#Frpol

[hedgehog-moss]

When you lay down the bare facts of what's happening in France, it's so plainly evil.

Macron, a millionaire banker, told French people he wants us to work until we die (most people affected by the increase in retirement age work in rough conditions that make their life expectancy much lower than the rest of the population) and French people took to the streets to say no, we want to live a little before we die, and Macron started sending thousands and thousands of cops armed with steel batons and tear gas grenades and LBD guns to gas us and beat us into submission. This millionaire banker is sending cops to brutalise old ladies and homeless men and arrest children at protests and many people have already been severely wounded, in the past week only French people have ended up with cracked skulls and amputations and broken hands for protesting Macron, and he's not backing down, and other Western governments are not in a hurry to do something because they're not terribly opposed to the idea of millionaires working poor people to death.

We'll keep protesting.

What they are singing:

We are here We are here Even if Macron doesn't want it, we are here For the dignity of workers And for a better world Even if Macron doesn't want it We are here

[wormbussy]

which one of you did this

[the-bibrarian]

[fritalianblr]

More than 10 600 000 people voted for fascism this sunday in France. I need a playlist to soothe me a bit because this is getting dangerous as hell. I share it here because I've obviously put french songs.

"La jeunesse emmerde le Front National."

(The youth screws the National Front.)

Le Front National est l'ancien nom du Rassemblement National, parti politique fondé par des anciens nazis et collabos de Vichy. C'est un parti xénophobe, raciste, antisémite, homophobe, transphobe et j'en passe. Son fondateur et président, Jean-Marie Le Pen, était assez direct devant les médias pour que personne ne puisse penser qu'il n'est pas raciste.

Mais depuis que c'est sa fille, Marine Le Pen, qui a pris la tête du parti, elle a entamé une campagne de communication incroyable pour faire croire que son parti n'est plus raciste et n'a plus de lien avec le nazisme. Bref, qu'il n'est plus d'extrême-droite. Tout ça dans le but de pouvoir passer dans les médias et gagner des électeurs. Changer le nom en Rassemblement National fait partie de sa stratégie de communication.

Et ça a fonctionné. Aujourd'hui, beaucoup trop de personnes pense qu'elle et son parti ne sont pas d'extrême-droite. Pourtant ce sont toujours les mêmes idées, le même programme. Ils sont juste enrobés dans une couche rose bonbon de communication. Les mots sont bien choisis. Ils sont lissés. Elle a gagné des électeurs. Elle est au deuxième tour des élections présidentielles depuis 2017. On est obligés de réélire ce fichu Macron parce qu'elle se retrouve en face de lui.

Et là, élections législatives provoquées par la dissolution de l'Assemblée Nationale par Macron le 9 juin 2024.

Le Rassemblement National fait 33% des votes, plus de 10 millions de votes. Plus de 10 millions de personnes ont choisi le racisme.

Les 18-25 ans ont voté à 50% pour la gauche. Et à 25% pour le RN... Mais pour les 50% de jeunes qui ont voté à gauche, ce slogan existe toujours bel et bien : LA JEUNESSE EMMERDE LE FRONT NATIONAL !

[ungrateful-cyborg-moved]

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[ahalliance]

the thing is, if the opposite had happened, if the leftists had come in 4th and the right in 1st and despite it a leftist prime minister had been elected, the absolute uproar of screaming crying shitting we’d be getting from the right rn would be astounding . but naturally they don’t care if it’s undemocratic as long as it suits them

[gratuiciel]

🩷On a gagné! On a du taff, et pas qu'un peu, mais on a battu le RN! Beaucoup de courage pour ta circonscription. On les battra en 2027!

Sérieux comment ça m'a remonté le moral direct de voir le NFP en tête ! J'osais même pas regarder les résultats et au final tout s'est passé encore mieux que je l'espérais :D Merci pour ton soutien <3 on lâche rien !

[firespirited]

The greatest terrorist attack on the usa wasn't 9/11 but cointelpro. Think about the loss of hope and inability to imagine a different future by killing, silencing or buying off all radical thinkers. I feel that the supreme court is currently carrying out acts of terror, whether it's corporate rights or bodily autonomy. You've felt it like a cage, like a knife at your neck.

Locally the loss of hope when the president was able to override the will of the people and their elected representatives has had this suffocating effect that's rippling down to the smaller institutions. Oddly enough we're looking to the usasian strikes for hope that we've lost in our own.

[cheapfakeblood]

if france can do it, so can america (at least try and vote please please please)

me @ France right now

[hedgehog-moss]

Update on the French protests: we've had a well-known expert in contemporary political history call the situation we're in "the worst democracy crisis France has known since [the end of the 4th Republic]" and meanwhile the government is trying its hardest to maintain a façade of normal functioning by a) hiding from protesters, b) hiding protesters from view, and c) banning saucepans and other means of drawing attention to the protests that are being swept under the rug.

I mean casserolades are an old tradition in this country but they wouldn't have been needed if Macron &co hadn't started almost systematically banning protests in entire districts of the towns they visit and setting up police roadblocks to prevent peaceful protesters from going anywhere near them. (Too bad because these are the kinds of images the media get (these 2 are from Le Monde) when protesters get to talk to Macron <3) :

Protesters corralled away where they can be easily ignored started banging pots and pans so the protest could at least be heard in the background of TV footage, and then pans started being confiscated.

French courts have repeatedly struck down the bans as illegal but police prefects keep churning new bans out every time Macron goes somewhere anyway, trying to publish them at the last minute so there's no time for a judicial review. (I saw a sign at a protest last week that went "Stop with all the bans we no longer have time to disobey all of them")

After boldly banning saucepans by calling them "portable sonorous devices" last week, today a police prefecture banned "festive gatherings of a musical nature" in a town Macron will be visiting tomorrow. They're (ab)using counter-terrorist legislation for all this, so these days we get to read unheard-of court rulings that go like "We are suspending this prefectural decree as we do not consider festive gatherings of a musical nature to pose a significant terrorist threat to the President."

If Macron had people showing up in support I don't think we would see so many pissy protest bans because then the media could show backers vs. opponents and things would look normal (and not like 70% of the country is very pissed off with Macron). But there's not much for them to show if they don't show the angry people banging pans and it clearly rankles Macron—we learnt yesterday that he sent a letter to 200,000 political supporters of his essentially ordering them to start making appearances all over the country, to show they are "proud of what you are and of what our country has become [since I got elected]." That seems a bit desperate.

For months Macron &co have been predicting that people would get tired of taking to the streets in large numbers, and now that people are going like—right, let's try a new strategy, small local protests greeting gov members everywhere they go!—we're hearing a clear "no not like that, that's not what we meant :l " reaction from the government.

They've also been trying the strategy of announcing stuff at the last minute, like on Monday the Minister of Education announced at noon that he would visit a higher learning institution in Lyon 2 hours later, and a hundred of protesters still showed up and tried to force their way into the building. They were held off by cops using tear gas and trying to block entrances (there's a pic that made me smile, showing cops trying to barricade university gates with garbage bins—how the tables have turned...!) and the Minister ended up not showing up and moving on to the next step of his schedule (protesters tried to follow him there but police vans were blocking the street.)

The first half of the video is at the uni in Lyon; the second half is in Paris later that day. When he returned to Paris the Minister was greeted by protesters with saucepans at the train station, it's like a national relay race of protesting at times. He had to go back through the train to leave via the other end of the platform under police escort so as not to meet any protesters (god forbid).

Macron commented that this was "uncivic" behaviour and I agree, civic behaviour on the part of gov members would be to at least face the people they choose to fuck over, instead of hiding behind cops and fleeing. Obviously Macron was condemning the 'uncivic' protesters though, and the Minister said he felt "physically threatened" by the "violence of [the protesters'] speech" which is a shit thing to say considering on the same day that he was mildly inconvenienced by having to take a different exit and felt physically endangered by words, yet another protester was mutilated after being shot at by police with a rubber bullet. Not a peep about this incident (or previous ones) from the government. The Minister of Education never even condemned that time high schoolers trying to protest got tear gassed and threatened with riot guns by cops in front of their school earlier this month.

But while people continue protesting despite the actual violence from cops, our ministers are looking pretty scared of citizens banging pots and pans. Here's a list of official visits that got cancelled "for safety reasons" (saucepan terrorism) in the past week:

1. Minister P. NDiaye cancelled a visit in Lyon 2. Minister F. Braun cancelled a visit to Evrard Hospital 3. Minister Delegate O. Klein cancelled a visit in Bobigny 4. Minister Delegate O. Grégoire cancelled a visit in La Baule 5. Minister S. Guerini cancelled a visit in Castelnau 6. Secretary of State B. Couillard cancelled a visit in Rochefort 7. Minister S. Retailleau cancelled a visit to the Paris Saclay University (electricity trade unionists cut the power in the building she was supposed to inaugurate, so) 8. Minister C. Grandjean cancelled a visit in Toulouse (this article says it was probably because the visit was quite near a big highway protest where protesters among other things were building a concrete wall on a national road)

In the same bullshitting vein as "portable sonorous devices", gov spokespeople have been insisting that visits aren't being cancelled, ministers are just "adjusting the course of their trips" which is funny to me. I guess we never beheaded any royalty we just adjusted the course of their necks. I also read a newspaper article that made me laugh, that went like "Minister cancels visit; trade unions disappointed" and I thought it was because the cancelled visit was a meeting with the unions which they wouldn't get to have, but the article said it was actually because they had a good protest planned and wouldn't get to hold it...

Watching protesters mess with the government in small ways on a daily basis has been good for morale—on Twitter the hashtags #IntervillesMacron and #IntervillesduZbeul popped up (zbeul = chaos, mess, and Intervilles was a TV game show that aired for over 50 years, where French cities competed against one another in goofy challenges). I only mentioned cancellations above, but fun things also happen on non-cancelled government visits, like a Minister having to leave a building via the emergency exit because of protesters blocking the building entrance (which some people argued is worth more points than a cancellation as it's more entertaining):

Various websites were created to keep track of all these smaller protests and to officialise the point system that ranks cities on their efforts to fuck with the government:

(the first symbol means a protest, the second means a casserolade, the last one means protesters managed to get inside a building where a visit was taking place)

(Translation: Ruckus (saucepans, heckling...) 1pt Protest: 1pt Creative action (chasing minister in the woods, etc): 2pts Measures of energy conservation (= power cuts by unions) 3pts Action that leads to a political figure fleeing: 4pts Cancellation of a visit: 5pts — then there's a weighting system where the score is multiplied by 3 if it's a Minister, by 5 if it's the Prime Minister, by 6 if it's Macron.) (I also saw an interesting debate on Twitter this week—since our leaders often embarrass themselves, how should the government's own goals fit into the point system?)

Right now the Hérault department is winning because on top of protests, power cuts and casserolades, protesters greeted Macron with a giant "MACRON FUCK OFF" sign hung from a cliff (!) and took over a highway display so it'd say "Welcome to [region] Butthole Ist"

These past few days I've been discovering unknown French cities (and Ministers) thanks to them showing up in the hashtag after a good protest. I discovered a mediaeval castle I'd never heard of when unions hung banners featuring our most famous revolutionary dates from the castle's battlements. (Two days later, another protest with eloquent banners in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris:)

People are very creative—last week we heard that protesters got prosecuted for giving Macron the finger and insulting him during one of his official visits (< we are a healthy democracy), so protesters in another region tried a more sarcastic approach, and greeted a deputy from Macron's party at a strawberry fair this week with clapping and confetti and "Thank you for making us work 2 more years, thank you for police repression, thank you!" The deputy beat a hasty retreat. Then said he would file a complaint against the harassment and intimidation he had been subjected to. (The tear gas and riot guns and arrests and protest bans are not intimidation of protesters on the other hand. Or the fact that another deputy from his party recently said on TV that they were "ready for war"... They're ready to wage war, but run and hide when people clang saucepans and throw confetti.)

Anyway. I'm enjoying the fact that they can't even attend a small strawberry fair without getting heckled right now. In one of my first posts about the political crisis in March I wrote something like "How will Macron and his gov have any legitimacy to speak about any issues after this?" and it cheers me up to see a lot of people across the country agree that they have no legitimacy to talk about anything, not even the strawberry harvest.

The next nationwide protest is of course for May 1st, but in the meantime it's been really fun following the smaller protest actions all over the place. Members of government & Macron's party keep making whiny statements along the lines of this is terrorist behaviour, we can't go anywhere, why are people not getting tired of fucking with us and the answer is, because it's really entertaining!

This was the last sentence of a recent Le Monde article about Macron's situation and it has such a sinister, end-of-reign tone:

"I'm moving forward," Macron concluded, on April 20th in the Herault department, while behind his back echoed the sound of saucepans.

[wormbussy]

truly wild cabinet reshuffle going on in France

- the new prime minister Gabriel Attal is 34, openly gay, and has talked about getting cyberbullied on Skyblog, which is what French millennials who didn't have a band used instead of Myspace.

- the new foreign minister Stéphane Séjourné is either his partner or his ex (they were at one point confirmed to be in a civil partnership, but are since rumored to have separated). (source) From the screenshot, he also seems to be the only other person brought into a major cabinet position.

in other words, the first openly gay prime minister of France and the first openly gay foreign minister of France are 1. in the same cabinet and 2. have fucked

there are already twitter gays claiming to have Grindr receipts on the PM

what a time to be alive

[the-bibrarian]

Pétition pour demander l’union des gauches aux législatives 👆

On ne devrait pas désespérer ! Avec le report des voix le système à deux tours est défavorable au RN et on a encore une chance de les bloquer, mais à condition de se mobiliser 💪

Parlez-en, partagez, signez et surtout votez ! Le 30 juin et le 7 juillet les électeurs du RN et de reconquête ne resteront pas chez eux. Ne les laissez pas faire ! Ne leur donnez pas l’occasion ne taper sur les plus fragiles, ne les laissez pas saboter toutes nos lois contre la crise climatique, détricoter l’état social, ruiner encore plus le pays pour enrichir les grandes entreprises !

Allez voter, et proposez des procurations à ceux qui ne peuvent pas !

[ungrateful-cyborg-moved]

Sur une note plus optimiste ceci dit, les conneries de Macron vont découpler les législatives des élections présidentielles. Je suis pas ravi de sa merde, mais pour la démocratie française c'est nettement plus sain.

[jackofacetrades]

Yeah, in France it's fucking catastrophic. The extreme right nazi parti was first in the European elections (31%, Macron's parti barely reach 14% (damn right imo) and the left was scattered so much that it was a fucking joke). So Macron decided to dissolve the Assembly immediately after. We barely have 3 weeks to organize and vote again for the legislatives, it's the beginning of the summer vacations and most people were not planning on being home. The french political landscape is in shambles and it does not look good. We're hoping for the left electorate to mobilise itself after such a defeat, especially since, thank god, all leftist parties FINALLY decided to unite themselves. I'm really hoping they'll follow through with this promise, otherwise we stand no chance.

Apparently, the extreme right wing got big scores in the countryside, where they feel completely abandoned by everyone and that's an anger vote. It's fueled by nearly all the medias, which are detained by very few men (Bolloré & Co) who have been villainising the left and paving the way for the extreme right for years now.

I can't help but hope for a real resurgence of the left, but I'm also very frightened of what our world is becoming...

We aren't the fucking european elections trending on here. Man y'all were all over eurovision but the elections were today and nobody is posting abt it??? Dude here in germany a right wing extremist nazi ass party is the second strongest one. Same in france and other countries as well. I feel like im in a dumpsterfire. Please fucking talk about it.

Ich geh jetzt im strahl kotzen tschau

[legallychanged]

l'alternance possible ? oserait-on y croire ?

(transcript: [DIRECT. RÉSULTATS ÉLECTIONS LÉGISLATIVES 2024/ LE RN EN TÊTE AVEC 33,5%, DEVANT LE NFP À 28%, ENSEMBLE À 22%])

[hedgehog-moss]

Much love to this old lady whose reaction to Macron's Great Saucepan Ban of 2023 was to straight-up smuggle a saucepan in her purse past the police checkpoint to go clang it with a spoon near the president with renewed anger and determination.

Protesters today greeted the Prime Minister on an official visit by banging their shoes against walls to make noise, so I wonder how long we'll still be allowed to wear shoes.

(Joking about this is risky because after the saucepan protests on Monday, Le Gorafi (the Onion's French cousin) joked that the government would now take action to seize pans—and it became a reality on Thursday... We can't forget that our satirical news outlets are disproportionately affected by the bullshit inflation.)