[HourglassFR]

> You are attacking the wrong target. You are missing the big picture.

This is rich comming from someone putting Melenchon, basically an old school socialist (in the werstern Europe sense), in the same bag as Le Pen and Zemmour who are as far-right as it gets in Europe.

I agree that the situation is not very readable, but at least let's try to have a point of view consistent with the political history of the last few decades.

[qsdf38100]

Yet there are lot of striking similarities. Lying, distorting reality to the absurd, openly supporting dictators, smoke-screen tactics, obstruction, inversion of reality, accusing others of things they are guilty. "Macron is a wanabee dictator!!".

In February 2022, Zemour, MLP and Mélenchon were all supporting Putin, his stance against the "evil US", saying that Putin would never invade Ukraine, that it was all US propaganda being spoon-fed to Europe. Then the invasion happened. Then they blamed the invasion on US, of course, and questioned the reports of war crimes, and justified Russia invasion by saying it was defending against "NATO aggression". But then, when Russia started to loose, they became "pacifists", saying NATO was prolonging the war by helping Ukraine...

If they were Russian assets, they wouldn't behave much differently, would they?

Same smell on both sides of the political spectrum. Who would have thought? Crazy, right? Like, imagine if far-right Hitler made a secret pact with the communist Soviet Union. Sounds familiar?

[mytailorisrich]

Le Pen is not "as far-right as it gets" and neither is Zemmour.

Melenchon is very left-wing, started as a Trostkist and is good friend Venezuela's Maduro, against the capitalist system, etc. So if you think Le Pen is extreme on one side then Melenchon has to be equally extreme on the other side.

[dtoma]

Who is "as far-right as it gets" if not these two? (in any country you want, not necessarily France)

[HourglassFR]

> Melenchon […] started as a Trostkist

So did more than half of the socialist party elit (elephant du PS), even freaking Cambadelis, are you suggesting he’s far left to ?

> against the capitalist system

Well yes, almost by definition of being on the left I would argue.

> So if you think Le Pen is extreme on one side then Melenchon has to be equally extreme on the other side.

No, this is a false equivalence. I mean the far-left as a political position does exist in France, but it is not represented by Melenchon who is still largely a socialist, although the actual socialist party has significantly shifted rightward in the 10's so there is a perception issue there.

[mytailorisrich]

The socialist party effectively no longer exists because its right wing has been absorbed by Macron and its left wing by Melenchon and friends. So now we're left with a large effectively far left group with Melenchon, Communist Party, LFI, etc.

My take on left-wing politics since the 1990s is that the fall of Communist/Solialist countries has made the old agenda difficult to sell so it's rehashed, repackaged, but at its core it's still the same. We've also seen that in the UK with Corbyn and McDonnell.

One thing in France is that it is usually better viewed to be far on the left than far on the right. For instance, the Communist Party are almost seen as nice guys these days...

Another point is that you do not explain why Le Pen is more extremist than Melenchon/LFI, etc.