Bild-French elections: Melanson ‘hates’ Germany

French Prime Minister-designate Jean-Luc Melanson “hates” Germany, according to a Bild article.

The old left-wing Jean-Luc Melanson is leading a new left-wing alliance in today’s French parliamentary elections – and has a good chance of winning a majority in the National Assembly from President Emanuel Macron, according to the same publication.

Macron must tremble. While he faced a right-wing populist in the April presidential election, this time his opponent is far left.

Mélenchon was eliminated in the first round of elections six weeks ago, finishing in third place just behind Marine Le Pen. Now he is threatening a strong comeback, because for this election he managed to rally the Socialists, Greens and Communists behind his own protest party La France Insoumise (“Unruly France”).

Candidate Asterix Melanson has declared himself a “prime ministerial candidate” – a position that does not exist in France. However, he strongly believes that Macron will have no choice but to appoint him prime minister after the second round of elections in a week.

According to the latest poll on Friday, Macron’s people (the “Ensemble” alliance) are about the same level as the newly formed Mélenchon bloc, at about 27%.

An electoral victory of his left-wing alliance (Nupes, “Nouvelle union populaire écologique et social”) would seriously upset the EU, the German newspaper notes.

Millions of French people are hanging on to the lips of the former Trotskyist Mélenchon as he pulls out his ancient slogans from the naphthalene of the anti-capitalist international (“man is not a commodity”, “another world is possible”).

His campaign promises are: lots of cash prizes to the state pump – and an additional reduction in the retirement age from 62 to 60 years.

Germany would have a huge problem with him. Mélenchon hates us, Bild reports, savagely portraying our country as a desolate empire of ruthless greed. He accuses us of honoring social coldness and of wanting to impose it on the rest of Europe.

“Germans, this is a model for people who do not care about life,” Melanson said in 2013, according to Bild. “No one wants to be German. They are poorer than average, they die earlier than others and have no children.”

Mélenchon has repeatedly referred to German reunification as an “illegal annexation” of the German Democratic Republic (DDR). He did not even avoid the comparison with the Russian occupation of Crimea – although otherwise he defended Putin after every crime.

There is no taboo for Mélenchon: he likes Germany so much that he would like to have two of them at the same time.

In his anti-German pamphlet entitled “Bismarck’s herring – the German poison” (2015), he wrote that the cliché of nature-loving Germans (nudists, honeyed tulle, walks in the pine forests) masked the fact that they actually pollute the air throughout Europe with their cars and coal-fired power stations. And their chemical industry is poisoning food around the world.

In a demonstration against the rescue package of Greece by our then chancellor, he sang “A la poubelle, Madame Merkel!”. (He was celebrating the Greek Prime Minister of SYRIZA Alexis Tsipras (“Il a la classe, notre Tsipras!” – “Our Tsipras is in order”) – at least for as long as he continued to resist the austerity measures.

When Angela Merkel once also cautiously called on France to make reforms, he wrote on Twitter in German: “Shut up, Mrs Merkel! France is free!” He once again said of the chancellor: “This is not an iron lady, she is a peasant girl from a corner of her country who does not take responsibility for Europe.”

Even after our departure from the qualifying round of the 2018 World Cup, it was not over for him to write on Twitter “pure joy”.

Majority voting makes it difficult for small parties in parliamentary elections, which often fail to even make it to the second round. Ultimately, only the votes for the winner of the constituency decide on the distribution of seats in parliament.

Right-wing Marine Le Pen nationalists, for example, won 13.2% of the vote in the first round in 2017, but ultimately won only 8 of the 577 seats (1.4%) in parliament, as rival candidates typically ally against of their candidates at the constituency level.

Mélenchon has a good chance of overcoming this obstacle, because he has united many parties of the left spectrum behind him. The situation is different in the right-wing and far-right camps: There, different parties dissolve each other.

Source: Capital

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