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
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.
If the Canadian left could do this the Conservatives would never win an election ever again
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!
Now the left needs to get serious about immigration issues, RN has been gaining and only gaining, we are just delaying the win of far right, so many issues with left, they need to do right things.
Well done france
That might look like good news, but it’s just delaying the problem. Far right has only gained votes for the last 20 years, and it’s only through jolts like the first round of these elections that other candidates unify to not let them pass. Nothing is done to address the underlying problems that make people vote for these fuckers, so it’s only a matter of time before they end up accessing power.
The far-right in Europe, with money from both Russia and American billionaires, has been ridding the wave of insatisfaction that’s the side effect of the very problems created by Neoliberalism (which is now in its natural end stage were wealth is far more concentrated than ever since the early XX century and social mobility is pretty much non-existent, hence why most people feel poorer and hopeless) which itself was created with billionaire money pumped into Think Tanks and buying politicians mainly in America in the late 70s, early 80s.
As I see it, the best way for the Left to disarm the the Far-Right is to undo most of Neoliberalism - go back to higher levels of State support and State control of strategical assets, free Education, Progressive taxation with excessive wealth heavilly taxed, and so on - thus removing the very cause of the popular insatisfaction that the Far-Right feeds on using a litany of “blame everybody but the rich” excuses.
At least some of this actually seems to be what the NFP has announced it will do.
Now, Macron (and his party) being hard core neoliberals will fight this tooth and nail, as will the EU because most of the governments there are neoliberals and things like the ECB as as pure neoliberal as it gets, so for starters, they will most definitelly try to help the ultra-rich in France more evade tax even more than now.
The other problem is that part of the NFP is the old centrist “left” party (the Socialist Party, which has nothing at all to do with Socialism) who were part and parcel of the Neoliberalization of French politics (a typical corrupt as hell mainstream “centrist” European party of the last 2 decades) and eventually suffered massivelly at the polls for it. That said, the fear of being made even more irrelevant will probably put a break on their corrupt neoliberal tendencies.
The good news is that, if the French Left manages to overcome the forces in France that will be arrayed against any undoing of Neoliberalism, that country is big enough to pretty much ignore EU pressure.
I feel like the real lesson is being missed here:
Do not mess with Mbappé.
Facts. He’s a national hero over there.
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.
Start listening to the working class and the far right won’t even be a fart in the night
In Germany, the working class wants the far right. Even though that party promises to make life worse in every way for poor people in their party program.
But why does the working class want the far right?
Because the far right offers simple solutions. That these solutions will only lead to things being much worse and Germany being completely ruined as a result is something they dont understand. Our biggest “newspaper” has been constantly bombarding people with fear and hate for decades and it only got worse and worse. Uneducated people who read that will panic and vote for those offering the simplest solution.
Mainly because they’re the losers of globalism, and the failed integration of immigrants. They can only afford to rent in areas that immigrants are pushed into for the same reason. So their kids go to school in classes where almost no education is possible because more than half the children can’t speak German, and they are subject to crime and run-down surroundings.
Then it’s easy to rile them up against immigrants, which seem to be the cause of their problems, instead of the upper class that actually caused all this, through the use of weaponized social media.
But they will stop these evil immigrants from stealing my jobs and living of my tax money and destroying my culture…
/s
Is the left listening to the working class?
Most “center” “left” parties in Europe nowadays are just Neoliberals (pro-business, pro-privatisation, pumping up asset bubbles and generally bough and paid for by moneyed interest) and hence not really Left and often not even Center.
However all countries in Europe still have real Left parties (even the UK with it’s highly rigged First Past The Post voting system has the Green Party), though judging by the one in my own country (of which I am a member) there’s often this messy mix of people whose leftwing thinking is basically slogans from the Soviet Union (these being mainly people in their 60s and older) and people who grew up in the post ideology neoliberal age for whom leftwing is basically greed but for-the-group instead of the individual (hence you end up with Identity Politics which is a twisted subverted charicature of the Fight For Equality that far too often is dominated by people who are members of a group they were born into demanding shit for their group - instead of a broad push for Equality done on the basis if need an independent of the “group” people were born into, we have competing pulls for getting shit per group, with people said to be deserving or undeserving based on the genetics they were born with, thus far too often rewarding some people who are priviledged but have the “right genetics” whilst not helping those who have real need and yet were born with the “wrong genetics”).
I don’t really know if the present day Left can find a modern ideology and vision that’s not just a “branch of neoliberalism that doesn’t talk of Economics”, though the victory of the NFP in France, lead by Melenchon and his party rather than the old “moderate” mainstream party - called Socialist but not in any way form or shape so, but rather just neolibs plus performatice leftwing talk - gives me hope.
WDYM?
The left will always deliver better quality of life for the working class.
The right likes to blame migrants and taxes which resonates with the working class.
I don’t understand the first line because I’m not a native English speaker, and acronyms sometimes confuse me.
I agree with you, and I am very happy about this victory in France. I was referring to the fact that the working class prioritizes certain issues that the left doesn’t always place at the top of their agenda.
I think it’s time to show that advocating for minority rights doesn’t mean neglecting measures in favor of workers. I believe this is true, but we need to demonstrate it now; otherwise, when the vote happens again in France, no coalition will be able to stop fascism.
Sorry, wdym is “what do you mean?”
In Australia, the centre left has very strong ties with employee unions. They will always advocate for better terms for employees.
Sadly, much of the “working class” votes on the right because they think of themselves as something better than the working class, despite being poor. There’s a phrase “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”.
Further left we have the greens, and indeed they prioritise environmental issues over employee terms.
The left, as in die Linke definitely does. It has great approaches to make life better for the working class. Unfortunately their foreign policy is so terrible they are unvoteable for me. A party that is against delivering weapons to Ukraine cannot get my vote.
The center left hasn’t been listening much for a few decades, which is why the far right has been steadily rising from a 20% ceiling to this 35% ceiling just now. But the alliance that won today is not center left - it has some legit left. You can tell because the center and the media have been working overtime to prop up the most divisive figure as Literaly Worse Than Hitler that needs to be stopped at all cost, even by electing literal Nazis.
But this new left is also an alliance, and the current fear is that some of them will jump ship to side with the center right when we all realize that we really can’t form a government, because no one has an absolute majority. Even with those potential defections, the center will likely still not get a majority back. Worst case scenario is the left breaks, no one can govern, and Macron uses an obscure law to take over 100%, best case scenario the left holds and Macron can’t even do that and we have a chance of getting at least SOME improvement.
If people are hurting, some of them will listen to the arguments of the Far Right - “the blame is those other guys who don’t look the same as you” is quit an appealing argument for many.
There are two solutions for that:
- You try to get most people to really think deeply their politics, in a well informed way which puts aside tribalisms, thus reducing the take of far-right arguments.
- You remove the causes of the hurt, which at the moment it’s mostly end-stage Neoliberalism (basically the wealth people produce is incredibly ill distributed).
I reckon the first one is pretty much impossible (I mean, it would be great, but it doesn’t work for actual human beings, with all their tribalism and ignorant self-evaluations as not at all ignorant), whilst the second absolutelly is possible (and probably required, if only to stop the Environmental destruction of our planet and guaranteed the survival of our civilization).
In Italy too. Must be some sort of cultural legacy 😂😂😂
I know there’s still a long way to go but maybe the future won’t be as completely horrofying as I thought. Fuck the facists and fuck the nazis, well done France!
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.
Alright! Now if France and Britain’s new left-of-center leadership can just… PLEASE not fuck it up… there may actually hope for the rest of the planet.
Britain left of centre ? . . . these are blairites, “labour” in name only , they literally propped up the second homes buy to let market through the 2000s. and they’d gladly privatise every public service we have left if they can. I’ve already heard shit like “individualised healthcare” being mentioned in their “think tanks”.
They’re probably not worse than the tories, and they probably will fuck it up less, that’s about all you can hope for them.
They aren’t going to tackle anything fundamental like bank regulation, promoting domestic investment, industrial strategy or developing public services.
I hope France gets a lot better.
Yeah, by European standards, I don’t think New Labour are even just Center-Right: they have far too much love for “businesses”, privatisation and deregulation to be an inch left of the traditional Right - in many ways they’re pretty much were the Tories were back in Thatcher’s day.
100% agreed. Weirdly, Starmer was very left-leaning during his time as a prosecutor, and a lot of people assumed that he’d be a rising force of the left when he moved into politics. Sadly, he seems closer to the right than even Blair did…
to be determined in my opinion. he’s been in office two days atm.
give him a chance
My opinion is pretty much based on their manifesto. I don’t see how they can do anything progressive when their mandate is based on that bag of shite.
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?
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%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.
Oh thank goodness. Worst fear allayed, now on to the next one.
B-B-But POLLS!!!
What a joke…
thats a pleasant surprise and all but the nazis will be back.
electoralism wont fix this and we better be prepared for the next time they have an opportunity. another pink wave won’t resolve our problems for the same reasons it didnt before.
nazis need to be dealt with asap, or else.
I want my scalps. And all y’all will git me one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis.
