If the Republicans decide Trump has to go....how will they go about it?

[Drakken]

That Paris terrorist attack pales in comparison to the violence of a balanced budget!

You tend to underestimate how rabid and incapable of pragmatism the French left and ultraleft can be.

[Valmy]

That Paris terrorist attack pales in comparison to the violence of a balanced budget!

You tend to underestimate how rabid and incapable of pragmatism the French left and ultraleft can be.

My impression was that they tended to talk a radical game but were pretty lame in actuality. Buy maybe they will be all like 'Better Hitler than Blum' this time. We'll see.

[Oexmelin]

It has more to do with how Fillion has positioned himself closer to historically rooted bourgeois right-wing ideology. The same that got thoroughly discredited by the 1940s, and which De Gaulle had been able to erase through circumstances and force of personality. 

The PS under Hollande indeed played the hand of so many left-wing parties of Europe and America - a managerial ideology of pragmatism, with the end result similar to so many other left-wing parties of Europe and America: approval from well-to-do liberals who are happy to give money and pontificate in the press, failing to convince right-wingers who hate their guts anyway, and disappointing their militants who gave time and energy to the party. These militants, who had been fighting the NF for years, will be the ones who will stay home this time around - and some will have been poached by the NF anyway.

[Valmy]

The same that got thoroughly discredited by the 1940s,

Huh. See I thought the extreme nationalism of the NF was what got thoroughly discredited by the 1940s. Silly me.

[Oexmelin]

Huh. See I thought the extreme nationalism of the NF was what got thoroughly discredited by the 1940s. Silly me.

Don't be flip. The National Front did not exist in the 1930s. What existed was a brand of bourgeois, Catholic, antisemitic, Conservatism, skeptical of the Republic at best, actively despising it at worst - who were not necessarily fascists, but who had been happy to give space, and power, to authoritarian leaders who promised to "make France Great Again". The end result - collaboration with Nazism - prompted self-examination, and the Gaullian synthesis. This is what discredited it as a form of mainstream conservatism. The FN certainly rose from the ashes of the Vichy militia - with antisemitism, fetish for direct, violent action, etc. - but it attracted people who did not care for discredit, because its modus vivendi did not seek respectability, contrary to mainstream conservatism. This is what has changed in the current incarnation of the FN. 

[Zoupa]

Maybe, but I'd bet ma chemise that Marine Le Pen will not be the next French President.

[Oexmelin]

Maybe, but I'd bet ma chemise that Marine Le Pen will not be the next French President.

Would you have made the same bet with Trump?

[Zoupa]

Maybe, but I'd bet ma chemise that Marine Le Pen will not be the next French President.

Would you have made the same bet with Trump?

I bet Yi that Trump would win... 

He owes me a crisp 50

[Crazy_Ivan80]

If there is one thing where the French are (still) superior it's this: they'll turn out and vote for a candidate not of their liking if it keeps out the worse option.

But what worked for Jean-Marie in 2002, won't work with Marine this time in 2017.

That may or may not be so.

[Capetan Mihali]

Fillon is just too much... an unabashed Thatcher-worshiper as President of the French Republic... scandale.

The history of the French far right is really interesting to me.  Despite the widespread and virulent/passionate embrace of values we might group as quasi-fascist from Boulanger and Dreyfus to the February 1934 pseudo-coup attempt, a French fascism, in the strict sense, never seems to have really emerged -- against the odds, really.  There was that one silly import that pretty much plagiarized Italian fascism to the point of absurdity, I forget the name, but nothing organically French.  Part of it might have been too many competing strands of reactionary thought: there were still Legitimists engaged in street fights in the 30s (Camelots du Roy), Orleanists, Bonapartists, Maurrasian national-syndicalists, etc.

[Oexmelin]

There was that one silly import that pretty much plagiarized Italian fascism to the point of absurdity, I forget the name, but nothing organically French.

Are you thinking of the Croix-de-Feu?

[Valmy]

Yeah Boulanger's trick was to unite those elements for a few seconds. The French far left also always had a similar problem.

However didn't the French Fascists use the defeat in 1940 to launch their parliamentary coup? It was not like the Germans required them to become a dictatorship. That seemed very French and 'L'Action française'-ish in how it viewed things.

[Oexmelin]

Technically, the coup was Pétain abrogating the Republic. But it was the Assembly - the same that had given birth to the Front Populaire in 1936 - that gave unlimited powers to Pétain - this is why Maurras called the defeat the "Divine Surprise".

[Capetan Mihali]

There was that one silly import that pretty much plagiarized Italian fascism to the point of absurdity, I forget the name, but nothing organically French.

Are you thinking of the Croix-de-Feu?

Le Faisceau.  Much less significant and much shorter-lived.  In a sad irony, the founder was at least enough of a French nationalist to join the Resistance, and he died in Bergen-Belsen.

[Valmy]

Technically, the coup was Pétain abrogating the Republic. But it was the Assembly - the same that had given birth to the Front Populaire in 1936 - that gave unlimited powers to Pétain - this is why Maurras called the defeat the "Divine Surprise".

I thought it was Laval's doing. He tricked a bunch of the Assembly's leadership to flee to North Africa and then bullied the leaderless remnant to end the Third Republic. IIRC anyway.