[tgs]

Anne Hidalgo, the candidate of France's ruling Socialist Party, will be the first female mayor of Paris after winning municipal elections in the French capital on Sunday, exit polls indicated.

Hidalgo, 54, the number two to current mayor Bertrand Delanoe, claimed 54.5 percent of second round votes in the capital, comfortably beating her centre-right rival, former government minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet (45.5 percent), the polls suggested.

[softy54534]

how can the french vote for another socialist? wasnt holand bad enough? and whatever happen to the advances of marine lepen?!?

[Frofted]

What level of socialist is she though? The level of Salvador Allende outright? or like the level of just more welfare?

[9mm_fan]

Anyway as someone who actually studied this for a bit, yes the French Socialist party is ideologically social democracy. Which if you are going to take socialism as a very broad school (including marxist leninists through to social liberals) is 'socialist'. However, in the emotively changed 'COMMUNISM BAD' sense people are using it, no they are not socialists in the sense you understand it.

French socialist parties platform basically reduces down to having a well funded social welfare program and a progressive system of taxation (that means literally, the more you make, the more of it as a share is taxed). Beyond that, depends on the politican, I mean if you actually wanted to educate yourself at.fucking.all on the matter check out Mitterrand. Interesting guy, also famously completely fucked over the communists. Little facts like that should hopefully change peoples narratives. But hey, this is reddit eh?

IF you really want to pursue this 'COMMUNISM BAD' line of thought and actually want to base your opinions on anything actually happening in france, check out the plethora of troskists, marxists and so on parties which the Socialists are in direct competition with. Suffice to say France does have plenty of 'lol wut' parties, though to be honest few get worse than the National Front.

The Major two though UMP and the Socialists are defined only in how they differ from the centre.
Source did philosophy, french gf.

[scooje]

The socialist party is indeed further left than the Labour, but not that far. The state-directed economy is not any more favored by the socialist party, subsidies for industries exists even under American republicans and they call for a higher percentage of taxes on the highest revenue bracket because, with inderect taxes, the low earners are those who end up paying the most taxes compared to their income, not because they want to harm the richest ones (to be honest, there are some socialists who despise wealth, but they are a minority).

[Wered1958]

She was the designed heir of Bertrand Delanoë, an openly gay politician who is a socialist too and will finish tomorrow his second 6 years term as the previous mayor of France's capital city.

Paris didn't went communist in 2001, it won't either in 2014. The french "Socialist Party" is quite accustomed with Americans overreacting to the word. It just show how these political words don't have the same meaning nor are looked at in the same way in differents countries. French for example are in turn usually a bit shocked by the use of "Christian-democrats" as a name of a political party, in Germany and several others european countries calling themselves seculars.

What one should remember about this election is that the candidate of the left Anne Hidlago was the expected favorite, yet her list came second (34%) behing the list of the candidate of the right, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, also a woman and who scored (35%) on the first round.
Hidalgo thus had to ally herself further with the Green party, which also scored high, comparatively, (9%) and so had political weight to merchandise on the second round. The direction Paris has took quite deeply toward public transports, reserved bus lanes, renting bikes and renting cars, and essentially a reduction of the presence of individual cars in the capital will thus likely remain unchanged.

As for the "first woman Mayor" part, you have to know Paris didn't had such an elected office until 1977, so she's only the fourth modern elected Mayor of Paris. 25% of woman as for now, then. While the socialist female candidate lost the presidential election in 2007, this one woman succeeded for Paris Mayor's office, which is considered a good position to try the presidency later on. Not bad.
The second round is less of a surprise, as it was mathematically quite certain the left was going to win from the first round results, and Anne Hidalgo's list indeed gained 54.5% of the votes, 92 of the 163 Councillors who will soon elect her.

So, Paris will keep being run by the same political party than it has the last twelve years.