After the National Rally came out on top in the June 30 elections, opposing parties joined together to try to block the National Rally advance and withdrew candidates in some constituencies in an effort to not split the anti-far-right vote.
France, OpinionWay exit poll:Snap national parliament election, second round (seat distribution)NFP-LEFT|G/EFA|S&D: 180-210Ensemble-RE: 155-175RN and allies-ID: 135-155LR-EPP: 46-56Divers-*: 15-25 https://t.co/oL97q6lO3I #lgislatives2024 #electionslegislatives2024 pic.twitter.com/gUVEh6iJMu
" Europe Elects (@EuropeElects) July 7, 2024
Local coverage...
Live: Leftist NFP alliance leads both Macron and far right in parliamentary vote, projections show
www.france24.com
... Initial projections from France's snap legislative elections on Sunday showed the New Popular Front -- a hastily cobbled-together leftist coalition -- leading both Macron's ruling party (in second place) and the right-wing National Rally (in third) but falling short of securing an absolute majority, according to Ipsos Talan polling. Follow our liveblog for the latest updates. ...
@#24 ... Nazis need to die ...
But then there is this...
Le Pen, Orban and the Patriots for Europe': Is the EU being undermined from within?
www.france24.com
... Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally party this week joined forces with the camp of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to form a powerful new far-right bloc in the EU parliament.
The group, Patriots for Europe, will be led by Jordan Bardella, Le Pen's 28-year-old protg. With 84 EU lawmakers it will be the parliament's third-largest political group. ...
__________
#17 | Posted by donnerboy at 2024-07-08 11:23 AM
The polls all leaned toward a right wing landslide. Guess what? All the polls were wrong. Again.
Not really. The pre-election polls were actually quite correct, before the creation of New Popular Front (NPF/NFP), an alliance of far-left parties, Greens and organized labor (radical-left La France Insoumise, Communist Party, Socialist Party, Ecologists, Generation.s, Place Publique, and other left-wing parties) into one party bloc on June 10 2024, just weeks before first round of elections, specifically to outvote the Le Pen's National Rally.
According to those pre-first-round polls, NR was going to (and did) get the most seats they've ever taken and possibly beat the fractured center-left but not enough for majority, which proved entirely correct. IOW, there was never a chance for NR to actually govern. Bur the fear of NR "winning" pushed voters to abandon center (for now) and move to extremes, particularly extreme left - also not nearly enough to govern. Like many recent elections, it was not a vote "for" the left to govern, it was a "Non" vote against the far-right.
This was the estimated poll before the second round, and it was spot on:
French Left Win Big; Right Comes in Third
Also not really what happened. NR did come in third, but NPF didn't "win big" - the bloc and two major parties each got less than a third of National Assembly seats, far less than the majority required (289 seats) and none of them has any chance of forming a majority coalition, though NR can form a larger plurality coalition with center-right Republicans... which is unlikely.
It's a mess, but that's how some parliamentary systems work... or don't. Belgium was without elected government for almost 22 months in 2020, which beat their own record of almost 20 months in 2011.
Oh, Les Miserables!
People are simply "flipping" governments because they are unhappy with weakening economies, deficits, loss of purchasing power and still-stubborn inflation (even though inflation rates everywhere came down recently, with both government and consumer debt are sky-high) and they are giving "other guys" and their promised "new/old solutions" a chance - "hope and change / change and hope" at least until the next elections, if "things don't work out" or the business cycle doesn't cooperate.
That's exactly what happened in UK, just 2 years after Labour was wiped out in a "ruling party" system. UK's unemployment rate is highest in 2 years, though inflation came down significantly. Labour won huge seats majority... but with the lowest percentage ever, and on the "platform" of a promise they can't possibly deliver:
Britain's Labour pulled off a thumping election victory with just 34% of the national vote
* Labour won just 34% of the national vote, while Tories secured nearly 24%
* Smaller parties including the centrist Liberal Democrats, right-wing Reform U.K. and the Greens took nearly 43% of the popular vote but gained just less than 18% of the seats
Not exactly a major turn there either, just "flipping" currently least popular party.
Fortunately, ours is a system of "checks and balances" that allows for shared "constrained" federal government, though in recent decades Presidents and executive branch have been taking (or given, by courts and Congress, deliberately or through vague legislations) more and more power - "Stroke of the pen - law of the land."
__________
__________
#28
More on UK's parliamentary system and elections:
www.bbc.co.uk - Biggest-ever gap between number of votes and MPs hits Reform and Greens - BBC, 2024 July 5
|------- The gap between the share of total votes won by the winning party in the 2024 general election and the share of Parliamentary seats won is the largest on record...
This disparity has prompted renewed calls for reform of the electoral system, with Richard Tice of Reform UK complaining ... that his party had received millions of votes but only five seats in Parliament.
He said: "That is blatantly not a properly functioning democratic system - that is a flawed system. The demands for change will grow and grow."
The Green Party's co-leader Adrian Ramsay said he wanted to see a "fairer system" to ensure that "every vote counts equally".
The Electoral Reform Society claimed it was "the most disproportional in British electoral history".
The UK's first-past-the-post system has a tendency to generate disproportionate results compared with systems in some other countries. ...
Reform's roughly four million votes translates into a 14% share of the total votes cast in the election, but only 1% of all the seats in the House of Commons.
By contrast, Labour won 34% of total votes cast, but about 64% of the 650 seats.
The Green Party also had a considerably larger vote share than seat share, with 7% of the total vote but, like Reform, about 1% of total seats, or four MPs. ...
On this measure Labour's result in 2024 - with the gap between the share of votes won and the share of seats won of around 30 percentage points - is the most disproportionate on record.
The second most disproportionate election result on this metric was 2001, when Tony Blair's Labour party won 41% of votes but 63% of total seats - a gap of 22 percentage points. ...
Labour grandee Lord Mandelson told the BBC on Friday morning that his party had put its campaigning resources into certain seats in order to maximise its chances of winning a large number of seats, rather than boosting its overall vote share.
A purely proportional system - where national vote share translated exactly into the number of seats - in 2024 would have given Labour about 221 seats and no majority. The Tories would have had 156 seats, Reform 91, the Liberal Democrats 78 and the Greens 45. ...
-------|
Other countries electoral systems don't directly translate into ours, and caution should be exercised not to overestimate the results of some "off" elections where the "local" quirks or certain circumstances play much bigger role, compared to "normal" years.
__________
Drudge Retort Headlines
Mayorkas: FEMA Doesn't Have Enough Funding (78 comments)
'Trump Bible' One of Few that Meet Criteria for Oklahoma Classrooms (31 comments)
Reich: JD Vance Will Be the GOP Candidate in 2028 (25 comments)
No, Biden Didn't Use FEMA Money on Migrants, But Trump Did (25 comments)
U.S. Added 254,000 Jobs in September Exceeding Expectations (21 comments)
Judge: Biden Can Move Forward with Student Loan Forgiveness (18 comments)
Donald Doubles Down on Election Lies (17 comments)
Trump Election Conspiracist Tina Peters Gets 9 Years in Prison (15 comments)
Anarctica Is Turning Green (13 comments)