France: Preferred President (First round)

[Antonio the Sixth]

Thanks, we needed a version with all the candidates.

You guys all know who gets my vote.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Not sure which of these joke candidates will get my joke vote.

If you want to push the joke to its logical conclusions, you should go for Cheminade.

[Antonio the Sixth]

A Hollande / Mélenchon runoff would be an awesome thing to see IRL.

[Antonio the Sixth]

At this point, I'm probably going to vote for Mélenchon as a half-joke, half-serious vote in the first round and, at the rate things are going with dumb and dumber, probably 'be creative' with the ballots in the runoff.

The 'half-serious' part of the vote being a sincere tribute to Georges Marchais?

I don't understand all this love for Georges Marchais. Sure, he was a pretty good speaker and a mostly honest person, but he was also a stubborn party hack who maintained an outdated party line despite its becoming sillier and sillier every day, a quite petty politician in his relationships with other parties (yes, Mitterrand screwed him, but Marchais would have done the same had he been more clever) and whose attitude has harmed the left plenty of times.

Compare with a man like Berlinguer, who was charismatic but also intelligent, had a forceful, original, principled but not dogmatic vision of communism, a project for the future and had distanced from the soviet failure even before it had been exposed as such. It explains why the PCF became such a joke and why the PCI remained so powerful (until, of course, it committed hara-kiri).

[Antonio the Sixth]

LOL, they're almost tied now.

[Antonio the Sixth]

No love for Cheminade ?

[Antonio the Sixth]

LOL, Dupont-Aignant is the most overrepresented (relatively speaking).

And still no love for Cheminade.

[Antonio the Sixth]

ftr, the poll on my blog (58 votes) is more balanced: Sarko and Hollande tied at 24%, Melenchon 17%, Bayrou 15.5%, Marion 10%, Joly 5.2%, Arthaud 3.5%. No love for either NDA, Cheminade or Poutou

Yeah, I already noticed that the readers of your blog tend to be more right-wing than the forum.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Bump, with 5 days left.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Anyone support Bayrou?

Moderate heroes ?

He turned himself into a French Evan Bayh.

[Antonio the Sixth]

had a dream last night.  in which I were Melenchon and upset Sarkozy for second place, and gave a victory speech.  I was only able to talk in English but nobody seemed to mind.  I spoke about how were were going to need a mass social movement to defeat Hollande in the runoff, and that social movement would have to continue through after we won in order to resist the IMF, EU, etc.

If Mélenchon made his victory speech in English, his voters would probably accuse him of capitulating against the globalized Anglo-Saxon financial oligarchy.

But fun dream anyways.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Still no love for Cheminade.

Well, anyways, these are good results. Probably better than RL ones.