What, Exactly, Is The Plan Of The French Left?

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First, what is this 'new' French left we have been going on about in the last couple of posts?

Noted humanist FrancoEcon guy Thomas Picketty, writing with his colleague Julia Cage in the Guardian, explains:

...This alliance takes its inspiration from the Popular Front – which in 1936 emerged under the threat of fascism to govern France. This leftwing coalition of socialists and communists represented a real change for the working classes, with policies such as the introduction of a two-week paid vacation and a law limiting the working week to 40 hours. Such social change was made possible by electoral victory, but also by the demands of civil society and by pressure from the trade unions, which organised a wave of factory occupations. There was a clear sociopolitical competition between working people and the ruling classes that led to a political conflict between the left and right...

In other words, the argument is that this New Popular Front (NPF) is the real deal rather than the soft, squishy faux social deal that the French were most recently served, as reader Danneau has noted, by Mitterrand and Hollande.

But what is this NPF proposing to do, exactly?

Back to Cage and Piketty...

...The detailed NFP economic manifesto was launched last month with full costings. Because – and this is new – the NFP’s plans are balanced from a budgetary viewpoint: investment in future growth and productivity as well as in energy and climate transition could be made affordable through progressive wealth taxation, the introduction of an exit tax, effective taxation of multinational firms and a long-awaited fight against social, fiscal and environmental dumping. This programme would also give workers more power within the companies that employ them by improving corporate governance (for example, reserving a third of seats on company boards for employees’ representatives, following similar provisions that have existed for decades in Nordic countries and Germany)...

Now, of course, if the NPF can do even half of that it will be a great victory for all, especially those folks most feeling the squeeze of late stage capitalism's end game.

And, again according to Cage and Piketty, truly helping those most squeezed is the real key to effectively dealing with the rise of the far right:

...(P)eople in smaller cities and rural areas are drawn to the far right first and foremost because of socioeconomic concerns: they lack purchasing power, they suffer most from the lack of investment in public infrastructure and they feel that they have been abandoned by governments of all stripes in recent decades.

The NFP’s policy platform credibly addresses how to finance a strategy of inclusive investment. By contrast, the far right argues in favour of repealing the existing tax on real-estate multi-millionaires. It claims it will finance its policies by targeting foreigners and welfare recipients, but this will simply generate more economic disillusionment and more tensions.

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FunFactInThePostWritingMachine...In doing a little background digging on Piketty I learned that he refused the Legion of Honour because, according to him, 'it is (not) the government's role to decide who is honourable'....Imagine that!


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