What happened on the night of the French election 2022?https://t.co/6JqpKTXlIj pic.twitter.com/Lv87EPEXVt
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 25, 2022
Congratulations to @EmmanuelMacron on his re-election. France is our oldest ally and a key partner in addressing global challenges. I look forward to our continued close cooperation — including on supporting Ukraine, defending democracy, and countering climate change.
— President Biden (@POTUS) April 24, 2022
If someone won a US presidential election by this margin, we’d call it a historic blowout. Keep in mind as pundits suggest the election was “close” in coming days. https://t.co/hFHGTW7csd
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) April 24, 2022
Fewer than 4 in 10 Americans voted for a far-right US candidate in 2016 — and he won. I guess what's objectively "better" is the French election system. https://t.co/8i6vFWRH15
— Ishaan Tharoor (@ishaantharoor) April 24, 2022
A reminder that, in actual functioning republics, even the far right parties don't engage in the level of authoritarian nonsense of today's GOP. No attempts to restrict suffrage. No lies about nonexistent voter fraud. No refusal to concede. No ex post coup attempts. https://t.co/sVPkbMKzoL
— Mark Copelovitch (@mcopelov) April 24, 2022
This was almost exactly Reagan's margin over Mondale, an election I personally do not consider to have been particularly close https://t.co/hhSCg5T4TD
— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) April 24, 2022
First I lost Moskva. Now I lost Paris
— Darth Putin (@DarthPutinKGB) April 24, 2022
so French politics nerds, did Ukraine + her association with Putin make any difference for Le Pen or was it purely domestic issues?
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) April 24, 2022
It was also, partially, a victory for centrist, liberal, pro-European politics over the forces of populism. In the end enough voters, especially those on the left who did not back Macron in the 1st round on April 10th, decided to swing behind him in the 2nd, to keep Le Pen out
— Sophie Pedder (@PedderSophie) April 24, 2022
Hell, I wish ours was this healthy. https://t.co/k4Za1SiOep
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) April 24, 2022
In Le Pen stronghold, French voters dread five more years of Macron https://t.co/h7GFqX99FQ pic.twitter.com/D3ofVFhunn
— Reuters (@Reuters) April 25, 2022
Feels like someone at Reuters is subtweeting the NYTimes…
… In this former coalmining town in northern France, where unemployment runs high and the town hall is controlled by Le Pen’s party, there had been strong hopes that the far right would this time break through the glass ceiling that has kept it out of power.
Support for Le Pen’s economic nationalism is high among the region’s blue collar workforce. So too is a deep disdain for a president seen as out of touch with regular folk.
“I’ve never hated a president so much,” said Marie Souillard, 50. “I don’t fully realize it yet, but tomorrow I’m going to be like, he’s here for another five years. I’m living a nightmare.”…
Le Pen, who had been running for president for a third time, vowed to keep up the fight in parliamentary elections in June.
In his victory speech, Macron acknowledged that many voters who had rallied behind him had done so only to keep the far right out of power.
“We will have to be benevolent and respectful because our country is riddled with so many doubts, so many divisions,” he told his supporters.
However, few in Henin-Beaumont were persuaded he was sincere…
Arnaud de Rigne, 26, a member of Le Pen’s National Rally party’s national committee, said he was disappointed by Le Pen’s loss but that there were signs for hope.
“When you look at the progress she’s made — she was at 17% in 2012, 34% in 2017 and now 42% — you see that there is a constant progression,” de Rigne said. “You can’t help think that sooner or later she’s going to make it.”
Cameron
Right-wing lost in Slovenia, too, so my plan to make the Great Escape is back on track.
Mike in NC
I switched on the boob tube while cooking breakfast and MSNBC was all about how the polls were showing the French presidential candidates basically running in a dead heat. Which only goes to show how utterly fucking worthless pollsters are.
That got me thinking about how the leading Republican imbeciles who want to move into the White House in 2024 would handle foreign policy. Just for a nanosecond imagine Ron DeathSentence or Ted Crud or any other shithead GOP senator or governor standing up to the dictator of Russia. They couldn’t. He’d be invited to extend his fascist empire to the Belgian border.
Thinking about going back to bed now.
Cameron
I think the suggestion offered in this article is interesting, although I have no idea how workable it is.
https://tomdispatch.com/how-to-end-the-war-in-ukraine/
phdesmond
this morning i sent a poem to my french-speaking friends:
félicitations
pour l’élection
de ce con
Macron
and one answered:
Mieux que la peine
De la Reine
Le Pen
spc123
@Mike in NC: Recently, not so much, but during Round 1 voting they were tight. This seems to be a pattern – people have tactical responses to pollsters during round 1 that tend to shift when the field is actually reduced to a couple candidates. So, in other words, round 1 polling for the final is fairly useless in France.
spc123
@Mike in NC: Recently, not so much, but during Round 1 voting they were really tight. This seems to be a pattern – people have tactical responses to pollsters during round 1 that tend to shift when the field is actually reduced to a couple candidates. So, in other words, round 1 polling for the final is fairly useless in France.
Redshift
In this case, it shows how worthless MSNBC is on foreign politics, because unless they were talking about the first round, that’s just plain wrong.
ChiJD Doug
Good Steve M post making largely the same point: https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2022/04/in-2024-press-will-declare-trump-or.html
Ken
the population complains because they don’t have the same jobs as their grandparents, who unfortunately they never met because they all died of black lung or coal-gas explosions before the age of 40.
NotMax
Speaking of coal –
Hoodie
The take by so much of the US press is ridiculous. This would be considered an absolute blowout in the US. If this is such a groundswell of support for Le Pen, consider that turnout was lower (still eclipsed anything you’d see in the US) – if it had been higher, she would have received a smaller percentage, given that her voters don’t lack enthusiasm. In other words, the fact she cracked 40 is probably more attributable to Macron not being particularly popular, not to any groundswell in support for Le Pen. The US media seems to be addicted to negative framing of just about everything. Might just be me, but I find Mehdi Hassan to be an annoying twit.
Elizabelle
@Hoodie: True. The US press is a hall of mirrors.
TM
It’s striking how little attention (basically none) the US media has paid to Macron’s “centrist” economic policies. Imagine if, say, Pete Buttigeig were to run in 2024 on a platform of more tax cuts for the rich, cuts in unemployment and Social Security payouts, and raising the Soc Sec retirement age, whilst Trump bravely opposes all that. Maybe no one wants to touch this point because the hot takers will immediately accuse them of supporting the odious LePen. It is a very well-established point of 20th-century European history that income inequality tends to create openings for clever and ambitious fascists. A dangerous lesson to forget.
NotMax
@Hoodie
France has been hit hard by COVID (and still is #4 in most cases reported, behind only the U.S., India and Brazil). Don’t discount that in depressing support for or generalized fatigue with Macron.
mrmoshpotato
@Hoodie:
I love how the posted response is basically, “Our Electoral College system is shit. Sounds like you agree.”
Captain C
@Hoodie:
Look for this headline in ’24, probably in the FTFNYT:
Trump Declares Victory in Stunning Blowout, Takes 38% of the Popular Vote and 137 Electoral Votes. Country Firmly Behind Former Popular President.
Subhead: Democrats in Disarray, Must Compromise with Totally Reasonable Victorious Opposition Party after Winning Less Than 2/3 of the Popular Vote, Barely 400 Electoral Votes, Unexpected Republican Near Victories in Florida and Texas Indicate Deeply Divided Country.
Subsubhead: Democrats Weak Numbers in House (286) and Senate (62) Mean A Divided Legislature Too. Can They Govern In The Likely Event of Entirely Reasonable Republican Intransigence?
Another Scott
Speaking of political reporting and memes…
True? No idea. It’s really, really easy to construct narratives about this race, though.
Here’s hoping that Pennsylvania Democrats make the better choice and win in November!
(via nycsouthpaw)
Cheers,
Scott.
geg6
@Hoodie:
Not just you.
Betty Cracker
@Another Scott: I envy PA Dems — their primary will be over soon. Here in FL, we have to wait until August.
geg6
@Another Scott:
Based on the horrible super PAC ads they are running for Lamb, it’s pretty evident that Lamb is their boy on our side. I read an article this weekend about how huge Fetterman’s war chest is and how non-existent Lamb’s is. Lamb hasn’t paid for a single ad yet and the numbers reported for cash on hand were anemic, to be as polite as possible. Fetterman just keeps rolling on and has great ads that make you feel good to vote for him.
I think it’s going to be Fetterman v Oz. Which is the best we can hope for here. People of all stripes love his pot legalization tour he did to every single county in the state and he definitely speaks Joe Sixpack well, especially about local sports. Oz could never match that.
Ken
@Captain C: You forgot:
Subsubsubhead: “Comity in the Senate requires increasing filibuster threshold to 70 votes”, Republicans and Manchin proclaim
Jerzy Russian
I haven’t been able to keep up: should I eat Freedom toast or French toast for breakfast?
Captain C
@Ken: That might be the lead editorial that day, probably written by Manchin, Moscow Turtle, and, let’s see…Matt Gaetz and his latest teen victim. Sinema will have her own editorial, but it will read like surrealist Harry Potter fiction written on a combination of bad acid and cough medicine and no one will know what it’s about except the theme will be “Me! Me! Me! It’s all about ME!!!”. When their shitty coverage is pilloried, the FTFNYT will use these editorials to claim that it’s “bipartisan” and “neutral” and “objective,” and anyone disagreeing is a big bad partisan poopyhead who’s always wrong, any and all evidence to the contrary nonwithstanding.
MrSnrub
@geg6:
His Sheetz over WaWa stance is a deal killer for me. Sorry.
Andrew
So what is the French equivalent of “Cletus Safari?”
germy
Here’s my guess: The reason some folks are expressing alarm over this “close” election (even though it wasn’t traditionally close) is because one of the candidates is a literal fascist.
I’m not sure we can compare the numbers to a contest between an American conservative and a liberal.
For example, if there’s a local race in my town and one candidate says “I won’t raise taxes” and the other candidate says “I’ll raise taxes only on those making above $300k” or whatever, and the results are 60-40, it’s not quite as alarming as one candidate saying “I’d like to add some sidewalks and repave some streets” and the losing candidate saying “Our blood will remain pure from the invading dark hordes”. In that case 60-40 would be cause for some worry about my town.
Fair Economist
@TM: Absolutely a lot of the reason for Le Pen’s relative success is Macron’s atrocious economic policies. The media seems to have memory-holed the fact that Hollande’s switch to center-rightist economic policies is what destroyed the French Socialist Party. You’d think the politicians would get a clue at some point. I wish the standard-bearer for the French left was somebody from the Socialist or Green parties, and not pro-Russian anti-Europe Melenchon.
Calouste
@Hoodie: I’ve said this before, but journalists really like right wing extremists because they make for easy copy. Why try to understand the different aspects of some complicated policies when you can just write the same articles about grievances and hate over and over again? See also “Cletus safari” and “Hillary Clinton was over prepared”.
Calouste
@germy: Paid any attention to American politics recently? Like the Republican candidate in Michigan mentioned here over the weekend who said that there should be only white families in ads?
germy
@Calouste:
Yes, as the Republican party slides further into fascism maybe we should be alarmed by a 60-40 result, rather than say “Hey it wasn’t that close” especially when losing Republicans often refuse to concede.
Kay
@germy:
This made me sad for the US, because it’s true:
Such a rock bottom bar and we can’t even meet it anymore.
Kay
Anything like this happen in the French election?
It’s one of hundreds of examples of the US Right’s response to losing an election.
Kay
“Cancel culture and “wokeness” is our very favorite thing to write about and all of us plan on churning out these columns until we bleed the last possible drop of revenue out of this, the theme we love most”
These people could be standing in rising floodwaters up to their knees and they would be penning yet another essay about Yale law students being rude.
Barbara
@geg6: OMG. It’s hard to make people in other places understand how important sports teams are in Pennsylvania. Poseurs are easy to spot.
MisterForkbeard
@Kay: What’s stupid about it is that ‘wokeness’ was never a big deal. Neither was “cancelling”. A small amount of people got called out for egregiously bad behaviour. Almost all of them were really rich and haven’t been harmed.
But elites can’t take any threat of actually being called to account, so here we go. And they keep harping on it, even when the conservatives are literally calling liberals traitors and about sending us to jail for the crime of… being liberals. Or when conservatives actively tried to overthrow the country.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Interesting exchange on the topic between Chait, Zack Beauchamp and Adam Serwer here. Sample of Serwer’s rebuttal:
Kent
I looked it up. You have to go back 38 years to Reagan’s 18 point electoral margin over Mondale to find an equal popular vote margin in the US and that resulted in a 525-13 electoral college blowout.
Before that you have to go back to Nixon in 1972 and Johnson in 1964 to find equivalent margins.
Marmot
@TM: whilst?
Diceros bicornis
In my town of approximately 4400 souls, Macron won 1167 votes and Marine Le Pen won 1091. That’s pretty damn close. I feel we’re lucky to have a lot of voters who live in bigger cities…tho it would be interesting to see figure for, say, Marseilles.
What I truly don’t get is how short people’s memories seem to be. This area was occupied by nazis only 70 some years ago and there are monuments everywhere to the people who were shot for daring to resist in any way. And the families of some of those people are neighbors, merchants, teachers…that occupation was literally within living memory.
Homegrown fascism is still fascism. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way to some of Le Pen’s supporters.
geg6
@MrSnrub:
Well, since there is no such thing as a Wawa in the vast majority of the state, your test will never get you a senate seat!
Ishiyama
@Cameron: Professor McCoy is the real deal; he may or may not be right but it is an interesting suggestion, hearkening back to the days when powerful Western nations would seize the revenues of third world nations to repay debts to the Western bankers. But this time in a good cause (presumably).
Ruckus ??
@Ken:
Just thinking about my grandparents and my grandfather died in his mid 40s because medicine wasn’t what it is now. What killed him is fixed on a regular basis these days but back 86 yrs ago was just something that you died from. I think people really do not have much idea any longer what life looked like to most everyone early in the last century. And before that. Now even those for whom life basically sucks mostly can have better than then. Of course our monetary betters are still trying to get everyone to think that a bank account bigger than theirs is what makes them better. And it so often does exactly the opposite.
Ruckus ??
@Elizabelle:
Well it’s owned by people who are super impressed by what they see in a mirror so owning a hall of mirrors seems rather appropriate.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: The state of Florida is literally passing a bill of attainder to punish the Disney company for political speech in disagreement with the state’s anti-LGBT policies, and most people who comment on this are acting as if it’s a perfectly normal thing to do and the moral is that Disney “should have stayed out of politics”, maybe because the target is the relatively unsympathetic Disney company and not some ordinary Joe. But that’s surely coming.
Diceros bicornis
Pierre pursuit? Chasse au Charles?
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
All of the people supporting DeSantis would be screaming their heads off if a liberal governor had done this to Hobby Lobby. Every newspaper would have daily editorials from outraged conservatives AND the “center left” antiwokesters.
The reason they’re dismissing and minimizing the threat of what DeSantis is doing to Disney is because they agree with him– they think Disney is “too woke” too.
I can’t even imagine a D governor going after Hobby Lobby for political speech. No one can. It would never happen and if it did happen I could hear the keening and wailing from my desk.
Elizabelle
@Diceros bicornis: That is terrifyingly close. That’s about 51.7% for your community. Too close for comfort when you are up against a fascist.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
We really should have some kind of contest over the most deranged hot take on an election from an MSM outlet.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Le Pen made a fatal error by campaigning with Pepé Le Pew – they just stunk up the joint.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
They’re sophisticated versions of the Libs of Tik Tok lady. She took the HUGE group of public school teachers – 3.5 million people- and declared a crisis based on .00001% of the teachers who are on Tik Tok.
They took the ENORMOUS higher education system in the US, ignored 99% of it, and lost their fucking marbles over 1%.
Michigan State University, one giant state school, is almost as big as the entire Ivy League. They ignored 99% of what constitutes “higher education” to the vast majority of the public and declared there was a “wokeness” crisis.
Are they just not aware of size and scale and…geography? How can one trust these people if they don’t take SIZE of the sample into account? It’s a disqualifying, massive error.
Peale
@Kay: Let’s see. Disney’s “woke” decisions over the past 20 years.
1) Deciding that perhaps its cartoons from the 30s-50s had a bunch of racial images that weren’t marketable any longer, and would get blowback if they were promoted, so they aren’t releasing them.
2) Hiring women to direct some of the super hero films.
3) Having 1 gay teen series on Hulu, based on a property it inherited from Fox.
4) A same sex interracial couple in a super hero movie.
5) A memo indicating that it would prefer diversity in casting for large ensemble pieces.
6) Princess animated movies that weren’t set in Sweden.
And lots of memos to the LGBTQ+ community about how they “totally were going to have an LGBTQ+ character this time. Were totally really considering it. But sadly, it didn’t happen. But we totally were going to do it. Keep buying our stuff.”
Yep. Its clearly out of control here.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
That’s how you end up smearing 3.5 million public school teachers as “pedophiles”. When you’re too dumb and/or lazy to figure out that a tiny portion of that huge group are on Tik Tok at all, let alone saying anything controversial.
You could do this to any super-large employment category of people. You could do it nurses. You could do it to “people who work for parcel delivery companies”.
“People who work in food service are all pyschos- here, look at my Tik Tok videos as proof”
Elizabelle
@Kay: Thank you. I often do not know what to make of either Jonathan Chait or Ezra Klein these days. Very good point.
Kay
@Peale:
Just plug in “Hobby Lobby” for “Disney” and every single one of these people would be out in the streets defending Hobby Lobby’s rights to espouse conservative views and outraged that the state was sanctioning them.
They’re not “for” or “against” free speech. They’re opposed to “wokeness”. Whatever or whoever helps them toward that end they’ll happily align with.
Kay
@Elizabelle:
I went to community college and a big state school. MOST people are there getting whatever piece of paper one needs to be a nurse, or a teacher, or an accountant, or an engineer.
Always, for years and years, one of the most popular majors at US colleges is “business”. In their fevered imaginations all of these business students are Marxists. It’s a cloistered, narrow view that just blithely ignores the reality of higher education for 90% of people.
Tony Jay
@Diceros bicornis:
Yeah, but they were German fascists, led by a common Austrian drug-addict and hopelessly addled on bogus Teutonic flimflamery. The wrong kind of nationalism, all lumpen brutality and pointless shouting, altogether lacking in the je ne sais quoi of the much superior Francocentric version.
Kay
I’d say Right wing hero Elon Musk taking over and controlling Twitter will make Right wingers “happy” but it won’t.
They’ll have a new grievance they’ll all be screeching about in the next six hours.
We’ll be “what’s that? What are you enraged about?” because we won’t even have heard of it before.
6 months ago did you think they could be insanely angry at Disney? It’ll be like Taco Bell or “nurses” or “national parks”.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
From what I have read the DeGualist had quite the purge list after liberation of conservatives who had let the Nazis in just to attack the French Left.
TM
@Marmot: Subconscious anglophilia sneaks out sometimes.
Captain C
@Kay:
They would be blaming the Yale law students for the floodwaters, even though they, themselves had blown up the dam, causing the flood.
sab
@Kay: I went to an elite midwestern liberal arts college which I loved. But the first useful help I got afterwords was Grand Rapids Junior College. Great place. Got me started on accounting, which is trade school much as it tries to be an academic discipline.