French Presidential elections

[vorlon13]

I don't see the French EU issue being a binary choice; stay or go.

How about the EU cut WAY back on the bloat, administrative redundancy, waste, administrative bloat, overhead, redundancy, administrative idiocy, redundancy, waste, and  administrative bloat  ???

A smooth running, efficient and taut EU might even get Britain back in the fold.  If the EU was managed well enough leaving becomes unthinkable for the members, then the members won't think about leaving.


Sheeesh!!  Is this so fucking hard to noodle out ??

Do you know how many people the EU employs? 24,500 directly and a further 9,000 on secondment. That is roughly comparable to the Irish civil service (which doesn't include employees of the HSE, An Garda Siochana, the Permanent Defence Forces, any of the semi-state companies or local authorities). Given the amount of work being done by EU institurions and bodies there is remarkably little bloat most of which is found in the CAP (and a large chunk of that is set to disappear in the next two years when the UK with its massive payments to large landowners exits).

The EU is, when you look at it, one of the most efficient govermental bodies around (and a far, far better thing than any private company [outside of small enetrprises] that I've ever looked at in terms of effectiveness).

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I care.

538 Gave Trump the highest chance of winning (@33% at the time of the election). The chances of a Brexit were similar, Ithink closer to 40%.
They say she has nowhere near the odds Trump or Brexit did, and her chances of winning are very, very, very low.  And shrinking.  The longer Trump is in office, the worse Le Pen has done.

I've heard some say a large terror attack might change that, but the recent shooting didn't even give her a bump.  I think she's got all the support she's going to get. They came close in this first round, but that was 4 candidates going against each other. In head to head polls, Macron is 26 points ahead of Le Pen.  That's nothing like the close polling that existed with Brexit or Trump/Clinton.  The recent "upsets" have all been within the statistical margins of error that they know exist, so are not actually statistical upsets.  If the trend holds, at the worst, Macron would win by 21%-ish.

Le Pen has never done well from terrorist attacks, because people begin to realise, a) the innefectiveness of her policies vis a vis terrorism, b) the sheer inability to implement even 10% of what she proposes, and c) the fact that the woman is herself a terrorist.

EDIT:

dammit, where'd my post go ?