I don't know how well folks are paying attention to what's going on in France right now, but left wing politicians in the French government are accusing President Emanuel Macron of trying to steal an election, as well as conducting a type of coup and given the available evidence, I'm having a hard time disagreeing with that sentiment.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/french-left-macron

'This Election Is Being Stolen From Us': French Left Calls Mass Protest Against Macron

"Leftist parties in France on Tuesday accused President Emmanuel Macron of election theft and announced mass protests after he rejected Nouveau Front Populaire's proposed candidate for prime minister, even though the left-wing coalition won the most seats in a snap parliamentary contest last month.

The left-wing parties that formed NFP in June to fight off the surging far-right expressed outrage at Macron's decision, with the Jean-Luc Mélenchon-led La France Insoumise (LFI) Party condemning Macron's dismissal of a leftist government as a "coup" and urging a "firm response from French society."

Although I must confess that I'm not an expert on the French system of government, on some level this seems like an extremely straightforward story. Back in June, Macron responded to his "centrist" party's extremely poor showing in European Parliament elections by calling an ill-advised snap election. As you can imagine, this did not go well and for a while it looked like Marine Le Pen's fascist National Rally party would win control of the country, until the burgeoning French Left and the country's centrist parties worked together to defeat the fascists at the ballot box. This left the parliament divided, but crucially the left wing parties working together controlled the most seats, which in turn means that the new French Prime Minister should be someone chosen by those parties. Except Macron, whose centrist bloc came in third place behind both the left and the fash, has been openly antagonistic to the left in France his entire time in office. Since the election he's dragged his feet and delayed naming a Prime Minster until now, when he's used the excuse that he believes a left wing government would immediately face a vote of no confidence (presumably engineered by the fascist right and crucially his *own* centrist bloc) to reject the left wing alliance's choice for Prime Minster entirely.

To say this is highly irregular, even unprecedented would be more than a mild understatement; from out here it looks like after the French left saved the country from fascism, Macron is preventing them from taking power pretty much entirely because he's a reactionary capitalist pig who hates anyone left of Otto von Bismarck. Furthermore, it's important to keep in mind here that the fascist right doesn't have the ability to collapse a left wing government on its own, so Macron is more or less admitting that his centrist bloc would work *with* the goddamn National Rally to do so; all of which makes this situation rather a lot like putting a gun to the country's head and saying "I can't let the will of the people stand because then someone, specifically us, would pull the trigger and blow the whole thing up."

Now that left wing alliance, the Nouveau Front Populaire, is (accurately, as far as I can tell) calling this a coup, organizing for Macron's impeachment, and promising to take the fight to the streets. In the meantime, Macron's government, which has already resigned, remains in power in a caretaker role. It's unclear how long this can continue on, but for the moment Macron is doing exactly what the left is accusing him of doing - stealing an election, against the will of French voters at large.

#FrenchPol #Macron #Fascism #Neoliberalism #NFP #Coup #Protests #NationalRally #LePen #Melenchon #GreenParty #LucieCastets