Le Pen has been very careful in the past years to tone down on the fascist rethoric. I listened to a bit of her speech last night and and it was mostly standard populist stuff, I didn’t pay too much attention but it was not agressive at all, she made sure to mention she would be president of all French people and not exclude anyone. Of course given the people behind her, the reality of her government would certainly be very brutal.
Analysts say that Zemmour’s candidacy actually helped her by making her appear normal in comparison. Macron’s team also shares some blame, there are several people in his government who spent the last years saying that the real danger was not fascism but “le wokisme”. The minister of interior (in charge of police, this is always the most annoying asshole you can imagine), in a debate with Le Pen, actually made fun of her for begin (in comparison to him) “too soft on Muslims”.
Another notable thing in this election is the complete collapse of the former big parties : “Les Républicains” (right-wing) at 4.5% and Socialist Party at 2%. They both were at 25%+ 10 years ago. A particularity of the French election system is that the state reimburses your campaign funds as long as you score above 5%, so being below might make it difficult for them to come back from this (especially LR who were probably not expecting it given that they were around 8-9% in the polls).
I mean, Macron isn’t great. Sort of like a typical eDem, only with French/Euro flavor (i.e. slightly less useless). But obviously a million times preferable to Le Pen. Putin loses another one. Sad!
More Good News for the EU: In Slovenia the newly-formed Green-liberal Freedom Movement becomes stromgest party, beating the party of the incumbent and pal of Orban.
It’s more about the system. The Nordic model with way more parties represented is always preferable imo. Starting to think no president is a plus too actually…who needs the extra layer, particularly a role who usually has way too much power concentrated in one person?
France does not have proportional representation in the parliament. This is why for instance Le Pen’s party, despite scoring 20%+ in the 1st round of the presidential election in 2017, had less than 2% of the seats in the parliament elected just after.
The next elections (in june) will be interesting. Sadly the most likely is that Macron gets a big (but slightly smaller than the current one) majority, but if the left manages to unite there may be a small chance for a better outcome.
I’m surprised that parties don’t form coalitions before elections in France.
Czech political parties did exactly that to topple ANO, the hideously corrupt party that had control of parliament for nearly a decade. Three center-right parties formed a coalition and two center/center-left parties formed one before the election. After the election, the two coalitions from different sides of the spectrum combined their seats to form SPOLU (Czech word for “Together”) whose only common belief is that ANO is shit and the country is better without them in power.
ANO is still the largest individual party in the country but they did not beat the 5 smaller parties that combined to oust them from the government.
Thanks for the clarification. I had always thought of France that way because of the number of parties in parliament.
According to Wikipedia it is a two-round election with a run-off between the two leading candidates, just like the presidential election. Seems to result in something between the extremes of two-party systems and a huge number of parties.
Fwiw, Italy (and Gernany) technically has a mixed system as well, where only a part of seats is given to district-winners and two-thirds are awarded proportionally (Gernany is a little more complicated, but technically 100% proportional representation)
even multi party parliaments eventually coalesce into two (sometimes three) coalitions. sure those coalitions usually only last until the next election, but i am guessing realignments are rarer in highly polarized societies. in a sense, mutli-party is a sign of a large (and hopefully functioning) center.
presidential power does need to be constantly trimmed down. can’t argue there, incumbent meddling with political will is a huge danger. but systems that have a limited presidency adapt by concentrating political power within the strongest party, eg law and justice in poland.
It works at keeping extremist parties from gaining power too. For example, the main far-right party in the Czech Republic has to either compromise its values to gain any real power or stay far-right and be ostracized. Since they’ll never do the former, they’ll be a fringe group due to the sheer number of parties that find their footing in the government.
It also kept the communist party from regaining any footing here after the Velvet Revolution. Now, they’re not even in the Chamber of Deputies.