Sure, American socialists want to do little things like pack the Supreme Court, eliminate the Electoral College, and give the vote to cats who think they're people. But before we get to all that, you've got to see what France's would-be Comrade President would do to what's left of his country.
France holds its presidential election in April 2027, and the establishment incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, is term-limited out. And in any case, Macron's Renaissance party doesn't look so rebirth-y these days. Party leader (and former PM under Macron) Gabriel Attal is in a distant third behind Marine Le Pen and her nationalist National Rally party, and the lefty LFI's Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
To read Mélenchon's just-released campaign platform is to laugh, down a stiff drink, and then cry into your follow-up drinks.
French news service AlertesInfos published it on X this weekend, and X did its usual commendable job of translating it into English for people — like Yours Truly — whose French is limited to popular restaurant items.
Among Mélenchon's many cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs campaign pledges:
- Lower the retirement age from 64 to 60, with a full pension after 40 years of contributions.
- Gradually reduce working hours to 32 per week.
- Introduce a mandatory 9-month environmental service for people under 25, paid at the minimum wage.
- Set a cap of €12 million on inheritances.
- Freeze the prices of certain essential products to limit excessive increases.
- Raise public-sector salaries.
- Guarantee a minimum income for young people through a benefit.
- Make public aid to businesses conditional on social and environmental commitments.
- Reinstate the wealth tax to increase taxes on the very wealthy.
- Begin a gradual phaseout of nuclear power.
- Achieve 100% renewable electricity generation by 2060.
- Ban flights between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. (Really.).
No word on whether Mélenchon would require citizens to change their underwear every half hour and wear it on the outside so he can check.
And price freezes along with indexing wages to inflation... [chef's kiss.]
My personal favorite might be Mélenchon's proposed seven days of bereavement leave following the death of a friend. As one French voter put it, "I’m going to follow the activities of my 5,000 Facebook friends very closely."
Statism always starts with lovely sounding promises, and always ends with the Interior Ministry's Permanent Undersecretary for Interpersonal Relationships and Online Communications scouring everyone's private DMs to see who their real friends are, and whether they're worthy of bereavement leave.
Here's where things really get fun. The April election will likely lead to a runoff in May, and the French establishment might just rally behind Mélenchon and LFI to thwart her. Mon Dieu!
And that brings me back to America and the Democratic Socialists currently hard at work in a dank cellar crafting a skinsuit out of the decaying bits of the Democrat Party.
If Mélenchon's platform reads like a parody of nation-destroying leftism from a comic-opera called Les Communistes (and it does), French elites would still likely prefer it to President Le Pen ordering mass deportations of unassimilated Muslims currently helping burn down the country.
I don't understand that; I can only report it.
We have a similar problem in this country with Democratic Socialists who are few in number, but who have successfully moved the Overton Window from "let's expand the social safety net" to "let's seize the means of production and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat." And the DSA has the Democrat leadership increasingly cowed.
Because, like the French establishment, a nation-destroying communist takeover is still better than letting Trump control the border, deregulate the economy, or just build a White House ballroom.
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