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I don't know where to start or how to succintly describe him in a way that properly captures the vibes especially if you don't have a coherent view of the state of French society.
Trotskyist background, leader of the biggest party on the left (which is also the party that's furthest to the left if you only include electoralist parties). Founded said party because the socialist party was too reformist and cozying up with the center/center-right. Likes quoting Lenin and insulting capitalists. Even though he clearly believes electoralism is useful it's clear he has a class-conscious/anticapitalist view of the world. Is pretty well-read and good at giving speeches. His party does not have a democratic structure. People on the center/right try to villify him and say he's uniquely bad, sometimes using quotes that are actually pretty iffy. Anti-NATO, critical of the EU (which he gets plenty of criticism over by people who aren't as left-wing), anti-nuclear. Doesn't want to give weapons to Ukraine. Usually fairly well-liked among young people on the left, is usually considered to have managed to create an "actual" leftist movement à la Bernie Sanders. People on his left, those who think electoralism isn't enough etc. might say that the way the media class and the capitalists are scared of him (and form a united front in attacking and villifying him) is evidence he might actually be a threat to their interests. Part of his electoralist strategy was to try to reach out to the classe populaire in banlieues, get them to vote and all that. Any issue I didn't mention you can probably imagine what his position is.
Good answer, thanks.
anti-nuclear
being anti-nuclear in France of all places seems to be something of an enigma, no? Do you know what his reasoning is?I presume you mean nuclear energy not weapons?
Yeah I do mean energy. Indeed, nuclear energy is big in France and popular among the overall population.
Their stated goal is to eventually go full renewables (0% nuclear in 15-20 years). They want to stop building new plants and eventually close existing ones. Some of the stated reasons are waste, water, an inability to solve climate change, unreliability (such as in 2022 with heat and the war in Ukraine, adding that climate change compounds the heat issue), dangerous accidents, import issues (no uranium in France, therefore does not allow for energy independence), and cost. He's not bad on climate change generally though.
Those were the official reasons I was able to find, I couldn't tell you if there was some kind of ideological stance behind all of it or some kind of sociological explanation that explains their opinions.
He's not the only one, the green party is also against it (0% nuclear in 25 years). The communist party (not communist) likes nuclear energy, the socialist party (not socialist) is kind of split/unclear. The right-wing parties all like nuclear energy. One of the trotskyist parties, the NPA is also anti-nuclear (0% in 10 years), citing Fukushima, Chernobyl, military interventionism in Africa and Asia for uranium, waste, and also call it anti-democratic.
Hmm, personally I'm a big supporter of nuclear energy, but I can see the whole "not having any domestic uranium and needing to terrorize Africa to obtain it" as being a legitimate reason to be against it, in France anyway.
The droughts fucking up the cooling ability of reactors was also kinda scary so fair enough.
Yeah. No idea how well that argument holds up. It's an issue that affects all resources. You need lithium and various metals for renewables, and they need to be periodically replaced.
It's worth saying that there are in fact uranium deposits in France. 76,000 tons have been extracted from 1945 to 2001. Some resources we only pillage the third world for because you don't shit where you eat, but we could actually responsibly do at home (to an extent) if safety, compensation, and environmental clean-ups were guaranteed. Other resources are actually absent in certain countries, which does raise a significant problem to any country that wants to have a communist revolution, decolonize and leave the globalized world economy while preserving modern life standards in important sectors (medicine, energy).