Francuska - predsednički izbori

The new Sopranos season is the best pic.twitter.com/IAgj3gLvm3

— Mathieu von Rohr (@mathieuvonrohr) 24. април 2018.

"Prvi maj je dan radnika, a ne dan razbijača", rekao je Makron

Not surprisingly, most of the French government has backed Janaillac in his struggle to keep wages contained. To that end, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire on Sunday expressed his concerns about the company's future and said that its workers need to show "responsibility" and accept that they can't demand unrealistic wages, because the French government - which owns 14% of the company - won't bail out the airline if it sinks into bankruptcy.

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This past April, however, Macron made the controversial move of accepting an invitation to speak at the annual conference of the bishops of France. In a country with a long tradition of militant anticlerical struggle, the fact that the president would even get in a room with the Catholic Church’s top clergymen was enough to rouse some secularists’ worries that Macron’s commitment to laïcité was less than solid. Minutes into his speech, the young president seemed to confirm these worries, announcing to the bishops that “the link between the church and the state has become strained, and it is up to us to repair it.”

Macron went on to suggest a role for religion — and the Catholic faith in particular — in his political program. One might have thought that a president so often portrayed as the champion of a progressive liberal center would have little use for the church. But a year into his presidency, as the French public has increasingly come to view him as a right-winger, Macron articulated a surprisingly explicit connection between his neoliberal reform agenda and Catholic religious identity.

Addressing the bishops only days after workers went on strike to contest his government’s liberalization of the national rail service, Macron took the opportunity to describe what he believed was the real challenge facing French society. “It is not only an economic crisis,” he insisted, “it is a relativism, even a nihilism, the idea that nothing is worth it: not worth learning, not worth working, and especially not worth lending a hand in service.” In our “postmodern era,” Macron continued, “our system traps people in a spirit of ‘What’s the point?’” by discouraging hard work and entrepreneurial initiative.

The message was clear to anyone familiar with Macron’s tendency to moralize economic activity. Throughout his short political career, he has cast himself as a champion of entrepreneurs and risk-takers against the “lazy.” For Macron, France is divided between those who want to set the country in motion — or as he named his campaign movement, En Marche! — and those who want to keep it stuck in place. In his speech to the bishops, Macron unsurprisingly insinuated that striking workers across the country are on the side of immobilism and laziness; choosing his words carefully, he referred to this moral crisis as “burdening our country,” the verb grever, “to burden,” being a homonym for the word for “strike.” More original was his suggestion that the church is on the side of dynamism and initiative. Throughout his speech, he praised the Catholic “energy” that he believed was the authentic source of French politics and culture, and called on Catholics to continue to “act politically” in this struggle.

Inverting the typical French understanding of progress, Macron has sought to cast organized religion as the agent of change, in opposition to movements for social equality. With Macron repeating his warnings about “nihilism” in recent weeks, this worldview appears to be either a sincere conviction or a calculated political message. In one particularly cynical exchange in early May, for example, Macron, a millionaire ex-banker, contrasted the values of the gendarme who had recently sacrificed himself to stop a terrorist attack — a practicing Catholic — with those of activists “who believe that the highest aim of political struggle is 50 euros in housing assistance.” Macron had, of course, imposed cuts on the aforementioned housing assistance some months prior.

Macron’s address was not merely a breach of protocol in a country where many believe politicians ought to refrain from speaking directly to religious communities. It was an expression of a deeply conservative political project, thinly masked with the language of “innovation.” As Macron has increasingly abandoned his center-left supporters — still waiting for his “pivot” to a supposed Scandinavian-style “flexible” social democracy — he has attempted to enlist both the church hierarchy and right-leaning Catholics as allies in a struggle against unions and the welfare state.

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Macron is only the latest politician to build his politics on the wager that France is headed towards a long-term shift to the right on questions of religion and identity. By making this wager, he, like Marine Le Pen, Nicolas Sarkozy, and to an extent Manuel Valls, has helped bring it closer to coming true. Yet despite media narratives to the contrary, Macron’s opponents on the secular left, though they may not agree on much, are as of yet united by a belief that when it comes to ethno-religious identarianism — as with neoliberal globalization — there is in fact an alternative.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/emmanuel-macron-catholic-church-laicite-religion

French MPs criticise 'hasty and ineffective' fake news law

President Macron faced heated debate in parliament from left and rightwing parties

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
@achrisafis
Fri 8 Jun 2018 10.37 BST


The French government was accused by right and leftwing opponents of trying to create a form of “thought police” and institute censorship, as parliament began debating Emmanuel Macron’s proposed law to ban fake news on the internet during election campaigns.

The draft law — designed to stop what the government calls “manipulation of information” in the runup to elections — would allow political parties to complain about widely spread assertions deemed to be false or “implausible” and a French judge could immediately move to stop their publication.

The centrist President Macron, who beat the far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, in 2017, has personally backed the reform after he complained his presidential campaign was targeted by online fake news rumours, including that he was gay and that he had a secret bank account in the Bahamas. He has said a law was needed against the spread of fake news “in order to protect democracy”.

The government wants the law to come into force before next spring’s European parliament elections. It is likely to pass because Macron has a parliamentary majority.


But in heated exchanges in parliament on Thursday, members of the rightwing Les Républicains party accused Macron of trying to create a “thought police” that threatened freedom of expression. The leftwing France Insoumise party warned of a new kind of censorship and cautioned against a hasty, unnecessary and ineffective law against an ill-defined concept of fake news.

The culture secretary, Françoise Nyssen, told parliament the spread of fake information online was “polluting” the public domain and amounted to a “slow poison that destroys our credibility”.

After one journalists’ union had warned the law could be used to hamper reporters’ work, Nyssen said that professional media would not be targeted.



Bruno Studer, a politician from Macron’s La République En Marche party, who drafted the bill, said the law would focus on “manipulation of information” and deliberately not use the English term “fake news”. He said the government wanted to distance itself from any ideological appropriation of the term “fake news” as used by the US president Donald Trump as means to attack journalists and the media.


The law aims to identify and stop deliberately false information that is “massively” spread online in the three-month period before an election.

Most criticism has been focused on the section of the law that allows political parties or candidates to complain about an item of allegedly false or implausible information online and a judge will, within 48 hours, rule on it and can block the publication. The judge must decide whether the allegedly false information could determine the course of an election, and whether it has been massively and artificially spread online.


Social networks would also have to clearly state who was sponsoring content. The law would also give the French media regulator new powers to remove broadcasters’ rights to air content in France if it is deemed to be deliberately fake or implausible. Foreign broadcasters could be taken off air if they were deemed to be attempting to destabilise France, a measure taken to be aimed at Russian state-backed outlets.


The newspaper Le Monde warned of the importance of ensuring the law could not one day be used by an authoritarian government for censorship. The paper argued that the real problem was that people readily believed fake news — a sign of “a major crisis in our democracies, people’s growing mistrust towards their institutions”.

Constance Le Grip of Les Républicains told parliament the law was “useless, redundant, inadequate, dangerous, an attack on freedom of expression, badly written and only raises concerns instead of bringing solutions”.

During the election campaign in spring 2017, Macron filed a legal complaint after Le Pen, the Front National leader, referred to stories about him placing funds in an offshore account in the Bahamas. At the time, Macron’s political movement, En Marche, called Le Pen’s statements a “textbook case” of fake news.

Macron has also had harsh words for Moscow, accusing Russia of following a “hybrid strategy combining military intimidation and an information war”.

The judge must decide whether the allegedly false information could determine the course of an election

Pariz -- Francuski predsednik Emanuel Makron našao se u neugodnoj situaciji tokom obeležavanja 78 godina od osnivanja Francuskog pokreta otpora.

U trenutku dok je Makron prolazio pokraj okupljenih građana, jedan tinejdžer ležerno ga je upitao: “Šta ima, Manu“, aludirajući na Makronov nadimak.

Pre toga mladić je otpevao stihove međunarodne socijalističke himne.

“Ne, ne, ovde si na ceremoniji. Ne možeš tako da se ponašaš. Možeš da se ponašaš kao klovn, ali danas ipak pevamo našu himnu. Obraćaj mi se sa ’gospodine predsedniče’“, rekao je Makron.

Mladić mu se izvinio, ali je francuski predsednik nastavio.

“Treba da radiš stvari na pravi način. Čak i ako jednog dana želiš da vodiš revoluciju, najpre moraš da zaslužiš diplomu i da naučiš kako da staviš hranu na sto”, oštro je završio Makron.