Monday, July 8, 2024

The French election commentary on right wing twitter has been as laughably apocalyptic as left wing

 Meanwhile, here are the final election results from France's most-watched news channel BFM-TV, slanted pro-business instead of pro-worker, shown below.

As you can see Le Pen's "right wing" alliance RN has overwhelming support in terms of votes with 10.12 million in the 2024 Second Round (left column) vs. 3.58 million in 2022, and now enjoys 143 seats vs. 89 in 2022. It's now arguably France's biggest party.

RN has grown its support phenomenally in just two years.

Its problem is that its support is more diffuse, so that its supporters are frequently outnumbered by enough voters from other parties to win seats. And this time leftist NFP and Macron's centrist ENS  cooperated in the second round to reduce candidates so that voters had to choose more often than normally between just two sides.

In the end no one got even close to 289 seats to achieve control in the 577 seat National Assembly.

And Macron could easily lose a vote of confidence in the wake of this within weeks and send the voters back to the polls again.

RN is obviously a growing threat to the status quo all while Macron has been just bleeding out seats since 2017, when he had a comfortable lead with 350.

Even CNN recognizes this:

The RN’s success should not be underestimated. In the 2017 elections, when Macron swept to power, the RN won just eight seats. In 2022, it surged to 89 seats. In Sunday’s vote, it won 125 – making it the largest individual party. That unity means it will likely remain a potent force in the next parliament, while the solidity of the leftist coalition remains untested. 

Stay tuned. The fireworks are not over, not in the least because the lunatics of NFP are even more divided than France as a whole, primarily because of the presence of the anti-semitic communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon.