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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1222 thread views

Transnational Thursday for July 4, 2024

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France's left coalition NPF appears to have won the election, with Macron's party in 2nd and the RN 3rd.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/ck7gydwgvy8t

I haven't faintest clue about how the french electoral system works but perhaps Macron was correct to call an early election.

Eh, Macron could have kept a coalition going with his party dominant in it for another three years. Now he definitely won't have that; Ensemble is at best going to be an equal partner.

Who's won is complicated, because you need a majority to get a Prime Minister and NFP does not have anything close to a majority.

The most likely coalition to actually work, eyeballing it, is NFP minus LFI (the largest and most extreme party in NFP) plus assorted non-NFP leftists plus Ensemble plus Les Républicains (NFP minus LFI plus Ensemble plus assorted leftists does not have a majority, and LFI and Ensemble have promised not to work with each other). The problem is, Les Républicains have said they won't go along with that.

Another possibility would be simply NFP plus Ensemble, but that has the LFI vs. Ensemble issue - LFI's primary policy goal is to chuck out the Constitution and start over, which isn't really amenable to compromise and which Ensemble, as agents of the status quo, really don't want.

Another possibility would be enough members of Ensemble willing to break the cordon to form a coalition with RN and Les Républicains (and assorted rightists), although the numbers don't look promising for that as some in Macron's own party within Ensemble, the least favourable to breaking the cordon, would be needed for a majority.

The last, ever-present possibility, of course, is no deal and a deadlocked legislature until Macron can call another snap election in a year.

NB: I'm not an expert and may be wrong about some stuff here.

The NPF has promised to scrap the pension and immigration reforms passed by the current government, to set up a rescue agency for undocumented migrants and to facilitate visa applications.

It also wants to put caps on basic goods to combat the cost of living crisis and raise the minimum wage.

For all the "Europe surging to the right" scaremongering, it seems like the only outcome is always even more money for illegal migrants and leftists expanding their control over the state

As long as the cordon holds and the parties outside the cordon don't just win outright, parties outside the cordon gaining ground will force bigger and bigger coalitions to retain a majority, involving stranger bedfellows that are still inside the cordon (usually socialists and SJ radicals, because the cordon doesn't apply to them).

On what I imagine you see as the plus side, this tends to feed the parties outside the cordon, because conservative voters get pissed off about the within-cordon conservative parties obviously betraying them and start voting outside the cordon, which of course just feeds on itself. The obvious endpoints for this process look like "cordon is abandoned in order to stem the tide", "cordon is overwhelmed by absolute majority" or "all rightist parties consumed by outside-cordon, but this is less than a majority and socialists/SJers have power for a long while".

I mean, here's the issue for the far-right - there is majority support for their harsh treatment of immigrants (and I say that openly as a dirty soft hearted liberal), but even in Europe, the far-right is dominated by weirdoes and people with reactionary social views people don't want to vote for.

An actual successful anti-immigration party would be basically be moderate to center-left or center-right on most issues, while also being wildly far-right on immigration, but of course, most of the people who deeply care about immigration are also right-wing on other issues.

Polling seems to suggest the opposite. More conservative social views better align with the average voter, it's generally the economic views that they disagree with. The problem isn't the policies it's just the elites have exclusive access to all the npc programming devices via their choke hold on information. Far right is weird not because of it's policy, it's weird because the authorities say it's weird.

The median voter is to the right of the median college-educated center-left politician but to the left of the median far-right politician, and in general, people are more scared of people trying to ban things they see as basically harmless or not that important than people who will allow it, especially when they people opposed to something seem obsessed with it.

I'm not under the assumption that the median American voter is super pro-trans for example, but they largely don't care plus American's inherent libertarianism on a lot of issues (which hurts the Right & Left at times) means it seems weird when somebody seems obsessed with it and acts like it's one of the most important issues in America. Again, ironically, not talking about it and quietly passing a law that does 80% of what Florida did would go over fine in probably 30 out of 50 states, but when you start talking about it, people get freaked out.

Like, in the US, abortion restriction referendums are losing by 10 to 15 points in states Trump won by 20. There are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with social liberalism, but find what actual social conservatives want to do far more scary when they try to put it in practice.

This is all doubly true in Europe, where there really is no socially conservative movement, so when far-righters end up saying out there things like women's basic rights and such, people decide to swallow their anger and vote for the boring centrist parties.

Geert Wilders is now PM of the Netherlands.

Except Wilders isn't the PM and had to actually step back from wanting to be PM despite his party doing well, because of his wackiness on a variety of issues, and compared to other right-wing parties, he at least attempts to portray himself as anti-Islam/immigration for culturally liberal reasons, just not bigotry.

No he is not.

Dick Schoof is the prime minister of the Netherlands

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