French Conservatives Dealt Crushing Blow (elections)

Tuesday, Mar. 30, 2004.

French Conservatives Dealt Crushing Blow
By Elaine Ganley
The Associated Press

PARIS -- In its most impressive electoral showing in a generation, France's left bulldozed its way across France in regional elections with a crushing defeat of President Jacques Chirac's government, which sets the stage for a Cabinet shakeup.

Sunday's victory march by the reborn opposition Socialists and their leftist allies isolated the conservative president with a losing team and an unpopular party midway through his five-year term.

edit ...
The Socialists, combining forces with the Communist Party and the Greens, won 20 out of mainland France's 22 regions, holding onto the eight it already ran and conquering 12 others. Results from four overseas regions were not immediately available.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/03/30/258.html

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Well, this will get some neo-cons frothing at the mouth. Will they say this election is a victory for terrorism too?


Images of the March 21 protest in Los Angeles here:
http://ediablo.com/LAprotest3-21-04.html

"If you have no enemies, it is a sign fortune has forgot you."
- Thomas Fuller (1608 - 1661)

They will just say that they surrendered to the terrorists.

Except in the United States of Amnesia, alas.

Congratulations, France.

Historical trends suggest that it will begin to recede in this election or the next one.

From the article

The results jolted the political landscape to its core and amounted to an angry call to the French leadership to change course. Painful reforms instituted to save the social security system from bankruptcy and bring France's budget deficit in line with European Union rules have turned wide swaths of French society against Chirac's governing conservatives.

For Chirac -- who hit a peak in popularity at home as the leading voice against the United States over the Iraq war -- the electoral drubbing for the right has forced him to refocus on his domestic flank.

Maybe a wake up call

A related article
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3578715.stm
Are France's economic reforms now doomed?
Analysis
Tim Fawcett
BBC News Online business reporter
(snip)
The previous - socialist - government hoped to create jobs by cutting the working week to 35 hours.

With salaries unchanged, this left companies with little money to hire more workers, but sparked widespread opposition from business.

Painful backlash

Under the conservative government, reform plans have been tougher on workers and recipients of welfare.

Employees are supposed to work longer to qualify for a pension. Some unemployment benefits are set to be cut back.

French voters - both in and out of work - have greeted the plans with derision.

And government proposals to introduce more private pension contributions have run into fierce opposition with bitter and disruptive protests
(snip)

a little premature?

Speak truth to power.

Tough luck, Tony.

I have to start objecting to this. There's nothing about Bush that's remotely akin to Bolshevism. Bolshevism opposed world war one, and many Bolsheviks honestly worked as union organizers and so forth. I see no comparison at all. Fascism perhaps... corporativism, nativism, racism, agrarian populism... the whole gamut of right-wing ideologies, but not Bolshevism.

Bolshevism...besides you?

It's a euphemism for, let's say, the "worldwide rightist movement" (see post #5), currently led by Bushco, which in some cases is willing to do virtually anything to gain political power, as were the Bolsheviks. There are totalitarian overtones as well.

n/t

But U.S. corporatists and neocons would likely prefer the anti-Iraq right-center Chirac to an anti-Iraq left or left-center anybody.

While there is agreement of the parties across the spectrum on Iraq, the left would not have been (quite as) complicit in the Haiti coup and other imperial activities in former French lands. The people of France are rejecting neo-liberal economics.

and might bring Hait back to democracy, and bring Aristide's return a little faster.