With France’s presidential election less than a month away, it seems like the once-dormant Communist Party is making major inroads among French leftists.
According to a recent poll, the candidate for France’s Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, has now cruised ahead of less-radical socialist party candidates, on his way to becoming the face of France’s left-wing political guard.
This is stunning, considering that the Communist Party has been almost completely out of favor in France for more than 25 years. The last time a Communist Party presidential candidate received anything close to the level of support that Roussel is currently garnering was way back in 1997.
As the popularity of Roussel has increased by leaps and bounds, the popularity of France’s social democratic candidate has waned. In other words, French leftists are jumping off of the center-left bandwagon in favor of a full-on communist radical!
So, what does Fabien Roussel have in store for France, should he become the next president?
Roussel calls his 180-point program (communists always have a laundry list of policies they long to implement) the “Happy Days France” program.
Among his biggest proposals, he would like to:
- Initiate a 32-hour work week
- Decrease the retirement age to 60 while increasing benefits
- Introduce a very generous Universal Basic Income
- Pay all students 850 euros per month
- Make all meals at school “canteens” 1 euro
- Restore and triple France’s wealth tax
- Enact a French-style Green New Deal
- Vastly increase France’s federal bureaucracy by at least 500,000 workers
And by no means is that a comprehensive list of the policies that Roussel and his Communist Party comrades desire for France.
But, wait. Isn’t France already dealing with a crushing burden from public pension promises that is already straining the nation? Well, yes.
And, didn’t France recently undergo a brutal round of riots (the so-called Yellow Vest protests) in defiance of the nation’s already out-of-control energy prices? Well, that would be true too.
And, isn’t public education already “free” in France? Well, that would be another yes.
However, all of these pesky facts can’t get in the way of the lofty rhetoric that Roussel is hoping will pull more French citizens away from the center-left to his far-left fantasy world.
Although it is unlikely Roussel will be the next president of France, it is still scary that his communist policies are gaining traction in the country with the motto: liberty, equality, fraternity.
PHOTO: French flag. Photo by Stephanie Hobson. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).
Chris Talgo ([email protected]) is the editorial director and a research fellow at The Heartland Institute, as well as a researcher and contributing editor at StoppingSocialism.com.
