the Assembly has then the choice to vote in order to demote the Parliament. They tried. It nearly went through. It didn't though, in the end, because the Republicans were too divided for it to go through. However both of the major opposing forces, the entire left wing and the far right party the RN, voted it if I remember correctly. And most of the past two years until summer 2024 were just the government fighting with the National Assembly. They used a metric ton of 49.3, it's now a meme (and also a widely antidemocratic tactic that everyone hates).

In the summer of 2024, there were the European elections. Each country votes, and ours voted for the far right. Like, a lot. I'm not kidding when I say that the situation with the RN is pretty fucking critical. What matters here is also that the President's Party had a ridiculously low score.

Now, Macron won't be re-elected. He can't. Like, physically. You can't be elected more than twice in France. But he wants someone of his party to take over after he leaves (which btw is going to be difficult, I'll be very surprised if en marche lasts three weeks without him since they're also divided as hell), so he needs it to be popular.

So he did something that he thought was smart : he dissolved the government and the Parliament. That meant we had to have a new legislative election. We were scared shirtless as we were all sure the RN would be elected and we'd have an RN prime minister, which we know now by some sources is what Macron intended to be able to prove that his party is the best alternative to the far right in order to continue to be elected in the next Presidential elections in 2027.

But the morning after the annunciation, then LFI MP Ruffin called for an union of the left wing parties, which was by the way done remarkably quickly for parties that have been at each others throats for the past ten years (forgot to mention this but it HAD to be done quickly as our rat bastard President put the election literally a month and a half after annunciation).

So now Macron needed something to discredit the left in order to be considered the only candidate against the RN. And he found his thing : he demonized them. Because of their public support for Palestine, they were suddenly antisemitic (this is particularly vicious as antisemitic hate crimes have in fact been an issue since the beginning of the Palestinian genocide in France and a lot of Jewish people here are scared of antisemitism for, yk, very good reasons) and a far left party who was basically anti republican and composed of revolutionaries.

And it worked ! It helped that LFI has been seen as such for a while for a variety of reasons, mostly baseless, and that everyone conveniently forgot that the leftist union was and is made up of four different parties. The far left does not exist in the National Assembly in France. Not in the communist party, not in LFI. I'm not the one saying this, official statements by the state council are. But every right wing politician forgets that because it gets them elected. And people believe them. So stop spreading that lie, please.

The first round of voting was led by the far right, so for the second, Macron and the left allied themselves : in every district of voting where a leftist candidate, a macronist candidate and a far right candidate were still competing against each other, the candidate of the two with the least votes would resign their candidature to be able to give as little votes to the far right as possible.

In truth this wasn't completely followed by Macronists especially, some refusing to resign when against an lfi candidate, which is completely ridiculous and personally disgusts me. But it worked, and the left-wing won the election with the far right coming in third place. I cried that day, actually, from relief, as embarrassing as it is.

So that meant that Macron had to name, TRADITIONALLY, a left wing prime minister. Several names were offered (which was difficult as the socialists and government would veto any lfi member and the communists and LFI would veto any socialist member) and Macron said that he wouldn't name any government who had members from lfi in it. So the lfi leader did a pretty beautiful move and pulled out all of the lfi members of any and all propositions of government (this being, I remind, the biggest left wing party in France).

Macron still named a right-wing prime minister, denying the elections' result and preferring to work with the far right than with the left, left which might I recall got him elected. Anyway. So we got a very right wing government, borderline far right to appease the RN, who only managed to stay in place because of that fact.

They had to make 49.3 for most laws they wanted to pass as the Assembly was heavily divided in the past months. The leftist union voted to demote the government every time, but the RN wouldn't. And then, a week or two ago, on one of the most restrictive budget propositions for public service this country has ever seen, they remembered they had to look like they care about poor people since that's, you know, their electorate, and since the budget was of course forced through with 49.3 voted also to demote the government.

So now we have a new prime minister, supposedly more to the left although still, obviously, a right-winger. Nothing much changed. Can't fucking wait for 2027... And please don't say that the leftist union is far left or that Macron is a centrist. Neither are true.