The French like self-destruction

Last night’s TV debate among all 11 presidential candidates was convincingly won by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who’s now running fourth in the race.

Debates are usually won not by deep ideas but by glib oratory. In a time warp, Leon Trotsky would debate rings around David Davis (why, even Dave Cameron managed to do that) – yet I’d prefer Mr Davis’s policies to Mr Trotsky’s.

Hence one shouldn’t read too much into Mélenchon’s outdebating Macron, Fillon and Le Pen. But one can still read something into it.

After all, 25 per cent of viewers saw a rank communist as the most convincing candidate. And yet every one of Mélenchon’s policies, if brought to fruition, would be catastrophic. Collectively, they’d turn France into a pre-1989 Romania.

Like Mrs May, Mélenchon wants to increase workers’ rights. However, the unions already have more power in France than they had even in pre-Thatcher Britain.

Nowhere in the high-rent part of Europe can the unions organise such paralysing strikes as in France. This, though French workers are already among the highest paid in the world, while working on average 200 hours per year fewer than in Britain, and 300 fewer than in the US.

Giving the unions (which is what ‘workers’ means in practice) even more control would plunge the economy into chaos and eventually destroy it. And if that doesn’t do the job, Mélenchon’s other pet idea, increasing welfare spending, will surely do it.

France already tops the world in that category, spending almost a third of GDP on welfare, way above the global average of 22 per cent. Only Finland, Belgium and Denmark approach such stratospheric levels, but even they lag behind France.

Mélenchon’s plan can’t be realised without pushing public spending in France, currently at about 60 per cent, close to what it was in Stalin’s Russia (about 80 per cent). Similar political adjustments are bound to follow, but then that’s the general idea.

Jean-Luc has also worked out how to rid France completely of any people capable of driving the economy forward. To that end he proposes to introduce a marginal tax rate of 100 per cent on those earning over €360,000 a year.

Hollande’s similarly inspired initiative only managed 75 per cent, which was sufficient to trigger a mass exodus of bright, enterprising Frenchmen. It’s largely thanks to such punitive taxation that London has become the world’s fifth most populous French city.

If Mélenchon gets his way, during the years it’ll take us to curb free movement in the EU, London has a sporting chance of outstripping Paris in that department. That’s not necessarily bad news for us, since the French are still better educated than the English and definitely produce better bread, cheese and pastries. One just hopes that the last Frenchman leaving his country will remember to unplug all electric appliances.

What else? Oh yes, Jean-Luc also wishes to ease immigration laws, which already don’t strike me as being excessively severe: France currently welcomes about 250,000 migrants a year.

‘Welcome’ isn’t a figure of speech: my local village proudly displays a sign Bienvenus aux migrants dans l’Yonne, a sentiment not universally shared among the locals who tend to vote for Le Pen by a wide margin. Considering that France is already 10 per cent Muslim, one can understand their understated hospitality.

I recall being tortured at school with a mathematical puzzle about water flowing into a pool through one pipe and out through another. If Jean-Luc implements his plans, France will function like that pool: foreigners, mainly from the less desirable countries, will be flowing in; Frenchmen, mainly the more solid kind, will be flowing out. Draw your own demographic conclusions.

Then of course Jean-Luc advocates full reimbursement of healthcare costs, money no object. Actually, money would be no object if he got his hands on the lever operating the printing press. Alas, that lever is in the hands of the European Central Bank, which is to say the EU, which is to say Germany.

So naturally Jean-Luc wants a Frexit referendum, ideally to yield a Brexit-like result. That by itself is good – chapeau, as I’d say in French. Except that, considering why Mélenchon wants to leave the EU, my head insists on keeping its hat in place.

He believes that the EU is too ‘neo-liberal’. Now anybody fluent in communist will tell you that in that language words mean the opposite of their dictionary definitions.

Hence ‘truth’ means a lie, ‘justice’ means ‘injustice’ and so forth. What Jean-Luc means by neo-liberalism is proto-liberalism, which is to say an accent on free markets and individual liberties.

Thus the way he uses the term is a lie, but it’s a double lie: the EU is nothing of the sort. It’s a protectionist economic bloc run by a demonstrably illiberal, unaccountable elite. As such, it’s closer to being neo-fascist, but Jean-Luc wouldn’t be a communist if he used words precisely.

Then of course there’s the usual opposition to religion and NATO, along with support for homomarriage and euthanasia, but such details go without saying.

What’s deeply worrying is that 25 per cent of French TV viewers are either too stupid to realise that Mélenchon would destroy their country – or too wicked not to mind. And it isn’t just Mélenchon: 68 per cent went for extremist candidates of either red or brown hues.

Don’t you just love French politics? And German politics aren’t vastly different. So much for the core of the EU.