Emmanuel Macron dissolves French parliament and calls snap elections

As I understand it, it was undergoing renovation, just as Notre Dame in Paris had been. In that case it was a problem of electrical equipment and lighting requiring multiple electrical sources to be brought into an old structure made of bone-dry wood. No Muslims needed for a fire to catch hold.

I'd bet a large amount of money that this is the same.

Plenty of accounts on twitter and the likes of breitbart that cater to those who aren't firing on all cylinders between the ears were claiming it was Muslims at the time and since.

So Macron keeps the existing PM if noone can propose another who can garner enough support to replace him ?

Is this still the French election thread?

Has anyone been following since?

It is very byzantine.I wonder how long Macron can hold off nominating a Prime Minister?

Do the potential Prime Ministers secretly prefer not to be nominated because they know they will not be accepted even if Macron nominates them?

That twitter poster seems fairly partisan ,calling Macron's (in) action a "coup d'état" whereas ,perhaps he is merely twisting in the wind and trying desperately to get the best deal for his own party in the short or medium term.

The comments in that twitter page are pretty interesting

Everyone has a different point of view and maybe that reflects the french public as a whole-no overall consensus eccept for the need to keep LePen's party out of power.

In they first place, they haven't said they'd try to vote down everything an LFI government did; just that they'd vote against it in a vote of confidence. That's a pretty standard position for parties that are not in the governing coalition themselves in most democracies.

Secondly, routinely voting against the government in all votes is the standard position adopted by the official opposition in any parliamentary democracy. It's not a way-out-there childish stance at all.

The issue here is not that the centre, centre-right and right blocs say they will vote against an LFI-led government. Why wouldn't they vote against a government that they aren't in and don't support? The issue is that the LFI and its allies in the NFP bloc don't have a majority of seats, or anything like a majority. Simply being larger than any of the other blocs in parliament doesn't mean a God-given right to form a government. Given the parliamentary arithmatic, any government has to be a coalition that includes parties from at least two blocs.

I think what Macron hopes — or hoped, at any rate — was to cause the NFP bloc to splinter. By holding out against a government dominated by the LFI, they would force other parties in the bloc to peel off and form an alliance with centrist parties, resulting in a centre-left government opposed by LFI from the left and by a variety of centre-right and right parties from the right. The current deadlock arises because the NFP bloc has refused to oblige by splintering. Now, they will seek to reverse the strategy, trying to get parties to peel off from the other blocs to form a centre-left government that includes (as its largest party, most likely) LFI.

He has to be voted in by the Assemblee,I assume.(get the feeling I was wrong there)

I wonder does Macron have the votes counted or is it going to be a squeeze?

Is that a man from his own party? (oh ,it is M. Brexit .We all know him quite well)