Man I WISH. He's pretty based overall, much better than every single one of his equivalents in other western countries, but he still has some rather limited proposals. On the question of debt, for example, he only says that the portion of the debt that is owned by the European central bank (around 10% iirc) should be suspended. However, the vast majority of French debt is owed to private creditors, because neoliberals passed a law in the 1970s to make it so that only private creditors can lend money to the French state, and this was included in the Maastricht treaty at the EU level later on (for all eurozone countries). The European central bank is also forbidden by EU treaties to lend money to states, it only owns part of their debt because it bought it from foreign creditors during the covid pandemic. This makes it so that France spends a lot of its budget on paying interest on its debt (in fact, it's soon to become the single largest expense in the whole budget), which it wouldn't have to do if it could use its central bank or the European central bank to go into debt at 0% interest like basically every single monetarily sovereign country can. An actual durable solution to the problem of debt is to leave the EU, and Mélenchon used to talk of this with his "Plan A Plan B" proposal in 2017 (Plan A, we renegotiate the EU treaties to allow non-neoliberal policies; Plan B, they don't allow us, so we leave the EU), but he doesn't talk of this anymore unfortunately.
all 50 comments