## F10 LiveFromFrance S02E10

Yippee, we have a government! ...well, it's not what everyone expected. It's the 4th party in the elections that made it, with an old man who negotiated Brexit badly for the European Union. An old man who was against abortion, against same-sex marriage and... against the "Republican Front" against the extreme right. Michel Barnier is the perfect embodiment of what Emmanuel Macron really is. An ultra-liberal with old ideas in a well-tailored suit that doesn't shock anyone... at first glance. But his government is under the sword of Damocles of the far right. So he has formed a government with the most retrograde and reactionary ministers of his party and the most upstart of the Macronists, who are never hard to find. They even find a pseudo-left minister to make it look like it's a big coalition. It's false and so far from the election result. Macron could have chosen athletes from the Olympics and it wouldn't have been worse.

At the same time, there's a trial against many MEPs from the extreme right-wing party. As some of the right-wing MEPs, they employed some assistants in the European Parliament just to get money. But they only worked for the party in France.... when they worked. There are a lot of false documents and lies, and it's all about Marine Le Pen's ineligibility. That's not a big scandal in France, for the first party, and that's shocking for many foreign observers... or French people who are attached to Justice. Justice is once again the poor relation of the budget. The government is trying to find 60 billion euros when Macron has given 100 billion to the big companies without giving anything in return. They are expecting a deficit of 6% of GDP, 1% more than the target and double the European rule. With lower contributions from companies, that's less revenue for health, pensions and unemployment. And France has never had so many poor people since the Second World War. Students are queuing up at soup kitchens and hel
p centres. But the theme in the media is always the same: flat screens bought with school fees, obviously fake news. 

Everything is done, in the news magazines and in the TV news programmes, to help the extreme right, with a buzz about the latest murder, an accident... only when it's a foreigner who's obviously guilty.... An Arab or black foreigner, of course. We have been talking about anti-Semitism for months, but Arabs and blacks are the real victims of a hidden, latent racism that is not yet recorded in the statistics. The statistics are often in unemployment and poverty. Anger is also hidden and I'm afraid that the next elections will be an expression of anger. As we say, anger is never a good advisor. After October 7, there was a lot of anger in the Jewish community and in Israel. Hamas opened the Pandora's box of the extreme right in Israel. It has caused tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. But the international community has done nothing concrete about it. France has never listened to either Israel or the Palestinians, not even in Lebanon, which used to be a French protectorate.
 Macron even had the great idea to start criticising Netanyahu 2 days before the 7 October celebrations. What a great diplomat! 

But in France, it's better to criticise professional diplomats like De Villepin or Vedrine and invite false philosophers linked to the Israeli extreme right like Bernard Henri Levy. How can we hope to understand at least part of this conflict and not import the worst of it? France sometimes seems so close to the situation in the United States or Italy. We don't have the Olympics anymore as a drug to forget our reality. A famous song from the 80s, La Boum, said: "My dream is my reality". But fewer and fewer people have dreams.

Last post of this series, because the plan for this blog was not to have monthly series and everything has been written on the subject.

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