Whom do you favour for President of France?

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*Please note that the following financial statement is entirely the opinion of the poster and may contain non-financial expressions*

From a financial markets point of view, the chief of the German central bank is already being fairly standoffish about the current programs and once the Germans are out the whole Euro zone is screwed. It does look like the German central bank is preparing for the eventual collapse of the Euro. The interest rates on French debt went up a little bit today, if Hollande is elected there is a risk that the rating agencies will slash the French rating down a bit, which means a further increase in the interest on the debt.

Overall, I'd say that anyone who votes for a socialist in the middle of a financial crisis needs to have their head examined and following that examination they should be locked away since they are clearly insane. Strauss-Kahn would have been a better choice, since he understands economics and finance, anyone who calls themselves a socialist does not.

If Hollande had half a brain, he would realize that declaring war on the financial industry and rich people is a bit moronic when you owe them billions of euro. It's essentially like telling your loan shark to f**k off and calling his wife a b***h. It will only hurt France economically and further public expansion (60.000 jobs according to Hollande) is risky given that it will have to be debt financed. I have yet to see a socialist cut public spending, since the only thing they know how to do is incinerate capital at a rate that makes drunken marines on shore leave look like Warren Buffett.

Maximillian Robbespierre

ruveyn

May 6th will be a very interesting day indeed with the 2nd round of the French election and the Greek elections being the same day. Could be the start of something really ugly.

I'm willing to put money on it getting very ugly, because the voters are still the same idiots that voted for spending borrowed money. The demands in the financial pact earlier should have required the states to give up a lot of autonomy to ensure that its followed.

If anything, the Euro crisis is an example that the inhabitants of some country should not be allowed to vote, because they are ret*d.

Here's a social democrat from the Netherlands who reduced our national debt by 10% while rebuilding the country after a war and a famine, with our most important centre of trade destroyed completely.
Even before the war, tight fiscal policies and the gold standard issued by conservatives and liberals had utterly ravaged our economy and left us one of the poorest countries in Europe.

Here's a graph.
Now, care to guess when social democrats took an important part in coalitions? I'll spoil it for you.
1945-1958; 1973-1977; 1989-2002, with a social democrat as premier between 1994 and 2002.

As for the most right-wing coalitions, I'll also spoil those for you.
1982-1989; 2002-2007; 2010-2012 (recently, a party withdrew after seeing the dramatic economic consequences of a rigid fiscal policy, and the premier resigned today. In two years, and with approximately eighteen billion in budget cuts, they failed completely to reduce the deficit due to annihilation of our economy, in fact raising it beyond remotely acceptable levels, and our debt is now well beyond the 400 billion milestone).

If France, as well as the Netherlands, is to meet a guideline or reduce its debt anywhere within the next two decades, the only reasonable course of action would be to have a coalition that ensured economic growth took precedence over clumsily reducing government spending. If I could vote in France, I'd vote Hollande. Unfortunately, Dutch elections seem to be set for September, so I'll have to wait, along with most people, for several months until I can vote for a competent social democratic candidate (Diederik Samsom, Ronald Plasterk or, as a wildcard, Emile Roemer) to pull us out of the ridiculous quagmire the economic right have put us in.

Social democrat is not the equivalent of a socialist. Social democracy in the modern western perspective tends to be a third-way (combination capitalism and socialism). The core problem was that the keyensian policy of increasing government spending during economic slowdowns was not followed, which along with reforms in the financial industry crippled private sector spending.

No private company is going to hire people and spend their massive cash reserves when they are being forced to keep a lot more capital on hand and can expand outside of the socialist anti-business climate of Europe in a country like China where you have a state-capitalist pro-business government.

What will most likely happen now, is that social-democrats enter office, spend like madmen, get the economy going through increasing their debt, then the new financial laws kick into action and boom its all gone.

If you're going to be semantic, Hollande's plans do not seem to involve

He's basically advocating what Samsom, Roemer and Plasterk advocate, and what Drees advocated. Increasing state control over the economy and prefering growth over reduced spending, unlike the disastrous and undemocratic dictates from Brussels and Wall Street we had to follow for most of the past thirty years. There are no plans whatsoever to reform to a socialist/practical communist state in any way. They just want to break the cycle of budget cuts, a shrinking economy and therefore a higher deficit paired with increasing homelessness and poverty (which, when you've been to France and Germany, seems a problem already and is steeply on the rise here).

I'm not sure where you live, but for someone who has spent most of his life under the financial uncertainty of right-wing coalitions, and has seen the debt more than double as a result of that since he was born, with parents and grandparents who would gladly trade life now for life in the 1950s and 1960s, even though they're not generally on the poor side of society, with relatives who lived through Colijn's era and still get angry if you mention 'that bastard' for his fiscal policies, this system is the opposite of ideal. Oh, and consumer trust reached an all-time low along with the deficit under this right-wing miscarriage.

The Greek election won't matter much. The new government still won't have any money to make changes, the leftists will still riot over social programs there is no money for, and those with a job will still evade taxes by any means possible to stay in business/avoid going bankrupt from getting shaken down to pay for people that deliberately lived off the government even before their economy crashed.

Would this be at all relevant to the debate?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/de ... as-sarkozy

Pocketing millions of dollars stolen from some of the poorest states in the world?

I'll send a ballot overseas for Sarkozy. Even with his dishonesty and corporatism, he is still less undesireable than parti socialiste, who would just continue the same kinds of corruption. Parti socialiste has also supported an initiative to give noncitizen residents of France the right to vote (fortunately, this never succeeded). And at the same time, Hollande has the nerve to demand actual citizens to pay exhorbitant taxes.

You're joking I hope! Le Pen is a extremist, a nazi, literally! She may not look like it, but that's don't mean she's not, she like the reincarnation of Hitler! In true she despise democracy and want nothing more to destroy it!

You should watch this documentary to give you a idea of the true face of the french far right.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDSKth4CP8k[/youtube]