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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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Ok now I'm so confused, can someone more in tune with French politics enlighten me? Just last week it seemed really doom and gloom with all the talk of the far right Le Pen and her party dominating the polls, then Macron and his party (ig a center or center left party?) talking about dropping out to deny Le Pen the majority
But now the actual left wing party is appearing to actually dominate? Were the French polls wrong like they are in the US or something?
The French Left and Macron's centrists both agreed to drop out of competitive races and support each other's candidates. With that, many of the races that were previously considered to be in the far-right's favor changed to favor the left, no longer having to split the vote with the centrists.
A great example of how a multiparty system encourages collaboration more than competition, and stops extremists from dominating politics for too long.
I don’t know if you meant to do this but you actually just hit what the biggest cultural problem we as a species are facing, the current hegemonic hierarchy values competition in place of cooperation/collaboration.
It's ideology versus reality. Here on Lemmy I'm sure you've seen plenty alienating potential allies over ideological purity. The problem with ideologies is that they are ideal but not real. Clinging to them dogmatically might give you a sense of superiority and insulation from blame in your own mind. But to everyone else you are still a big part of the problem. What is the value of an ideology if it cannot accomplish anything good? What good is ideological purity? Is useless. And yet many people still use it as a substitute for a personality.
But, I thought that looking like the coolest leftist who dunks on the most people was the whole point. Noone said anything about building community, or coalitions, or anything productive in affecting change! /s
My understanding is:
There were elections, no one paid any attention to them, the nazi party won a ton of seats and everyone went "WTF?"
Macron immediately called a snap election to give themselves a mulligan, did an all out media blitz to get people to pay attention, made a deal with the left wing where the centrists dropped out(they are unpopular), opening the door for the left wing to swoop in and save the day.
Kudos to him for a ballsy move to keep Nazis out of power.
The far-right won big in elections for the EU.
Macron called a snap election for the FRENCH legislature in the hopes of using "Far right is winning, SUPPORT THE NON-FAR-RIGHT" (implicitly, Macron's centrists) to renew his mandate to rule.
However, the far-right won big in the first round of elections, sending everyone into a panic, since they were projected to get close to or an actual majority in the French legislature.
Macron and the Left then agreed that in races where both of their candidates were competitive, the weaker of the candidates in each of the races would drop out to bolster the other, because as much as they hate each other, they hate the far-right more.
similar thing happened in last elections in poland but with much, much more preparation. polish senate is elected in first past the post system. everyone that is not PiS (conservatives) and Konfederacja (crackpot-libertarian-nationalist-prorussian union) agreed to send only one candidate, so that collectively everyone voted against PiS. 66/100 seats in senate now belongs to them
I still can’t get over the fact that the polish Conservative Party is literally called pis fuck my life ain’t that sumthin huh whatabouthat eh, whaddaboutthat
no it's not, but if you translate it word for word into english it's "law and justice" which sounds like a name of a party that just staged a coup and now leads military junta in some broke subsaharan african country
and also catholic church went out of their way to use psalm 33 literal hour before lots of people vote (vote is on sunday and in smaller towns and villages lots of people go voting just after mass) half year away when it was supposed to because it has a line like "the lord loves law and justice", yeah completely nothing political about it, please ignore all these sketchy real estate deals that catholic church benefited from
That's an overall accurate analysis, but more leftists have dropped out than centrists. A number of centrists refused to drop out, leading to far right seats rather than leftists.
Following the European elections Macron decided in all his hubris and contempt, to dissolve the Assembly. The far right basically won the elections, (roughly 40% of the votes with a 60% abstention rate, definitely not legitimate but they still won).
The dissolution called for early parliamentary elections, which was pretty much unexpected. The far right rejoiced, especially because of their fresh results from the European elections. Pretty much all the left parties panicked (justifiably so) and banded together as the NFP.
France being a shit country when it comes to actual press freedom (90% of mass media are controlled by a dozen people roughly, mostly billionaires, including Vincent Bolloré, our very own Rupert Murdoch), the media unleashed an absolute massive amount of right wing and far right propaganda to discredit the NFP and its program (supported by multiple economists, including but not limited to, Esther Duflo the Economy Nobel price laureate, specialized in poverty).
Said program is fairly softly leftist, with a big emphasis on massively raising tax revenue for the richest people and increasing public spending for everyone else. It got demonized by the bourgeois owned media and our own brainwashed population.
The first round of the election projected an absolute majority of RN in the assembly. With a significant number of three people in the second round, the NFP removed all its candidates that ended up third, the current ruling party took its time but ended up doing the same to limit vote division and prevent a far right massacre.
With a massive mobilization, the leftist party ended up with a majority apparently, which is good, but not really good enough to wreck shit up like they wanted. Now we can take a breather and hope they won't go back to their petty infighting and do what they promised to do, because if they don't, we will have a far right president in 2027.
It's a bit simplified obviously, but that's the gist of it.
The right was never dominating the polls. They had ~30%. It was always going to play out this way. The doom and gloom was that actual fascists had 30% of the vote.
It was only individual candidates being encouraged to drop out strategically.
France has a slightly less shitty electoral system than e.g. UK, US, Canada, so a party with 30% was never going to win absolute power.
Edit: when I say "it was always going to play out this way" l just mean the right weren't going to win a majority. The left still seems to have done surprisingly well in the second round.
Also, it's still shitty that the fascists won so many seats..
They were projected with 240-310 seats (out of 577) before the Centrists and Left agreed to cooperate. If things were a little more dysfunctional, it could very well have ended up very ugly.
1st round projections aren't the same as winning projections. Those 240+ seats projections were illustrating the actual results of round 1, where the far right was ahead in a lot of places, not from guessing how round 2 would end, because... we don't do it that way, I guess? But since round 2 only brings the candidates who scored above 20%, which usually means either 2 or 3, rarely 4 candidates, instead of 10+, that means everyone who voted on round 1 for the parties that lost would then vote for one of the remaining 2~3 candidates. And that's anybody's guess.
So you can have 30% of voters bringing the far right to the top among 10 candidates, but those 30% don't win when there's only 2 or 3 candidates left, because it turns out 70 always beats 30 - especially with the mutual agreement that a 3rd place center or left candidate would drop out in favor of the other to stop the far right. This doesn't work in rural places where the far right was over 40% (some "centrists" still chose the far right over the left alliance, getting over 60%), but it works everywhere else - and that's what happened here. Think of 2 round voting with >10 parties as a little bit more like one round ranked choice voting than first past the post with 3 candidates.
Realistically, we knew that the results of the first round was never going to hold, because it's been like that for a few decades - like someone else said, 2002 saw the far right fail to get more on the presidential round 2 than the 20% of their score of round 1 (but that ceiling has been rising since because of Macron); of course there's the concern of the growing number of regions that feel abandoned and turn to the far right, but beyond that, the real question was how well the left alliance would do, and how badly the "center" would drop. That's the big deal, the left is back on top - now we just hope that union is strong enough and they don't collapse again because of the constant demonizing that Macron and the media have been spewing non-stop (they really no joke honestly want the far right over the boogeyman "extreme left" that doesn't exist), with the center left abandoning ship to side with Macron again.