I don’t know a lot about the French election pitting current President Macron against the very worrisome far-right challenger Marine Le Pen. There will be a debate tonight (Wednesday the 20th), and the vote happens on Sunday.
Le Pen, daughter of longtime fringe candidate and Nazi sympathizer / Vichy apologist Jean Marie Le Pen, took a trip to Russia last week and had a chummy meeting with Putin. Which seems odd, since Putin is using a made-up Nazi threat to Russian speakers in Ukaraine as his excuse for invading. But then, Marine Le Pen is supposedly estranged from her father, and maybe understands the optics of being pro-Nazi doesn’t help her cause, though her xenophobic politics are not far removed from her old man’s.
What are Macron’s weaknesses? Is France really ready to elect someone as openly fascist as Le Pen? Her dad’s National Front party has been around for decades, always losing the big battles but seeming to gain ground millimeter by millimeter. Is Europe really going down the toilet?
I’m not French, but my understanding is that macron is decried as a neo-liberal whose policies benefit the rich and leave everyone else behind. So that is part of the appeal of other parties.
However the fascist party in France has been steadily growing for a couple decades now. When Le Pen’s father ran in 2002 he only got 18% of the vote, Marine Le Pen is looking at about a 46% vote in 2022. By the end of this decade the fascists could garner 50% of the vote in national elections there.
Macron wins and current projections indicate a large margin of 58-42 which I believe is significantly higher than the last polls. A good result for France and liberal democracy in general.
Incidentally it was quite remarkable to see an election where the results were available practically seconds after polls closed. I suppose that is what happens with a popular vote and a large margin.
Apologies for the double post. I get people who are concerned about cost of living and inflation. I just don’t get why they think a fascist is the way to go to address that issue. IMHO it’s like someone dealing with a grease fire voting to try to put it out by spraying some water on it.
ETA. I don’t mean to pick specifically on the French. There seem to be an increasing number of people with that type of mindset all over the world these days.
The sequence of the 3 Le Pen runoff elections is remarkable. In 2002 the Jean Marie lost by a whopping 64 points. In 2017 Marine lost by 32 and in 2022 it looks like she is losing by 16. She is still only 53 so it’s a rather ominous trajectory…
It will be interesting to see how accurate the early projections of 58.2-41.8 are. I suppose if the counting is reasonably broad, the law of large numbers means you get a super-accurate count very, very quickly in a single popular vote count.
“Mussolini made the trains run on time.” Never mind that he didn’t and that impression is from propaganda; people just love someone who self-assuredly claims to be successful at fixing all of their problems. Witness Donald Trump, the “great businessman” with a legendary string of failures, bankruptcies, bad investments, shady dealing, and running multiple oceanfront casinos—a business that comes with a statistically guaranteed return if you can get people in the doors and to the slots and tables—into insolvency. The worse he fails, the more he blusters, and his adherents lap it up like a dog licking vomit off the floor.
I am very relieved and so glad my fears did not come true. At least not this time! There is a lot to dislike about Macron, but Md. Le Pen is much, much worse.
I hope M. Macron has learnt his lesson and becomes a better President for the next five years. Alas… well, there is always hope.
This election confirms that Macron is one of the most remarkable politicians in the Western world. To become French president at the age of 39 and then create a new party that won a legislative majority was a huge achievement and now he has won again convincingly and become the first French President in 20 years to win reelection. There is no other Western politician who has faced and beaten the right-wing populist threat so convincingly. The template that he represents: young,bright and moderate has an obvious US counterpart: Mayor Pete, something for Democrats to chew over in 2024 or 2028.
It’ll be interesting to see where Le Pen goes from here. She’s already trying to spin this as a victory, and she certainly did better than any far-right candidate for President in France before (including increasing her own showing from the last election by seven percentage points). But that still makes her twice a loser on the national stage. I don’t know much about French politics, but in the U.S. getting branded a “loser” is a pretty quick way to end a political career.
Both the hardline right and hardline left are already warning they intend to get back at Macron in the upcoming parliamentary election. So it’s an important but limited win.
Also, we clearly identify Marine LePen as representing fascists beause one political generation earlier her father led that party as undisputably hardcore ultraright nationalist, rather than dressing it up as “just” populist “anti-globalist”(*). The path is more visible because of the nature of the French party and election systems, where the growth of such a movement does not get disguised within the takeover of a once-“mainstream conservative” party.
Still, it can be something to have to govern knowing that rather than having a proper mandate for you, your margin of win was fundamentally At Least You Are Not That Other Person Thank God. France has had two presidents like that this century, and we in the USA have one such right now.
(* the latter being something that populist left movements, in those countries where they have some traction, also claim to be)
