Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean Macron will name a leftist prime minister. He already asked his center-right prime minister to remain in office for a while. But the message from the population is clear.
The PM gave his request for demission, but Manu rejected it… WTF.
The current pm stays in order to run the country before the transition happens. He has to pick a candidate that the left party will present.
Thank you, UK.
Thank you, France.
Hat trick, USA?
Putin getting nervous.
America is trying to do the opposite by getting MORE candidates in to split the vote more on the lib/dem side, because to many people in Media are invested in the ratings from the next Trump shitshow.
Also extremely rare Iran W
Let’s hope for a good election in Germany next year 🙏
We are hoping to defeat the conservatives AND idiot single-issue liberals(to end genocide they are going to support both continued and more aggressive genocide AND turn the US to the path of joining the WW3 axis powers…). It’s an uphill battle.
Crossing my fingers and will be contributing to this hat trick come November
I’ll vote for a corpse over Trump, but if Biden doesn’t step down I’d bet money we lose as much as it pains me to say it. No data supports a Biden reelection. And I’ve seen no promising path to altering the trends in the polls that are largely a result of an immutable, worsening vice: age.
I feel like “the right gets a big showing early on but ends up losing” is a regular feature of modern French elections. It seems like it’s happened multiple times in my lifetime.
Not to make this about the US, but hopefully we see similar.
The far right is making a huge push around the world in recent years. Every time populations resist their influence is a giant win for humanity and the future.
I believe we have it in us but this Democratic Party is a finely oiled machine designed to blunt our progress, not lead it. Goddamn Biden said in the beginning that he wouldn’t seek reelection and he should have stuck to that. Now he’s in danger of actually losing to Shitstain L’Orange.
The background trend, unfortunately, is of the far right slowly but surely gaining votes. We pushed them back to third place today, but they still almost doubled the number of representatives they’ll be sending to parliament (from 89 to the projected ~130 for today’s elections).
- In 2002, Jacques Chirac won against the far right with 82% (to the far right’s 18%).
- In 2017, Macron won against the far right with 66% (to the far right’s 34%).
- In 2022, Macron won against the far right with 58% (to the far right’s 41%).
IMO it’s largely a consequence of the center-left and center-right (Hollande, Macron) completely abandoning the working class, and demonizing the left whilst cozying up to the far-right (mostly Macron, though Hollande definitely slid right over his term).
IMO it’s largely a consequence of the center-left and center-right (Hollande, Macron) completely abandoning the working class, and demonizing the left whilst cozying up to the far-right (mostly Macron, though Hollande definitely slid right over his term).
A tale as old as time.
IMO it’s largely a consequence of the center-left and center-right (Hollande, Macron) completely abandoning the working class, and demonizing the left whilst cozying up to the far-right (mostly Macron, though Hollande definitely slid right over his term).
While i am no fan of Hollande and establishment socialism, I feel like he’s really the butt of the joke here. Whatever we do, we always seem to punch left.
He was president for 5 years, yeah it was limp-dicked as fuck and it veered right in mid-course, but if you remember, he was basically elected on a platform of not being Sarkozy. The people were so KOed by his mandate that Hollande’s whole angle was to be the “back to normal” president. And that’s a promise he kind of kept, if you look at his time, sandwiched between two hyper-mediatic hard-right presidents, well yeah it felt like the kind of politics our parents talked about. Not great politics, just normal not-sadistic politics.
Thank you for giving more info, I appreciate it!
Still, they are way too cocky all over the world. But great work, France. Thank you
I definitely wouldn’t extrapolate anything about the rest of the world from this. I just remember “Le Pen is going to be the next president of France” being said more than once in my life time.
“The French are socialist cowards who don’t know shit but actually get off their asses to protest…”
– 'Muricans
Conservatives just lost the UK in a big way. France on course to do the same (not to the same extent). Tons of money (and Russian manipulation) are pushing hard for far-right politics, but they keep losing. Remember, abortion has won every time it’s on the ballot since Roe was overturned. I’m still cautiously optimistic about the US’s chances
You are more optimistic than I am, but I hope you’re right. At this point, my hope is that at least Democrats will retain the congressional power to do something about a Trump regime I am seeing as an increasing inevitability.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still terrified, but I think the chances are better than the media is portraying currently.
Don’t forget that the media’s main goal is profit. How can they make sure to make more and more profit? By constantly showing you stuff that keeps you in fear and in turn makes you want to know everything that’s happening. The only way to know the current events? Watch our media segments, read our newspaper, read our website etc. (also see 24/7 news cycle)
What you said is true and in addition to that we should consider that the responsible thing to do in the face of fascism is raise the alarm. Not crying panic over far right politicians and their nightmare policy fantasies would just normalize them and help bring those nightmares about.
So while there is a fairly typical “follow the money” argument to be made here, alarmism over fascist ideologies is also just good activism and responsible citizenry.
While I agree with you in general, it’s the electoral college that’s a uniquely American fuckery I worry about. France and the UK don’t have to worry about the majority vote being the losers.
There are so many levels of fuckery in the American system. It goes all the way up to just asking the supreme court (who you appointed) to please let you win.
Yep it’s fuckery turtles all the way down
In their presidential elections at least it’s pretty much by design. It happens because they have 2 rounds.
The first round the far-right option gets a relatively large amount of votes. Then the round after only 2 options remain, so anyone who doesn’t want the far-right option just votes for the only other option. Not sure what happens in general elections, but presumably it’s somewhat similar because there’s still 2 rounds.
As far as election systems go it has quite a lot of obvious flaws, but it’s perhaps not quite as bad as first past the post. At least it makes the tactical voting a bit more straightforward.
Hardly a shock.
It’s funny because that required that all parties left of the far right with together and remove candidates so the vote wouldn’t get split in order for the results to be closer to what the population actually wanted, shows just how broken democracy is…
Yes, FPTP is a shit system, even with the multi round elections. If they had ranked choice / IRV it wouldn’t have needed these games to work properly.
This. Democracy isn’t broken, FPTP is. Although, as the other comment says, this shows it still being functional in that party alignment substitutes for ranked choice by making it so that candidates the third party can tolerate get endorsed by a retiring third candidate. Less “broken”, more “convoluted and ambiguous requiring custom to take over for the design flaws”.
Having lived in a country with Proportional Vote, that’s exactly it in my experience: all those other, mathematically-rigged, parliamentarian allocation systems are not broken Democracy, they’re subversions of Democracy that twist what is supposedly the will of the voters to achieve some other objective (generally we’re told it’s “Stability”, which curiously always end us as a power duopoly of parties whose politicians have to worry about getting votes far less than they would otherwise, and which are easilly corrupted by those with lots of money).
Democracy isn’t broken, it has however been subverted to control it in most of the West, very deeply so in some cases like the US.
The US didn’t “subvert it”, they’re just running a pre-alpha version that never worked and was built for entirely different hardware.
Because ultimately all representative democracy is game design. Democracy isn’t majority rule, it’s majority rule tempered by a lot of pre-existing agreements and ongoing compromises.
Very representative systems have a lot of advantadges, but they also have different issues. Coalitions can be hard to sustain, manifestos and programs aren’t expected to see implementation. People argue, and they do have a point, that an overly fragmented legislative doesn’t represent popular will, since the policy implemented by coalitions necessarily will be mismatched to every option people voted for. It’s also true that in extreme cases you end up with systems where people run as an audition to get a job in the ruling coalition, rather than to push an agenda.
So yeah, ultimately all electoral systems are constantly being gamed by both politicians and voters. That’s just how politics work. But within that we can fine tune all these systems for optimal outcomes, and I do think that a legislative that genuinely needs to trade and deal and compromise is going to be more functional and less prone to extremism than direct majoritarian rule, where there are no checks beyond the other powers. I think even a system like the French would be a big improvement for both the US and UK systems, but it’s probably only applicable in the UK, where there is already a multiparty system. The US is so entrenched that at this point you probably need a full reinvention of their entire constitution. The thing was always a first draft at best anyway.
From my experience living in a country with Proportional Vote, one with First Past The Post and one with something in between (multiple representatives per electoral circle) my conclusion is that Democracy works best with variety and frequent change - you don’t want Stability, because that just entrenches some people in control of the State and inevitably leads to frequent abuse of that power for personal upside maximisation, including via outright corruption, as well as the steady takeover of the various mechanisms of the State (most notably the subversion of the supposedly independent Pillar Of Democracy which is the Judicial System, something you see reaching its natural outcome right now in the US).
Change and many eyes with many conflicting interests and a real likelihood of reaching power are the best way to delay and even undo the natural subversion of the State by the kind of people who seek power - which happens in all systems, not just autocratic ones - whilst the highly stable “Two Party Systems” in supposed Democracies are barely better than dictatorships in their resilience to the rotting of the State from the inside.
Proportional Vote, which isn’t at all Mathematically rigged for “stability” is the best system I’ve seen so far at keeping the politicians in power from pillaging and subverting the State, mostly because they fear both their coalition partners (Government there is always by coalition) finding it out and using it for political advantage (by loudly bringing down government and triggering new elections in order to capture more votes) and that the next government might very well be a wholly different coalition whose politicians are not “people like them” and would just love to catch and bring to Justice any funny business done by the previous guys.
In places with two dominant parties that alternate in power, the politicians of both those parties make lots of noise for the audience simulating deep differences but often are mates and frequent the same social circles and even when they’re not there’s generally on subjects like Corruption a “gentleman’s agreement” of “I don’t go after you in my turn and you don’t go after me in your turn”.
Not even PV systems are immune to crooked politicians but they certainly seem way more resilient to their actions and even much more capable of self-healing before the rot is too far along.
feature not a bug
Good job France!
Joe Biden, take note of how rigged the polks and press are and keep going.
This isn’t the example you want. Candidates from two other parties stepped aside to change the election math. This isn’t the polls being wrong, it’s people who care about the country listening to the polls and doing what they have to do in order to stop the bad guys. The analogy here would be Biden withdrawing.
Alright if there was a further left party that would take over for Joe Biden that would absolutely be the move.
The issue with Joe Biden dropping out is there’s no one really to replace him other than Kamala. Conservatives don’t want her because they’re racists, leftists don’t want her because she’s a fucking cop.
And what happens if Joe dies in his sleep before election day? No one is talking about this as a liability but given the speed of his cognitive decline and the stress of the job and schedule, why is it outside the realm of possibility? Trump will of course live to be 180 years old since he’s literally a conglomerate of McDonalds microplastics and literally one of the worst pieces of shit to walk the earth in the post modern era. Why would anyone want Trump over Kamala outside of being an impotent right wing Russia cuck?
Kamala sucks but she’s the contingency plan. She’s part of his admin that passed the IRA, CHIPS, etc. and trying to put forth executive action that would seemingly be beneficial for the American people. Presumably she’d continue many of the same policies as her predecessor. There is no perfect candidate in a FPTP two-party system.
My point was less Kamala sucks, and more people probably want to vote for her even less than they do Joe Biden.
Its kind of telling when he talks about dropping out the first name everyone talks about is Sanders instead of Harris. Despite how unfortunately far fetched the idea is.
Dodged a bullet
Today, in my heart I am French.
“Aujourd’hui, ma baguette est levée pour la France.”
(more or less)
Does a baguette pee Chardonnay?
Hard to believe with the error-free English
We learned
You’re right, I wrote that more like a German. /s
I would have gone with my epic Canadian cereal box French, but I think bad French is probably worse than no French.
Mmm petit déjeuner
Flocons de mais, tabarnak…
How is it that a French political party can get 15% fewer votes than a rival party, and end up with 8 more seats in Parliament than that rival party?
You new to politics?
1000 people vote in 10 districts. Their choices are a Hard-Right party, a Centrist Party, and a Left coalition, representing the Left-Centre, Left, and Hard Left. PS: This is what the French had going on.
Let’s say 373 people wanted the Hard Right party, 269 people wanted the Left-Wing Coalition, 223 wanted the centre, 51 picked a minor libertarian party, 50 picked from a slew of minor parties not on the Right, and 35 picked from other Right-Wing parties.
In a proportional representation system, you’d expect 37.3% of the representatives be from the Hard-Right party, 26.9% from the Left-Wing Coalition, 22.3% from the Centrist party, plus about 14% being from minor parties. But France uses a First Past the Post system and so does our hypothetical nation. So here we go:
Riding 1: 95 people voted Hard Right. 3 vote Centre, and one each vote other Right and Libertarian. Hard Right wins this riding. Riding 2: 90 vote Hard Right, 5 vote Centre, 2 vote Other Right, 1 votes other Non-Right, and two vote Libertarian. Right wins this riding. Riding 3: 85 vote Hard Right, 10 vote Centre, 1 votes Left, 3 vote Other Right, and one votes Libertarian. Winner is Hard Right. Riding 4: 15 vote Hard Right, 65 vote Centre, 10 vote Left, while 2 vote Other Right, 5 vote Other Non-Right, and 3 vote Libertarian. Centre wins. Riding 5: 12 vote Hard Right, 60 vote Centre, 12 vote Left, while 4, 8, and 4 vote for minor parties. Centre wins. Riding 6: 20 each vote Hard Right and Centre, while 3, 4, and 2 vote third parties. Left gets 51 votes and wins the riding. Riding 7: 22 vote Hard Right and 11 vote Centre. 2, 9, and 4 vote Third Party, and Left wins the riding with 52 votes. Riding 8: 15 vote Hard Right and 21 vote Centre. 3, 5, and 5 vote Third Party, and Left wins again, this time with 51 votes. Riding 9: 10 vote Hard Right and 14 vote Centre, while an amazing 8, 10, and 8 votes being sent to the Third Parties. However, Left once again takes the riding with 50 votes. Riding 10: 9 people vote Hard Right, while 14 vote Centre. Another 21 vote Libertarian, with 7 voting minor right-wing third parties, and 7 voting for non-right-wing minor parties. Despite these 50 people likely having more in common with each other than with the Hard Right or the Left, because they couldn’t agree on one candidate to vote for, their votes get split, allowing the Left to win the riding with 42 votes.
End result: 3 Right, 2 Moderate, and a whopping 5 Left. It didn’t go this badly for the non-Left parties in France, but it illustrates how a party with a lower vote share can get more representation in a First Past the Post system. It illustrates why Gerrymandering is bad. If those voters in the first three districts are packed there because some partisan power broker got into the redistricting process, they’ve basically been defanged by political shenanigans. Doubly so if the left-wing coalition managed to spread all their voters out so that they had a solid lock on 5 of the districts.
This is a fundamental problem with FPTP, so that’s why many of us advocate for RCV or Proportional systems.
I know how gerrymandering works in USA’s system - the last two far-right Presidents were elected despite the center-right candidate getting more votes. But the margins were tighter in those contests - a few percentage points not double digits. I’m curious about the peculiarities of the French system that lead to such an apparently wide gap between votes versus representation.
Vote distribution
Win seats by a small margin, lose seats by a wide margin
if you think that’s bad/weird
https://www.bbc.com/news/election/2024/uk/results
Labour
total votes 9,686,329
share 33.7%
412 seats
Conservative
total seats 121 total votes 6,827,311 share 23.7%
Hell yeah
Fuck yeah frogs. Well done.
Lol, from the AP.
Some big-name stores in Paris are protecting their windows in case of unrest as results come out, but that’s a pretty common precaution.
They party like it’s 1799, guys.
Eat shit fascists
Thank you France
This is not over. We have to continue to fight. Not only against the far right but for the people, for social justice for everyone. I’m so proud of France today. I’m so relieved but this is not over, what’s scares me now is that the country is deeply polarized. This was a wake up call for me. These last years of politics have made me apathetic. But what happened today gave me hope. I’m gonna do something, I don’t known what yet but I will. I’ll vote as I always did but I’ll do more. I will fight.
Thankfully some gerrymandered states are finally getting their maps in order. I really really hope we are in the timeline where Dems take the House, Senate, and Presidency.
My hope is that Leftwing implements policies that undo large parts of the Money-is-King and Screw-You-Plebes Neoliberalism, thus removing at least part of the popular discontent and distrust (people feel poorer and yet the mainstream keeps telling them the Economy is Growing) that the Far-Right feeds on with their “the blame is those other people that are even worse of than you (not at all the super rich)” scapegoating.
Reduce the pain by making the State more supportive again and getting more “from those who can the most, to give to those who need the most” and you take the wind off the Far-Right’s sails.
Without the majority in the Parliament that is very unlikely to happen. Worse, I fear that a government formed by the NFP would accept a coalition with the Macrony just so they can barely apply their program and thus give more ammo to the RN in the next presidential election.
What is a good news today could be a very bad news in 2027. Depends in how the left will handle it.
“The good fight is the one you are losing” or no rest for the wicked as it where I guess
Hoping the same for the United States.
A leftist hat trick would be amazing.
I see a lot of the nay sayers as a vocal minority. They yell the loudest, but only because the media gives them a platform to generate clicks. Just like how Republicans believe everyone in the nation, who doesn’t worship satan, is pro-birth. Kansas, a deep red rural state proved otherwise with a vote to add abortion rights into their constitution a couple years ago, something their conservative supreme court just upheld.
Honestly, the recent ruling on the Kansas ballot initiative, which quite frankly surprised me to begin with, shows that in some places judges still do their job even when their personal beliefs may differ from the law they are entrusted with interpreting. Kansas voters, you showed us the way and stood out against the backdrop of “conservative status quo.” Kansas showed, in the last two years, that when given a chance, even deep red states see the writing on the wall.
I have a feeling the outcome of this election is going to be a “silent storm” event and wake-up call to the GOP that they are out of touch with what the people really want. They’ve drank the loud-mouth’s Kool-aid for far too long and won’t believe it when it happens.
Think of it like the silent majority (maybe 80% of nationwide voters) is the massive tornado that took out the drive-in theater in the movie, Twister. In the movie, no one saw it until a random lightning strike shed light on the sheer girth of the monster bearing down on them. The GOP is the drive-in. The night of the election will be their lightning flash. We, the voters, will be the tornado.
That would be amazing but it doesn’t require playing chicken with Biden’s age issue and the political maneuvers the French left and center pulled off were possible because of polling, not in spite of them.
Kansas, and other red states are deeply poisoned against democrats by about 60 years of propaganda. This shows in the polling where they’d rather vote for the new RFK with brain worms and vaccine conspiracies than vote for Biden. That’s not just a joke, Biden loses to RFK in Kansas if the election was held today. And RFK is competitive with Trump. He’s expected to lose but nobody’s really studying the non battleground states very hard.
It would be hilarious if RFK managed to siphon enough EC votes to throw it into congress. (Even though that would also mean a Trump presidency because they vote as state delegations, 26 of which are firmly controlled by the GOP)
Also, don’t get overly proud of this. The idiotic notion of “there are two extremes polarizing everyone,” where they put the left and the right on equal danger-footing, is all over this article. I mean, it’s a few quotes from a few people, but still. That kind of shit is poisonous. It not only likens what the left wants to what the fascists want, but it also shields the far right from the view that their opinions are as dangerous as they are. “We want everyone to be cared for and we think nationalism is wrong” is not the same as “nationalism.” Still a pretty scary article. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s great that the RN didn’t take the election, but they are still a huge portion of that govt. and that is very fuckin scary.
If these numbers hold, it will come down to Macron’s faction to decide who to align with. And counting on neoliberals in that scenario is…scary.
This is The Guardian, a Liberal (not Left, Liberal) newspaper in Britain, a country whose only left of center (by European standards) party is the Green Party which has all of 4 seats out of 300 in Parliament now (and it used to be just 1, even though they had 1 million votes out of 40 million).
(Labour was once leftwing, before Blair’s Third Way, and when recently it’s members voted for it to go back to being Leftwing there was a massive smear campaign which included this very newspaper to bring down the leftie leader and put the neoliberals back in control of it).
From the point of view of the journalists, editors and board of The Guardian, even Social Democracy if “far left”.
Britain is maybe the most “like America” (but not on the good things) country in Europe, with a very similar voting system (First Past The Post) and with and Overtoon Window far more shifted to the Right than almost any other country in Europe (basically the Tories are a posher version of Orban) and their Press is one of the least trusted in Europe, and that includes The Guardian.
Think of The Guardian as a British New York Times.
If you want to see coverage of the French elections that’s not been twisted by a British hard-Neoliberal Private School Attending High Middle Class journalist in a newspaper that prides itself of being “opinion makers”, try Le Monde.
The Guardian has a pretty broad ideological base stretching from centre/centre-right all the way out to moderate left. Unless you think George Monbiot and Owen Jones are neo-liberals too? (Sample articles Things are not going to get better as long as oligarchs rule the roost in our democracies and Natalie Elphicke is a hard-right Tory. Her defection sums up Labour’s contempt for progressive voters )
In your post you literally listed all the left of center writers that The Guardian has out of all their opinion writers and journalists, many of whom loudly proclaim themselves as “opinion makers”.
And that’s not even mentioning their editorial direction after the editor that published the Snowden Leaks was kicked out because of doing it.
Sure, they have all of two token lefties who get maybe one article every week or two each, in an ocean of neoliberals.
This for a newspaper many here seem to think is left of center.
I’ve lived in a number of countries in Europe, including the UK, and The Guardian’s take on European subjects (which are the ones were I can more easily compare it with newspapers from other countries) is always to the right of the take of most newspapers in Continental Europe and hence they generally, as the previous poster pointed out in this article, spin that which is just normal Left in Europe as being Far-Left and Neoliberalism (a pro-Oligarchic ideology that puts Money and those who have it above the State and hence the power of voters) as being Center-Left.
You can hardly claim that a haystack is in fact a needlestack just because there are two needles in it.
France’s national assembly has 577 seats, with 289 seats needed for an absolute majority.
Here is the first projected seat distribution, from Ipsos. It shows the left in the lead, in a major shift compared to opinion polls during the campaign.
Left-green New Popular Front: 172-192 seats
**Emmanuel Macron’s allies: **150-170 seats
**Far right National Rally and allies: **132-152 seats
Beat turn out projections and upended polling results.
Vive La France!
It looks like the Far Right did worryingly well.
Hey hey - tomorrow. Right now we’re gonna fucking LOVE this.
This is why it’s so, so, so important for us to vote this November in the US! I’m proud of you, France!
