I totally appreciate your sentiment and generally agree, but with the caveat that the problem you’re facing is not just a problem with this current election, but an inherent issue with your electoral system.

How about “vexatious litigation”?

Your instinct to search for a non-Murdoch source is correct, as they are trying to paint the entire NFP as holding the same positions as their most extreme member.

There is little to no chance of Melenchon becoming Prime Minister or having any ability to enact this tax.

However a marginal tax rate of 90% on income over €400k is well above the upper-middle class and would apply to only the wealthiest families, most of whom would still have other avenues to minimise the tax they actually pay.

This is a bit of a misleading summary.

Melenchon speaks for his own party, France Unbowed (LFI), not the entire NFP alliance.

The NFP as a whole has not declared support for Melenchon’s position, although his party controls 71 (~41%) of NFP’s 180 seats in the National Assembly.

Macron has already indicated that he will not allow Melenchon to become Prime Minister, and the entire NFP will be aware that they must select a more moderate leader to represent them if they expect to gain enough support from the centre to operate as a minority government.

Exactly. They’ve brought up nuclear because they’re desperate to have some kind of energy policy, but one they know they’ll never have to bring to fruition because that allows them to continue with coal and gas for as long as possible.

The LNP doesn’t have a legitimate interest in transitioning to nuclear power or they would’ve begun over the last decade or so that they were in power.

Instead they’ve proposed - now that they’re in opposition - a technology which is banned at the Federal level and individually at the state level, because they know that gives them years of lead time before they ever have to begin the project.

On top of that, all of the proposed sites are owned by companies who’ve already begun transitioning to renewable generation or renewable storage, and most of them are in states in which the state Premiers have publicly stated that they will not consider overturning their bans on nuclear power.

He thinks the Ten Commandments are a bingo card.

Quick, put some AI in it!

This is somewhat analogous to the way midterm elections are treated in the US, and a decent comparison would be when Mitch McConnell blocked Obama from appointing a Supreme Court Justice towards the end of his second term.

The Democrats lost seats in Congress during that midterm season, which the Republicans used to claim that the American people had no faith in the Democrats and therefore no faith in Obama. They then used this claim as an excuse to block the Democrats ability to govern.

In this case, the people of France have voted for another party to represent their interests internationally to the EU parliament.

Macron will now face claims within the French government that the people voting against them in the EU elections indicates that they have no faith in his party’s leadership and that will make it difficult for him to govern.

With this move, calling an election early, they will have a clear indication of who the French people wish to lead them internally and, if they reelect Macron’s party, can dismiss the claims from opposition parties that the people don’t trust them.

It’s worth mentioning that many governments around the world don’t have fixed election cycles the way you do in the US. Instead many countries have an end date by which the election must occur, but a new election can be called at any time before that date if the government thinks it’s necessary. A similar thing is currently happening in the UK where the Conservative Party has called an election for early July, even though the election didn’t have to take place until late January 2025.

OOP’s dad is a ham radio enthusiast.

Airport security is by far the most identifiable change for me personally. We never used to take shoes or belts off at airport security, we never walked through backscatter x-ray machines, we could carry liquids onto the plane and you could see your family or friends off at the departure gate even if you didn’t have a boarding pass.

Would Israel take the same approach if Hamas was hiding in an Israeli hospital?

If anyone made it as far as the third sentence in the article, they might notice that “Islamic Jihad” in the title refers to “Palestinian Islamic Jihad”.

They’re not blaming Hamas for this incident. PIJ is a separate organisation.

Microsoft decided to skip Windows 9 because, after doing a lot of research, they found that a lot of commonly used legacy software had implemented compatibility hacks which involved checking for “Windows 9” to detect when the software was running under either Windows 95 or Windows 98.

Instead of breaking a lot of software or requiring a lot of updates (some of which could even be from vendors who were no longer in business) they decided to work around the problem by just skipping straight to 10.

Edit: My mistake, I responded to the wrong comment. But I’m gonna leave it here because I already typed it.