Far-right Le Pen closes in on Macron ahead of vote

I wouldn't say a nail in the coffin. The swell of fascists has been suppressed for now. And this could be simply down to their money being focussed on the invasion in Ukraine.

The level of abstention in France says it all. When given the choice between "more of the same" and a horrible racist piece of sh1t, the French people en masse went said, "Meh, Que Será, Será".

European countries need to get their sh1t together on this. The neo-liberal policies that have been creeping in for the last few decades have left behind a younger middle-class group who are in real terms less well-off than their parents and finding themselves less and less represented in the political sphere. Politicians have been throwing them beans by pursuing social reforms, but that only goes so far when people can't put a roof over their heads.

This leaves them wide open for exploitation by populists who find convenient scapegoats and promise easy answers.

The EU as a whole needs to aggressively start rebalancing the financial situation. Crack down hard on property speculation. Higher taxes on high earners. ECB strategies to dampen inflation and improve access to funds for building homes. There are very basic and obvious reasons why younger voters are unhappy. The answers to those aren't easy, but they need to be done.

The idea of a "protest vote" is patently ridiculous.

Here kids, a choice of two doors. Keep walking through the left one and you get punched everytime without fail, but whatever you do, don't open that boogey-man right door, oh don't do that, nooooo, wouldn't want to do that! :P

People want change from being punched in the face, as demonstrated by the fogies voting for macron, and the upswelling youth vote for Le pen.

There's only one single take away from this particular vote that's worth knowing, and it's in the graphic below. Inevitability is coming.

Most people don't have much notion about the complexities of running a country and balancing all the needs. Politicians, no matter how "good" they are, will always have drawbacks and limitations in that regard. As such there's always criticism/blame to be levelled. Try to think of how many world leaders have succeeded in the last 20 years at staying above 50% in the polls, very few. Not because they are all "the same" but because the job itself has so many limitations and always has diminishing returns.

Populists have found a way round that. They join the rabble and blame the current establishment for all the ills, claiming they will magically fix everything. Then when they do get into power, they just continue to blame the establishment ("deep state"), the media, etc to scapegoat the fact they aren't magically fixing all the problems

The far right populists do the above, but they feverishly work to erode democracy in the process, always gravitating towards autocracy which is their natural state.

Rinse, repeat.

Except they aren't "a brick through the establishment's window" are they? They are the establishment.

The supreme stupidity of someone voting for the likes of Trump, say, who they think will tackle the establishment and work for the common man should be clear to all at this stage. A guy that shits on a golden toilet and lives in a tower in NYC and who gave tax breaks to billionaire jet owners is the guy that's going to fight the establishment on behalf of Joe Bloggs?

Or take the likes of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson...you couldn't get more establishment than him. He's the guy working class Tories think is going to do them the best deal?

People voting that type into power as a means to have a go at the establishment has got to be one of the greatest depictions of irony that I can think of.

nothing to do with macron, it is well known that french riot police are violent, that's just how they operate.

you can be damn sure the same thing would happen if le pen was in power, in fact it would probably be a thousand times more violent.

The CRS have a violent history, the students involved in the 1968 protests can attest to that, in fact you will often hear the chant "CR-SS" at many demos once they appear

I never said they didn't? I was responding to his claims of it supposedly being sure to be worse under Le Pen

unlikely given they aren't a threat to the state unlike the truck protesters who had to have their bank accounts frozen to protect the state and it's people.

the government act with banks to freeze bank accounts of criminals all the time, it's nothing new.

Convicted criminals and tax defaulters.....not innocent protesters.

they were neither innocent or protesters.

le pen and people of her politics are dangerous and must be prevented from being anywhere near power.

Well they weren't, they were against mandatory vaccination (something the left would have been behind in the past) but ok, if you're happy for those powers to be used against people you don't agree with, then don't complain when it happens to ones you support. Personally I don't think governments should have the power to freeze personal bank accounts for protesting against their policies, whether I agree with them or not. It's a dangerous precedent