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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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 problem with the US (and Canada, and to a lesser degree the UK) is that the centrists would rather lose to the far right than legitimize actual leftism.
We’ve seen this in Canada several times, at all levels, where the Liberals would rather go down in flames in an election, knowing that they’ll get another shot in a few years time, then share power with actual leftists in order to keep the right from doing more damage.
I’m really impressed with Macron. That’s a level of long term holistic thinking that you don’t normally see from neoliberal politicians.
Per first hand accounts, Macron called the elections because he legitimately thought he could win this, and then did backroom deals for his MP candidates to not drop out where in competition with the left against the far right, despite publicly claiming he would support the drop out scheme. He’s a fool and an incompetent that got France in this situation in the first place.
In fact it’s not even certain that he won’t just try to make a government by allying with the far right. He’s really got his head that far up his own ass.
Over 200 candidates from Macron’s party withdrew to consolidate votes under the New Front’s candidates. Did you’d stop paying attention like two weeks ago?
Okay, let me quote sources then. Patrick Vignal in the 9th district of Hérault reported in the Midi Libre newspaper that after he came in 3rd in the first round of the election, Macron called him, asking him not to drop out – which he did anyway. Source: pbs.twimg.com/media/GRbNC3WWcAAIBX4.jpg
I have, in fact, been paying attention, thank you.
It seemed to have been a bet that the left would be completely divided so that he could place his party as the defender against the far right in order to get an absolute majority (he only had a relative majority until now)
That didn’t work because the left parties managed to create a united front in less than a week.
But let’s not forget the following: yes, the left parties have a relative majority (or at least should given the last estimations), but the far right did gain a lot of seats in the elections compared to last time. So yeah it could have been worse, but it’s not exactly a comfortable situation either
The Liberals could have prevented a Conservative majority by implementing election reform. They were worried that it might hurt them a tiny bit, so that was enough to scrap the idea.
We’ve seen this in Canada several times, at all levels, where the Liberals would rather go down in flames in an election, knowing that they’ll get another shot in a few years time, then share power with actual leftists in order to keep the right from doing more damage
Aren’t we right now under a coalition between the liberals and the NDP? One that has been on for 3 and some years?
I passed through TSA with a pocket knife, a small pair of sewing scissors, and a Leatherman multitool I forgot I put in my work backpack, but had to throw away my solid hand lotion for being 3.4oz. Larger than 3oz was a potential explosive, they told me. I had to toss it in a trashcan filled to overflowing with other potential explosives, located in the most populated area of the airport. I guess so it would take out as many people as possible and do the most structural damage, if my sealed Working Hands lotion was to explode and set off the other containers of lotions, water, and sodas. TSA is a joke.
Project 2025’s call to dismantle NOAA by eliminating or privatizing key functions of the agency is the endgame of years of attempts by conservatives and right-wing media to attack the credibility of the agency and the veracity of the data it produces. It also illustrates that the conservative plan is not just to dismantle U.S. climate policy, but also to scrub the climate data that underpins it.
Brockwell, the crew’s flight engineer, said the mission showed him the importance of living sustainably for the benefit of everyone on Earth.
“I’m very grateful to have had this incredible opportunity to live for a year within the spirit of planetary adventure towards an exciting future, and I’m grateful for the chance to live the idea that we must utilise resources no faster than they can be replenished and produce waste no faster than they can be processed back into resources,” Brockwell said.
I realize they simulated the whole trip from beginning to end, but it’s still funny to read the words ‘flight engineer’ when they didn’t actually go anywhere.
Isn’t fining a person for a quick kiss a way worse look for the governing body than the actual kiss? Not that the fools running cycling would ever be able to come up with that thought on their own.
Our conservatives aren’t like conservatives elsewhere in the world. Our liberals are like your conservatives, policy wise.
Our conservatives are brainwashed by four decades of targeted conservative media that’s explicitly designed to keep them in an anger loop in order to create a political climate where republicans (who are the actual politicians) don’t have to appeal to the conservative base with actual policy.
Republicans, through channels like Fox News and OANN (seriously, go watch some of it and see what we’re dealing with here) have demonized everyone to the left of them so hard that entire generations of conservatives genuinely believe that there’s a bloody revolution coming.
It would be nice if it were actually bullshit, but these lunatics who make up half of our voting population put a con-man entertainer with zero political experience in the whitehouse for four years and installed conservative justices to our highest court who are systematically dismantling our democracy.
It’s very real. It’s so real that some of the less insane conservatives are waking up to how dangerous the details of this plan actually are, and that’s why Republicans are panicking about this.
The Heritage Foundation is wild, and one of the most significant public policy groups with deep ties to American conservatism. Basically, any crazy policy that the Republican party has taken on as a major party plank in the past 50 years has a distressing high chance of having its roots in Heritage’s recommendations.
For example, in 1981:
Among the 2,000 Heritage policy recommendations, approximately 60% of them were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan’s first year in office.
How? I’m not saying what the radio host covered in the article did was right…I just think the difference with how right-wing media operates is striking
Dude, I just explained how what I said relates to this article. It wasn’t at all random. Hope you have a great night and get to set that phone down soon
That doesn’t make this right. If democrats are going to make a mockery of the democratic process to “save democracy”, they’re not actually saving democracy.
Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren’t they? They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re preborn, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.
There was also “have you ever noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?”
Edit: whether you like it or not, this was an actual George Carlin quote from one of his HBO specials in the '80s. I laughed uproariously at the time - along with the audience - but I can see how it’s a questionable sentiment today. Although it’s still completely accurate.
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