For the last week or more, I’ve been watching Paris burn, and with it, France.
This is portrayed as “the far-right” vs. the “left-wing”. Which begs the question, what does it take to be “far-left”?
Right-wing and Left-wing come from where the different parties sat in the German parliament. The communists sat on the left, the Nazi, and socialists and everybody else sat on the right.
So to say that Nazi’s are right wing only refers to them being further right than communists. Which wasn’t very far.
The “right” in these United States are conservatives, not Nazi’s or other socialist scumbags.
Parliaments
In America, we don’t have a parliament. Our system is simpler, though it may not be better.
Our founding fathers designed a system that had a primary goal of stopping the government from doing things. Our constitution is written as a list of what the state is allowed to do. If it is not listed, then the government is not allowed to do it. That “thing” is reserved for The People or the states.
Some of our founding fathers realized how the government always wants more power. They added the first ten amendments as the Bill of Rights. These are explicit, rather than implicit, limits on the state.
There is nothing in The Constitution that allows the state to regulate The People’s right to be armed. Thus, the state is forbidden to do so.
The founding fathers knew that there were going to be morons that would say that they could regulate anything, speech, arms, privacy, anything.
The Bill of Rights places limits on what the state can do. There is nothing in the Bill of Rights that needs to be there. “Congress shall make no law…” There is nothing in the Constitution that says that congress can make a law regarding religion, speech, or the press.
The Bill of Rights is redundant. Boy am I glad it is there.
In a parliamentary government, members of the parliament are selected by the subjects of the nation. Those members then choose who will be the prime minister and who will be in the cabinet.
Since this is a majority vote, parliaments are shifting messes of coalitions.
If a single party has the majority of the members of the parliament, they then have control of the executive branch of government as well. If they don’t have the majority, they need to have some members of other parties join them.
A small party might decide to support the major party in exchange for a say in the executive.
What Happened In France
Parliament declared a “snap election”. This is when the people who hold control are losing control of the coalition. They are having too many issues with getting everybody to stay in line.
When they decide they can’t govern, they dissolve the government and the parliament.
In France, this means that the people go to the polls and vote for the member of parliament they want. If enough members from the same party win, they will have control of the government.
The snap election was called, and something unexpected happened, the right was winning.
They won the first round. They were on track to be the majority. Then the games started.
First, some 200 candidates dropped out of the race. With the votes, no longer being split between two or more Far-Left candidates, the right did not win that seat.
Having avoided losing completely to the Right, the Far-Left still did not have a single party with enough seats to create a government. The biggest winner, with the most seats, was the Right.
The Far-Left parties then formed their own coalition and blocked the Right out.
What It Means
The Right was running on stopping the flood of immigrants from third-world shitholes. They were running on stopping the flood of Muslims coming from the Middle East.
This is not to say that the two are distinctly different, there are more than a few third-world shitholes that are not Muslim centric, but it does seem that most third world shitholes have larger Muslim populations.
The Far-Left coalition is going to continue to import foreigners to replace the native population. They will continue to be soft on migrant crime. They will continue stomping on those that speak up against the loss of their country.
It was just reported that prosecutors are launching an investigation into Le Pen’s campaign finances. Claiming she did something illegal.
Le Pen is the head of the Right leaning party in France.
Comments
4 responses to “France is Burning”
The more mature countries of economic significance fell for the allure of Progressive policies. The Progressive Elites gained power in government; they will relinquish that power to rule the population reluctantly.
The people have decided not to participate in this game. It’s not going well for the Progressives.
this is how the loony liberals use “right wing extremism “….. everything but THEIR policies is “right wing extreme”.
yawn…. same shiite, different loony…
A good example of how a lot of Parliaments work — one that the international media actually cares enough about to cover — is Israel’s Knesset.
You hear all the basic terms: MP == Member (or Minister) of Parliament, PM == Prime Minister, etc.
But for the purposes of this discussion, the term to focus on is, “coalition government”. As described above, this is when a large party doesn’t have a clear majority, and must make alliances (including concessions and agreements) with smaller parties so that the sum total adds up to a majority, and that majority gets to pick the Prime Minister. This alliance-building system is necessary to form a majority “coalition” in nations with several parties, and (usually) functions as their version of checks and balances; it’s very difficult and rare for one party to control the show alone.
(It doesn’t happen in America’s House or Senate because: 1. We have only two major parties and one of the major parties almost always has a majority in any given chamber of Congress; and 2. The Executive [i.e. the President] is elected by the people via the electoral college, and not by Congress.)
What has happened in France is that the PM’s coalition government was crumbling and losing control, so they dissolved the Parliament and called for a new “snap election”, which Marine Le Pen’s Right-wing party was winning handily … until the multiple Leftist parties united, dropped selected candidates so that all the parties’ votes would be united behind single candidates, and re-took the majority. And then they played rule shenanigans to shut Le Pen’s party out of the coalition process … and launched a criminal investigation into Le Pen’s campaign finances.
(That last-minute change in campaign tactics, including dropping smaller parties’ candidates and 11th hour GOTV efforts against the “undesirable” party, is also one reason why American voting all happens on the same day and the results aren’t tabulated until after the polls close.)
IOW, Marine Le Pen is now France’s Donald J. Trump. The Left is scrambling for ANYTHING they can use to bring her down.
My guess is the investigation into her campaign finances will produce nothing of consequence, but that’s not the point, is it? The resources of the State are unlimited, but she’ll have to expend limited time, energy, and political capital fighting it; it’s intended to weaken her position at no cost to the Leftists.
Another element is that many other countries either have no Constitution (UK, Israel) or they have a meaningless one (Russia, Netherlands). The notion of “limited government” is somewhere between rare and non-existent outside the USA.
There’s a historic reason for that: other governments are evolutions of absolute monarchies. Henry VIII and the various Louis of France could do what they wanted, with no legal limitation whatsoever. Similarly, the UK has no legal limit on the government’s power; the only limits are its traditions and discipline, for whatever that might be worth. The Dutch “constitution” says the people have certain rights, but then in article 120 it says that no court has any authority to enforce the Constitution. Oops, so much for those rights.