Czech news mentioned he was.
Translated from Czech to English:
“Cintula, a 71-year-old writer from Levice, is linked to pro-Russian paramilitary groups. He allegedly decided on the assassination after the presidential election because of Fico’s attacks on public media.”
Attacking public media is typical authoritarian shit. Andrej Babis did it in Czech Republic for years when ANO was in power. That said, nothing good will come from this even if I strongly disagree with Fico’s politics.
Quick news from France
Yesterday the head of LR (right-wing, formerly big party, now around 8%) announced an agreement with the far right for the upcoming elections.
If followed that would have meant guaranteed majority for them.
However he had not consulted with the other members of the party, and they all disagreed with that (good for them). So they decided to kick him out of the party (today I think)
However the guy reacted by locking himself in his office at the headquarters and said he was still the party’s boss and was not going anywhere. This lasted for a few hours until they located some spare keys i guess ? (Edit yes that is exactly what happened lol)
(At least the left parties quickly came to an agreement, but even together they don’t have that much weight…hard to predict what will happen but it will likely not be good…so at least we can have a few laughs before the election)
It’s now reported that the guy went first to Macron to ask for a Minister position, and when turned down immediately went to the far-right (and then blew up his political career ? tbc)
Funny how surprise elections in 20 days makes all the politicians lose their minds (except the left for now, fingers crossed this holds)
Smaller news than the LR guy but Macron randomly announced that he plans to forbid cellphones to < 11yo’s and social networks to <15. just saying whatever goes through his mind now I guess.
Is that a popular take by Macron, re: the phones? And is it possible to enforce through e.g. logins only through national digital IDs or the like? Politicians are discussing similar measures in Norway right now, with most people supporting some sort of ban for kids for social media especially.
And if you don’t mind, what are the polls looking like right now?
Yeah there’s already some laws, I forget the details but I think under 13 or 14 you can’t create an account without the parent’s authorization. The catch is that it s up to the networks to enforce this and they are obviously not highly motivated to do more than requiring to tick a box that says “I’m not a child” when registering
the forbidding cellphones for under 11 what it means is unclear, would cops ask for the ID’s of kids if they’re looking at phones in public places ?
Polls ive seen were 35% far right 30% left union 20% macron and then some smaller parties. Since it’s a 2 round vote but with possibly 3 candidates at the 2nd round, it’s not so easy to predict. Projections are giving about 45% of the seats to the far right, which is obviously pretty horrible, but its unclear how reliable they are.
Re: the LR “president”, he went for the Costanza technique (coming back to the office this morning as if nothing happened), let’s see how it works out for him…
Fantastic!
And thanks. Leaving it up to the social networks to enforce this will obviously be close to meaningless, you need to use a digital ID (such as eIDAS) and force the networks to use it for authentication. Easier said than done of course, but technically possible. Which is rarely the biggest obstacle…
Lmao he filmed himself dramatically sitting down to work at his (emptied?) office and then talked to journalists from the window, bragging he still had “most of” the keys, amazing
https://x.com/ECiotti/status/1801195609434587444?t=B3odHtX2jdQ9gJfwgO_YwA&s=19
https://x.com/CerfiaFR/status/1801181744193769562?t=DxC00YtPP3WWg4C8MFHuvA&s=19
https://x.com/_Dan_Austin/status/1810074791996514398
Not everything is always terrible. There is hope.
So you’re saying we can move to France? I’d do that tomorrow if I could get my wife on board.
It’s weird how catturd and Stephen Miller and friends are so upset about this. Shouldn’t they be focused on MAGA? Wgaf about France?
Makes it harder to screw NATO and Ukraine I guess?
Final results :
so even though the left “won” they are still far from the majority (289), and the centrists still managed a decent score, despite the high (deserved) unpopularity of Macron. (This is mostly because of the 2 round voting system, and the fact that all the leftist and most centrists who came 3rd in the 1st round dropped out and called to vote against the fascists).
Noteworthy from the electoral campaign :
unsurprising (but still depressing) how all of the billionaire-owned media went ALL-IN on supporting the fascists rather than the possibility of having their taxes increased. A little more surprising (and more depressing) is how this also applied (to a lesser extent, but still), to the public national channels, interviewing very aggressively every leftist candidate, while being soft against RN.
However, the public local press / TV did a really good job at showing how bad/scary the RN candidates were. A lot of the times this required not much more than asking them basic policy questions and watching them disintegrate (or try to push the “immigrants!” dial even on unrelated topics).
(weird feelings watching some of these videos…hard not to feel bad for these people who are clearly not mentally equipped for any sort of scrutiny…but they’re nazis so fuck em)
what happens now is unclear, as our constitution was not made for such a (3 party) situation.
optimistic scenario is the left remains united and nominates a PM. they probably won’t be able to get that much done, but they could try for some social measures (retirement age, minimum wage etc…) which could either pass or require the far right to go on record against them. there’s also a lot that can be done without majority under the constitution (as was shown by Macron et al. essentially ignoring parliament in the last couple years)
Other possibilities :
Macron manages to get 100 from moderate right and center left to ally with him for a “unity” government. This would be terrible and probably guarantee Le Pen winning in 27. Imo this is unlikely given his low popularity.
He could also just ignore the vote and nominate a PM/government from his own party, hoping the others won’t vote together against him. Would be very unlikely to work but would be in character for him (thinks of himself as a genius despite all evidence)
In any case, there cannot be any new parliamentary elections before 1 year from now.
Thanks for the summary!
Any educated guesses as to what will happen, or is it too hard to tell?
Not much more than what I wrote above. We’ll probably know in a few days what the leftist parties and Macron’s want to happen. Then we’ll find out what does, but it’s very hard to predict, and there’s a good chance there will be some twists and turns…
(i’m trying to cut down on my political news consumption, not easy in this moment!)
Which left parties are most likely to deal with Macron/Ensemble? Presumably the Popular Front will split to an extent in the wake of the election.
The left-wing coalition is made of, from (relative) right to left : PS (socialists), EELV (green), LFI (left), PCF (communists, only a few seats).
The order of “most likely to deal with Macron” is basically the same ? my Twitter timeline is filled by people lamenting how “surely, the PS will betray again” (it’s kind of their brand) but it’s pretty unlikely at the moment. The issue is that Macron’s coalition is, in non-negligible part, already made from PS (also LR, right-wing) defectors, so that those willing to go to him already left a long time ago, while current leadership has been very clear on wanting to stay part of a leftist coalition. In addition, even though Macron famously claimed in 2017 to be “neither right-wing nor left-wing”, his policies so far have been almost exclusively right-wing, to the extent that it’s been kind of a joke how every 6 months there were some new articles on how “this time, the left branch of Macron’s majority are really fed up” (almost none of them ever did anything). So it would be hard for him to convince people that this time it would be different.
There are maybe a few individuals who could “defect” ? for instance :
Aurélien Rousseau was a former (health) Minister under Macron. He was one of the few who did something and resigned last december when Macron went too far with a pretty disgusting immigration reform (passed thanks to the RN vote). He was also secretary of staff for the PM the year before, during retirement reform (his being part of the “left-wing” coalition is kind of a joke)
François Hollande, which you may remember as former president, came out of retirement to get back into parliament (has this been reported as far as the US ?). He is obviously not a leftist, as his presidency was famous for being hard left in the campaign but soft center/right when governing, he was hated by literally everyone by the end of his term.
So there’s a few like them who ideologically are pretty close to Macron. They probably deeply hate him personally though lol.
in short :
PS : unlikely to work with Macron except for a few individuals
greens : even more unlikely
LFI : zero chance
