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I talked to some french relatives and they said that plenty of the RN candidates just are embarrassingly incompetent and that plenty of them were publicly humiliated in debates and such in the run-up to the election by the candidates of the more established parties.
I don't speak french or paid much attention to the election so I don't know how true this is but similar things are true in Sweden where SD has reasonably competent top leadership but many of their candidates (especially on the local level) are abject clowns who survive electorally not in small part due to not being directly elected.
In Poland actual far-right also has share of extremists (actual monarchists, supporters of theocracy, Russia and people who want to ban woman from voting).
And clowns. And people unusually incompetent, even by standard of politics.
And people who prefer to produce Tik-Tok materials over achieving anything, see Braun with fire extinguisher.
I wonder how much is boosting them and hiding the same from other parties and how much RN having much smaller pool of candidates and how much is RN being structurally stupid.
There's a genuine structural factor. For example, in the European Elections, Finns Party refused to accept one of their MEPs, Teuvo Hakkarainen, as a candidate again, because he was a pitiful drunken failure and a national joke. The said MEP went on to be a candidate for a minor fringe party and got absolutely nowhere, but there was also a fair amount of comments around social medias from Finns Party supporters going "They didn't take Teuvo so I don't trust them any more, they've become too elitist and not for normal men of the people any more". Clearly the party's supporters pay close attention to stuff like this and this limits the party's opportunities to clear away chaff, even if they had to do it in this instance.
what does it mean?
This was intended to continue with other stuff that was probably inessential. Fixed.
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