One thing the PS had been very adroit at doing is to draw people's attention to the FN, which right now is the only credible anti-EU and anti-ruling elite party. There is a concerted attempt to muzzle anything to the left of the PS leadership, which is why you often hear folks like Valls and Le Guen vociferously denouncing "division" among the ranks, which is an invitation, given they have no intention of even considering modifying the course on policy, to just fall into step.

Focalising attention on the FN is a two-pronged electoral strategy. First, it is one which tries to give those many disappointed rank and file PS members and sympathisers a reason to vote. The logic is "you are disappointed in how we govern, but if you don't vote look which scary people could get in!" While the PS in governing is a failure, this particular strategy, while on the whole not a great one, has had some success, and arguably the PS did better, even though they were badly beathen, then they could have.

Second, there have been polls looking forward to 2017 which would indicate that there is only one way the PS can possibly succeed - and that is in a dream Hollande run-off against Marine Le Pen. The hope being here that a divided centre-right (say, Juppé, Sarkozy and maybe another mainstream right wing candidate could all run with relative strength) could let Hollande squeak through to the second round against Marine Le Pen, with a subsequent "rally for the Republican candidate" push allowing Hollande to remain at the Elysée. A bit of a stretch, but one which none other than Le Monde has talked up, earlier this year, and realistically Hollande's (and the PS in general) only hope as things stand now.

This strategy has parliamentary repurcussions too, as triangular and PS-FN binary run-offs are the PS only possible route to success in a large portion of parliamentary seats which will be up in two years.

One unfortunate side effect of this has been for criticism of the EU and of Maastricht to be relegated to the FN. There are voices on the left with similar criticisms, notably people like Jacques Sapir in academia or François Lafond with a more political background, but no one with a political following much less a movement. A key mistake, in my view, of the Front de Gauche in the 2012 election was to mostly and substantively avoid this subject, choosing instead, like the PS today, to direct attention to the FN's unsavory side rather than that of the EU the FN was attacking, and in so doing giving up to the latter the ideological space which is contesting the single currency as presently constituted. And now we see many of its former voters in 2012 (don't forget, Mélanchon got 11% and the Front de Gauche got 12% in last year's Europeans) these people didn't just go away, though they certainly did not vote in those numbers last week.

Alas, in France if we are to have a political movement come to power which forthrightly contests the prerogatives of the elite which both the UMP and the PS represent, it will come from the populist right.

 

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill

Syriza and Podemos arose out of a massively unemployed, educated middle class. 50% youth unemployment for 5 years will tend to generate that kind of movement because it gives a lot of energetic, able people a lot of time to think and to organize. As bad as France's employment situation may be relative to the French norm, it's still in the low double digits. So I just don't expect a radical left movement to arise in France. And, in addition, the country has the Front National as a suitable outlet for non-ideological anti-establishment anger.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman

Almost since Al Gore, I have a growing suspicion that the big Labour-lite parties of the world are deliberately (from some compartmentalized level) abstaining from the power, letting down their constituencies in elections and policies. It started from some details in Lithuanian elections, then Al Gore and Kerry non-elections, the Netherlands in 2002, Sarkozy in France, again thin but consequential losses in New Zealand, Denmark... And when they have to win an election, Obama, Hollande (and what, Wouter Bos in NL?) only confirm the trend.

Here in the UK, with an election looming Blair has just come out strongly supporting Labour and Ed in person.

Considering how much Blair is hated, I can only assume this is a move to throw the election for the Tories.

french elite (this one is a normalien) spout such nonesense. Completely cut off from the reality of truly normal french people, another lieutenant (and there are only lieutenants on up in this army) in the central commande of the brigade logistique of keyboard kommandoes tells us all how the answer is to gut the state even more, as if we haven't example after example in the EU of how this is not a particularly good idea, much less proven.

They've lost the plot. This is normal, they haven't experienced life in the real world, only the elite one where they evolve. These employment and other business-connected perks (super rolodex, think-tank sponsorships, et c.) result from their fortunate status as a graduate of an elite french educational institution, where what you did from ages of 16-21 will punch your ticket for not having to worry about such trifles.

I am actually surprised they still speak french (some of them have in the past stopped. As with this one, English tends to be the language of choice, though as it was generations ago, German is coming back into fashion; perhaps we will see this translated and published in Handelsblatt sometime soon.

I do not sure it comes from the breeding (i.e., inbred). I tend to favor the explanation of the selection process. To get into one of these institutions, you need to certainly be intelligent; but you also need to have been a very docile and disciplined teen, studying while the others might have been doing what normal adolescents do, like playing football, going out with friends, trying to get laid and so forth. And so the resulting promotions tend to be populated with folks who integrate and then stenograph what their authorities say (teacher, then boss, then the conventional wisdom they hear in fora from Brussels to Davos to Jackson Hole). A perfect petri dish for perpetuating long-discredited (outside the inbred circle) economic theories like Hayek's.

I strongly suspect this is why very few elite continentals win many, say, Riksbank Economics prizes, the recent French winner being the exception which more or less proves the rule (doing your PhD at MIT helps a lot). And I also strongly suspect that this explains how the Euro came into existence: an elite project, not economically sound (in real time as early as the 1960's being discounted as unrealistic and economically and politically damaging); the people, when their opinion was actually asked for, weren't warm to it at all.

 

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill