The Elections in France, 2017

[filghy2]

Thanks stavros. Whoever wins in the end, it seems likely that neither of the two long-established major parties will make it past the first round, so there will have been a complete rejection of the political establishment.

[bluesoul]

well, at least now we know who ISIS wants to win.

btw: anyone happen to know if marine's niece marion is dating?

[flabbybody]

Exit polls show Macron and Le Pen winners in round 1.
No doubt Marcon will be significant favorite in one on one runoff. We're due for an election to turn out as predicted.

[Stavros]

Exit polls show Macron and Le Pen winners in round 1.
No doubt Marcon will be significant favorite in one on one runoff. We're due for an election to turn out as predicted.

Yes, so far, with just over 80% of the votes counted (on a turn-out of just over 69%) the votes have not produced a surprise although some did suggest Le Pen would top the poll. Macron is now expected to win more than 60% of the votes next week with Le Pen static on the 30% her party tends to poll at this level.

However, the key to France's future does not lie with the Presidency alone, and even if Macron is elected President, the question, who will dominate the National Assembly in June? has yet to be answered.

Given that Macron is a pro-EU candidate, the hostile, anti-EU trend that began in the UK has not so far produced aggressive new anti-EU leaders in either the Netherlands or, it appears, in France, and is not likely to do so in Germany this autumn. This is not good news for Theresa May, who would not have wanted Le Pen to win, but who now faces an EU which is not about to fall apart, and will hold all the high cards in the negotiations on Brexit, when they begin. And it is not a set-back for the unpopular President of the USA, who now appears to have decided -or rather, his 'advisers' have decided- that a deal with the EU is going to benefit the USA more than a deal with the UK. Obama was right. The UK is at the back of the queue.

And yet, without knowing what the National Assembly is going to look like we cannot know how France will move on from its apparent rejection of the two long-established conservative and socialist parties (allowing for name changes). The details -regional voting in particular- will be interesting to read when the data comes in and could be useful when assessing the outcome of the Parliamentary elections.

For now, we can congratulate France for choosing Hope against Hate; Macron's positive view of France, compared to the negative loathing of Le Pen. Adieu, Marine, et ne revien pas!

[Stavros]

Some basic stats based on most of the results so far:

Turn out in this election was 76.21% higher than average.

Macron has won 23.9%, Le Pen 21.43%, Fillon 19.9%, Melenchon 19.6% and Hamon 6.4%.

Geographically, Macron won across France and appears to have taken votes from both Conservatives and Socialists, but while Le Pen scored heavily in the south-east which has been a National Front base for many years, the FN also took votes from Socialist areas in the north and north-east, the areas that have suffered most from de-industrialization. What this means is that while the voters have turned away from the parties that have dominated the Fifth Republic since it was created in 1958 when De Gaulle became President, the divisions in France are stark in a way that has not been seen before, which gives the Parliamentary elections in June an even more important profile.

What remains to be seen is if voters endorse Macron by voting for his party, or maintain their support for the existing Deputies from the established parties, while for Le Pen, with two seats in the Assembly, there is an assumption that the party will increase its presence, but not enough to affect the relationship with the President, who may have to 'co-habit' with a party that is not his own.

If the Front National were to become the largest party, it could still be outvoted by the others, but at the moment the problem is nobody knows if this rebuke to the Conservative and Socialist parties will carry on into the June elections and what the final profile of French government will look like -and whether or not it will last. Was this a major change in French politics, or just a slap in the face for the establishment? If he succeeds, will Macron make a real difference to economy and society? Were she to win, would Le Pen be able to get a single policy through Parliament?

[Stavros]

With less than a week to go before the Presidential run-off between Macron and Le Pen, the gap appears to be narrowing, with a small growth of support for the Front National among Millenials, a decline in support for Macron, and a worrying gap between the two made up of don't knows and don't cares. Two articles express these trends, one which argues Macron is not offering new policies as he claims, another which argues that as the gap between the two candidates is roughly a million votes, it is a gap Le Pen could breach and win the Presidency. These two articles are here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-marine-le-pen

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a7707931.html

If Macron does have a credibility issue, the problem for Le Pen is the toxic history of the National Front and its inability to shake off precisely the party's connections to France's old anti-Semitic, collaborationist past which Le Pen has sought to do. She resigned as leader of the party to focus on the Presidency, but her nominated replacement, Jean-Francois Jalkh had to turn it down when it was revealed he had once queried the ability of Zyklon-B to kill as many Jews in the death camps as history records. If this resurrects all the problems associated with Marine's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen and the men who founded the National Front in 1972, it underlines her major weakness: there have been only two leaders of the National Front, and both have the name Le Pen, few people can name anyone else of importance in the party, and when a new leader was proposed, he turned out to be an embarrassing throw-back to a dark past -or simply the typical National Front activist in a party that expresses an extreme version of French nationalism as it always has. The news on Jalkh is here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a7706971.html

My guess is that Macron will win the Presidency, but it will be closer than is comfortable. If there is some doubt about Le Pen, it is because the last time the country had an opportunity to vote, in the regional councils elections in 2015, the National Front share of the vote was 27.1% whereas in the first round of this year's Presidential election, Le Pen received 21.3% suggesting she is already having to make up on a decline in support. This makes the abstentions critical, and one wonders what would happen if Le Pen were to win, and how convincing it would be on a low turn-out.

[trish]

Thank you France. There may still be hope for this world.

[flabbybody]

My generation of Manhattan Republicans grew up mocking France and her 30 hour work week, anti-American socialism, and 6 week vacations.
So it's sorta ironic that this election outcome is the return of political reason...in a year following the US and Great Britain embarking on collective insanity.
Vive la France

[Stavros]

Preliminary results confirm that Emmanuel Macron is the new President of France. The National Front increased its share of the vote and broke through the 30% barrier, but it was insufficient, Le Pen having around 34% to Macron's 65-66%, more precise figures to follow in the next day or so. However, it appears that Le Pen scored heavily in the north and north-east and in the south, but not across France, which suggests that even with an increased vote this may not produce more than ten seats in the National Assembly elections next month, though Le Pen would consider this an advance. She will carry on through June, but it is not clear if she will seek to return as leader of the party and has said the Front National needs to 'renew itself' while her close ally Florian Philipott believes a new party is required.
It is not clear if the FN will win enough seats in the National Assembly to form the main opposition to whichever is the largest party. The claim that this election broke the mould of French politics may not be realised next month, which could see voters return the Republican Party as the largest in the Assembly unless Macron's vehicle, En Marche! can capitalize on his success. The abstentions in this round suggest voters are in fact wary of Macron. Macron's ability to be an effective President will now rest on the outcome of the National Assembly elections, and as stated before, this could be a period of uncertainty in France.

Externally, this is not a good result for Theresa May in the UK as it maintains the EU in its present form, giving no hope that the UK will get any concessions on access to the single market. It is a blow for Vladimir Putin and the US President who saw France as the weak link that could unravel the EU which they want to see dissolved, and undermines the nationalist trend proclaimed by the 'alt-right' after Brexit and the US elections in 2016. Or it could embolden them to put more pressure on the EU or find other ways of undermining liberal democracy. Intervention in the German elections later this year cannot be ruled out, not least because Germany is now the leader of the Free World, the USA having abandoned its previous commitment to Human Rights and individual liberty. For now the President hums with awe at the achievements of crooks and murderers in power in Cairo, Ankara, Moscow and Manila, while he ponders changes to the Constitutional right to free speech, and attempts to place Christianity at the intersection of every transaction of American life, and his family based in the White House offers the Chinese Green Cards for sale at a cost of $500,000, monetizing the Presidency being the Number 1 priority.

[Stavros]

Marine Le Pen has said that the election result has established the National Front as the main opposition party in France, and it is true that for now the party has consolidated a position in French politics that it did not have before, given that it has council seats and Mayors even if these tend to be either in the North or South and not much in between (and Macron swept the board in Brittany). The problem for Le Pen is that she must now prove her words by winning seats in the National Assembly, but at a deeper level it is not clear what the future of the National Front might be.

To begin with, the only leader it has had since its formation in 1972 has been a Le Pen, and just yesterday the honorary President of the party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, described Marine as 'unfit to govern' and that the party should have chosen her niece, Marion to lead the party. Setting aside Marion's youth and (alleged) appeal to younger voters, those same might wonder if there is nobody else to lead this party. The problem is that the higher profile candidates are precisely the kind of provocative politicians that tend to give the National Front the image of an extremist, rather than a responsible party. This simple fact was demonstrated just two weeks ago when Le Pen stood down from the leadership of the party and the nominated replacement, Jean-Francois Jalke had to give it up almost immediately because of his toxic remarks about the Holocaust. Elsewhere the NF has tended to be a pro-Roman Catholic party challenging the long-established anti-clerical nature of public office, and vocally anti-Muslim, a factor which links the party today with those NF founders from the Organisation armée secrète formed by dissident officers who fought the guerilla war in Algeria and tried to assassinate General de Gaulle in 1962, and which also murdered Muslims on the streets of France in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Attempts to distance the party from its past may require them to change their name and their leadership team, but it is not clear how long the anger of the 'forgotten ones' will last if the party presents itself as disunited and incoherent on a range of politics and, like UKIP descends into the 'France First' nationalism that inevitably links them to both Vichy and the anti-semitic campaign against Dreyfus that was the crucible of today's nationalist politics.
The cheek in all this is in the twitter account of the anti-EU body set up by Nigel Farage, Leave.EU which responded to Macron's victory with a tweet that declared
that the French people had once again “rolled over” just as they had done in 1940 – except this time they saved Germany “the bullets and the fuel”. The tweet also included a picture of a newspaper headline from 1940 reporting the surrender of France to the Nazis. Picking up on the same theme, Farage tweeted: “A giant deceit has been voted for today. Macron will be Juncker’s puppet.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...esidential-win

The National Front was created by a loose collection of anti-semites, extreme nationalists, and Vichy collaborators giving these responses the same air of political fantasy that attended the life and death of UKIP, the same reliance on aggressive dismissals of fact, attempts to re-write history and plant 'fake news' stories that may now be seen as ineffective, in Europe if not in the USA.

The problem is, can the National Front ever escape the facts of its own past and a legacy that has no achievements on which to lay claim to power?