While France celebrates the defeat of the “far Right”, less well-reported is the extraordinary victory of the far Left (the actual far Left – it includes Marxists and Trotskyists and is violent and antisemitic) after it won the highest number of seats. This ascendancy of radical Leftism poses a real threat to the French economy and the survival of the European single currency, says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
Compared to the U.K.’s election, France’s was certainly a shock. With the final votes tallied, Le Pen’s NR and its allies won only 143 seats in the new Parliament, President Macron’s Ensemble secured 168, and the New Popular Front won 182. Although the NR won 37% of the votes, far more than any other party, tactical voting in a two-round system meant it was locked out of power. Here’s the problem, however. Blocking Le Pen also meant handing a huge increase in power to a New Popular Front dominated by Jean-Luc Melenchon’s France Unbowed. And ironically, it is even more extreme than the NR.
In reality, the Popular Front’s manifesto makes Jeremy Corbyn look like a moderate. It promised 150 billion euros in extra public spending, increasing public sector salaries by 10% immediately, making transport free and lowering the retirement age back to 62, with longer term plans to hire more teachers and healthcare workers and invest more in green energy. It would pay for all of that with higher corporate taxes, with a wealth tax and by borrowing more money.
The NR had plenty of plans for spending more money too, and had nothing to say on liberalising the economy or restoring its competitiveness, but the Popular Front is far more radical. Indeed, an analysis by Bloomberg showed debt as a percentage of GDP rising to almost 130% by 2027 under the Popular Front, compared with 120% for the NR, and 110% under Macron’s outgoing Government.
That is not all. A far-Left administration in Paris is far less likely to accept the discipline of the bond markets and the credit rating agencies than the Right. As bonds started to sell off in anticipation of an NR Government, the party started to water down its plans, and showed signs of accepting fiscal constraints. By contrast, the Left doubled down on extra spending.
The problem is that French voters “have become addicted to vast and rising levels of Government spending”, with nearly 80% voting for a big increase in the deficit. This “is not sustainable within a single currency”, says Lynn.
Worth reading in full.
France, it seems, has become so fixated on keeping out the phantom of the “far Right” – even though National Rally no longer has any policies that could be so described and really is just focused on the very popular policy of immigration control – that the country ran straight into the arms of actually dangerous extreme Leftists with a genuine penchant for antisemitism. A far Left which loves to riot when it doesn’t get its way, and even when it does. This is not a healthy democracy by any measure.
Stop Press: France’s sovereign debt rating is at risk as it faces an “unprecedented situation” over its public finances, the agency Moody’s has warned.
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