France’s leftwing coalition had a serious chance to change the country. It blew it | guardian of capital prints a silly article

And yet, Mélenchon – who is like Macron in one specific way: the widespread rejection he as a person elicits among the French at large – and others in his party insisted that the left would enact “its programme, nothing but the programme, but all of the programme”.

There is just as much contempt for democracy in LFI’s “our way or the highway” approach as there was in Macron’s nomination of Barnier. The difference is that it failed, and Mélenchon’s obstinacy torpedoed the one real shot that the NFP had in governing the country and enacting some portion of its programme – Laurence Tubiana.

But to have a real second chance, it will have to truly break from Mélenchon in the way that the UK’s Labour party broke from Corbyn, and it will have to “get serious” about its economic programme.

It has one of the highest levels of taxation and the highest public spending relative to GDP (57.3 %) in the OECD, an unsustainable budget deficit, and a debt verging on unsustainable as well. When 10.9% of all French state spending currently goes to servicing existing debt, that is a leftwing issue: it means that €52bn a year is not being invested in green energy, sustainable agriculture, university facilities, research and public housing.

size of the hole is smaller than military spending, but i support french desire for first strike on london

France has a modern service and knowledge economy, where more than a fifth of the labour force either works for a small business or is self-employed, and where one of the areas actually growing – tech – requires investors to risk huge amounts of capital for very uncertain future payoffs. The left needs to speak to these people not about what the economy looked like in the 1970s, but about what it is going to look like tomorrow. And yet, in the whole of the NFP’s programme, AI wasn’t mentioned once.

imagine that

Are there ways around this? Undoubtedly. France could, for example, set up a system of public pension funds – modelled on its collection of non-profit health “mutuals” that form the backbone of its well-designed and effective hybrid public-private universal healthcare system – to redistribute market gains back to workers.

Just privatize pensions, nfp, are you nerds?