Opening the thread in case some would be interested.
In France, it’s a disaster for both the traditional right and the traditional left.
Radical left got 7%
Traditional left didn’t do any better : 7% too.
Traditional right sunk with 8.5%
Green/ecologist got a great score with 12.5 %
Macron’s “centrist” party had correct but not great result : with 22%
The far right Front National came first with 23.5%
The rest is spread among a bazillion (well, a bit less : 34) of minor lists, including a handful or two of radical left lists another handful of ecologists, a third handful of far right/nationalists/Frexiters, and a variety of others : feminist list, european republic list, royalist list, animal list, education list, immigration list, esperanto list…
The broader preliminary view from the Beeb seems to suggest that the Left may have a small advantage over the right. But, I am not 100% sure what those designations mean in a European context, relative to “left” / “right” in US.
Italy’s far right Lega won in a landslide with about 33% of the votes. What is notable is that contrarily to some other European countries, they were pretty much non existant 5 years ago, so it’s a massive and sudden change. Presumably tied to very large numbers (by Italian standard) of immigrants coming into the country during the last years (there used to be very few immigrants in Italy by comparison with countries like the UK or France).
The left still holds its ground, with the traditional left getting about 22% and the radical left “5 stars” 20% (note that Italy is currently governed by an extremely weird alliance of the far right Lega and the radical left 5 stars). The traditional right is trashed.
Parties in favour of a second referendum get considerably more votes than parties who want a no deal Brexit. Brexiters-with-a-Deal get a slither.
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In the UK, basically, Farage’s new fanclub (the Brexit party) has hoovered up the Brexit voters, UKIP being pushed down below the threshold for election (thank goodness, likewise the egregious Tommy Robinson). LibDems and Greens have won most of the Remain vote. Both Labour and (above all) Tory support has been squeezed, with the Tories pushed almost to the margins.
Here’s the current table of results (Northern Ireland counts take longer, because they have a different system, so will come later).
The Leave/Remain divide remains very close. Guessing that almost all Tory voters are pro-Brexit in one form or another, call that 8% of the total, which would bring the vote for all pro-Brexit parties to around 43%. On the Remain side, the firmly Remain parties have won a lot of votes from both Labour and Tories, and total around 41%, but we can’t be sure what proportion of Labour’s 14.1% are Remainers.
But the ball remains in the court of the Tories in Parliament, and whoever ends up their leader.
In Spain we were having municipal elections as well; most regions including Navarre also had regional elections. I’ve just checked the covers of my two regional newspapers (Navarre), two from a neighboring region with which we have an… intense relationship (Euskadi), and four national ones.
Those covers alone have material for a doctoral thesis or three on “how to present the exact same numbers in completely different ways”. I’m trying to decide if I wanna cry, scream or go postal (that is, write a series of carefully-worded letters to the editor).
One thing in which several of those newspapers agree, and which for some reason is treated as a surprise every time despite it happening every time, is that the numbers for each level are very different from those for other levels: that is, you may have a region where Party A gets 40% of the votes at the municipal level, 23% at the regional level and 30% at the European level, but what the reporters forget is that the list of contenders is different at each level. For example, when I went to vote everybody was deadpanning about how difficult our municipal election was going to be: with a single option, you could vote for them, vote empty or not vote. At the regional level there were 8 serious contenders (6 parties got seats) and a bunch of champiñones*, and at the European level there were all kinds of weird parties along with the half-dozen or so of parties which actually expected to get seats (8 different parties did). My own votes went to three different parties and this is quite common.
“mushrooms”, parties that nobody has heard of and which may not even have held a single open-door event or bothered with ads at all, so called because they pop up out of nowhere and for a very short period of time.
Yep; in my area (South West) we got ended up with 3 Brexit party, 2 Lib Dems and a Green. I went Green this time, mainly because Stephen somebody-or-rather (Lib Dem) came to my door for the last general election and rolled his eyes when I said I was a knee-jerk Labour voter who wasn’t keen on Corbyn. Not sure how I could have encouraged him more to lure me to his party, but he went with ‘contemptuous’ instead. He didn’t make MEP anyway. Good.
Very glad that UKIP failed at least. Rape-joking sad-sack Carl Benjamin was a candidate in the South West - and Tommy Robinson is an outright fascist, who has been (terrifyingly) championed by Fox News as a freedom of speech advocate. For breaking the law to advance his anti-Islam agenda. The prick.
I don’t keep up with EU politics nearly as much as I should, but what is the future of the mainstream right and left in your opinion(s)? It looks bleak from here, unfortunately, but hopefully I’m wrong?
I can’t tell as an American either. Specifically with regards to the UK, I’m wondering what the threshold of polling for the big two would need to get to to make people stop tactically voting for the major two in MP elections and start tactically voting for the others, then all bets are off.
They’re fine in Spain, thank you. In general, the analysis in Spain has seen a rise of PSOE (officially center-left; social democrats with some vague memories of having been marxists at some point); populist parties in the left and right have gone BOOM. Ciudadanos (officially center-right; social democrats, more fond of centralized power than either PP or PSOE) and PP (officially center-right; social democrats) haven’t done as well as PSOE but have done better than the populists. The biggest populist party (Podemos) has broken up into several smaller ones and eaten some bigtime floor; brand-new far-right populists VOX should have bothered invest in miner’s lights.
And yes, we have a lot of social democrat parties: along with the three national-level ones, we have several which operate at regional levels. All of the regional social democrats have recovered ground lost to Ciudadanos or to the populists in the previous rounds of regional and municipal elections.
One of the major themes prior to this year was that every EU parliamentary election saw lower turnout than the one before it. The first in 1979 had 61.8% turnout and last cycles was 42.6%. (Cite)
Small but motivated parties were gaining power in elections that typically had quite a bit lower turnout than the national elections. That gave us a trend of the EU taking on a different character than national governments. The mainstream parties were less represented. The good news is that this election broke the trend for turnout - 50.9% Of course the euroskeptics were part of that with a major push. Of course the results also show, by the article title, that the center was gutted. Environmental activists from the left and the far right both performed well.
What that means for effective alliances to actually get things done is the million euro question.
I am ignorant as fuck when it comes to EU politics (what else would you expect from an American). But as I understand it, the mainstream parties still have, in effect, a 70% or so control of the EU parliament? My question is, would the 25-30% anti-establishment/nationalist parties have enough influence to disrupt and obstruct the major parties in the EU? Could, say, the antics of the Italian right wing infect the rest of the body?
The established centrist bloc that has dominated te EU parliament for a long time, including both center-left and center-right, looks like it won’t have a majority 329 of 751 seats (43%, cite). They’ll need to find some alliances among the rest to be able to effectively do anything.
But it’s worth pointing out that their options for finding alliances are not confined to the far right and the far left. The EPP (centre-right) and S&D (centre-left) between them are projected to have 331 seats when the counting is finished. That’s short of a majority, but it would be a majority when combined with any one of the liberal bloc, the Greeen bloc, the conservative/reformist bloc.
But the “centre centre” (if I can put it that way) Alliance of Liberals and Democrats also did well, so either they or the Greens (or both) now become a pivotal force in the key decisions, first of all choosing the new Commission President and later the development of policy objectives for the next budgetary period.
There are differences between the various brands of right-wing populists (e.g., the Italian Liga want a quota allocation system for distributing refugees/migrants around every country in Europe, which the Hungarian Fidesz in particular are bitterly opposed to). That makes it unlikely that they can consistently organise themselves as a bloc, though it may be a while before we see how the various groups and blocs set themselves up.
It’s worth remembering that the legislative process is designed around trying to achieve as much consensus as possible between the Council of Ministers (=member state governments), the Commission (=develops legislation to meet broad objectives set by the Council) and the Parliament, before the final drafts go back to the Council for final decision. The Parliament has influence and could hold up a proposal, but it can’t overrule or instruct the Council, or the Commission, so it’s not like forming a government (though it does have a nuclear option to sack the Commission as a whole).
ISTM that the Euro elites are still treating the proles with contempt. Real power lies with the Commission, not the Parliament. So the proles vote for the left-wing and right-wing fringe parties in protest.
I was, at least, heartened to see Bristol uphold it’s routinely strong remain vote - and to see the Greens top the polls here ( I say, quietly, as a card carrying Labour member and Green-this-time-voter. At the risk of being chucked out the party).