European Parliament election
TurquoiseTastic
Kerygmania Host
in Purgatory
So looking at the Euoropean Parliament election results what do we learn? I'm not sure! France is the headlining story with LePen's RN doing very well; Macron has felt compelled to call French parliamentary elections (due in 3/4 weeks time!). But hard-right parties have done well in many places (better in some than in others).
Any analysis from Shipmates?
Any analysis from Shipmates?
Comments
On the wider story, it seems to be of far-right gains in many EU countries.
Again, I'm showing my ignorance and stating the obvious. But it doesn't look good if these parties can unify their message and solidify their political position further across the Union.
The US units landing on D-Day were segregated. French African units involved in the liberation of France were barred from the formal liberation of Paris by de Gaulle. There are plenty of forms of right-wing arseholery that fall short of out-and-out Nazism, for all that they share a lot of DNA.
And left wing... Attlee not inviting the Poles to the 1946 London victory parade so as not to upset the USSR, for example.
First, the far right has worked very long and hard on detoxifying their brand. If you read their election literature and aren't paying attention, they look a lot like a normal right-wing, socially conservative party. You have to get into the small print before you find the really poisonous stuff.
That said, I'm not sure this is so much about the far right doing well as it is about other parties doing extremely badly, and Renaissance in particular. Although the RN's score is clearly far too high, I believe their vote share has actually been fairly consistent over recent years. The people who vote for the RN tend not to change their minds, but the rest of us are much less sure who on earth to vote for.
You can add to this that the left is also a shambles. I voted for a centre left list, but it was only one of three or four similar ones on the ballot. I think the Socialists did respectably, certainly much better than in recent times, but if they and the lists like the one I voted for had got together to produce a united moderate left-wing programme, I suspect they might have ended up with more MEPs than they did.
It remains to be seen what will happen in the new elections for the Assembly. My suspicion is that Macron is hoping to throw some sops to the Republicans in the hopes of putting a working majority together. I do think people vote differently in European and domestic elections. I wouldn't exclude voting for the presidential majority in the latter, even though I voted for someone else in the former. There's also the fact that in France the European elections are an anomaly in being run over only one round. In a traditional French election, quite a lot of people will still put a clothes peg on their nose and vote for Anyone But The Fash in the second round.
My sister lives near Narbonne. She doesn't have a vote, but she is alarmed at the way things appear to be going, not only in France, but in Germany and the Netherlands. Our Family is pretty much united in being left-wing...
IIRC, the right wing has been on the ascendency in Germany for some time, and I think I've read somewhere that it's mainly in what used to be the communist Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), known generally in English as East Germany.
Open to correction on that...
Yes that's all true. Arguably that is nothing new - one fairly common historical observation (e.g. in the short popular history "The Shortest History of Germany") is that the Protestant north-east was the heartland of the Junker "blood and soil" anti-Slav nationalism whereas the Catholic south-west was rather less enamoured by such ideas.
This is trite; firstly, as in many places, EU elections in Germany have an element of the anti-systemic protest vote to them. Secondly, German reunification was over 30 years ago, and the rise of the AFD was a long time coming, and reflect the failure of the CDU and then the SPD to actually fix some of the economic woes that plague the region. The former-DDR has been hollowed out over a single generation, with industry disappearing or shifting eastwards, and very little to replace it. Large parts of it are like the North of England minus the service industries.
Yeah you might like to look into some of the interesting characters that have long floated around in CDU/CSU circles.
You mean the chronically unemployed will cast protest votes in EU elections, but not in their own national elections?
But, before being dragged out of the EU, turnout in the UK for European elections was significantly lower than turnout for General Elections. I suspect that that would be true elsewhere in Europe as well.
Any election with low turnout will over represent support for more extreme parties, who though having small numbers of supporters generally do well at getting them out. People with strong political views will vote at every election. Those without strong commitment to a particular party or cause are less likely to vote, but when they do are more likely to vote for the centre.
The indolent centrist majority are being represented by active extremists, against their best interests. The majority are therefore the Lumpenproletariat.
It's a bit hard to see because of the way it's displayed (bar graphs with no legend unless you hover over the bar), but you can see turnout for the 2024 elections here:
https://europeelects.eu/ep2024/
Although you then need to hunt down each national election on Wikipedia and follow the links to do the comparison.
Which is partly why von der Leyen is cosying up to Meloni, although I assume Macron now has his hands full so his plan to replace her with Mario Draghi may not get off the ground anyway.
von der Leyen's courting of Meloni predates the calling of the French election.
You may want to spell out what you mean, because both this and your previous post seem like non-sequiturs.
No. I think Von Der Leyen's concern was primarily her re-election and the continued influence of the EPP, and that this predated any concerns over Le Pen's influence - chronology alone shows that.
Far from 'pulling Meloni towards the centre' it's clear that the 'cordon sanitaire' can and will be breached if the far right party involved plays ball on foreign policy and adopts an emollient attitude towards finance (the primary concern of the Economist and the sense in which they define the 'centre').
Anyone who is in France or follows French politics - what is a good English language news source for in depth coverage of the snap parliamentary election? I get what news I can from the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, etc., but if there were English-language news outlet based in France I might be able to get more detail. So far all I can find is France 24, and that is mostly news clips rather than articles, and I prefer to get my news by reading or listening to podcasts rather than watching videos.
What sort of thing do you find still in the small print if you can bear to look through it?
1. The Socialist center left, Mélenchon-led populist left, Greens, and Communists have formed a New Popular Front in order to not be divided against Le Pen/Bardella's National Rally, like they did in the 2022 general election. In the EU election results weeks earlier though, the story on the left was that Raphaël Glücksmann had regained ground for the recently much-diminished Socialists after divisions had emerged between them and Mélenchon over Gaza and Ukraine. Now Glücksmann and former Socialist president François Hollande (now running for parliament) have thrown their weight behind the renewed alliance, which is likely be dominated by Mélenchon's La France Insoumise party. The New Popular Front is currently predicted to be the second force in Parliament after the National Rally (although neither is predicted to win a majority), but it is very hard to predict the election results because of the two-round system and tactical voting in the second round.
2. The center-right Gaullist Les Républicains, also much-diminished after the two-dominant-party system of Gaullists and Socialists was destroyed in 2017, is cracking after its leader Éric Ciotti suggested partnering with the National Rally, other leaders in his party tried to oust him, he locked himself in the party offices, and a court ruled that his attempted removal could not go through.
What looks likely to happen is that Macron's Ensemble coalition will see its seats in the National Assembly reduced from the largest group to third behind the National Rally and the New Popular Front. I've heard predictions that in a great majority of seats, the parties that advance to the second round will be the National Rally and whatever party is locally running for the New Popular Front, locking out Macron's Ensemble. For a long time centrists on the right and left would tactically vote in the second round against whoever was likely to defeat the Le Pen family's party of the day, but when that party is La France Insoumise or a party otherwise allied to Mélenchon, I'm worried that center-right voters might either stay home in the second round or even follow Ciotti's advice and start voting for the National Rally.
The story that seems to have happened in multiple European countries but now seems to be happening in an accelerated fashion in France is...
1. All other major parties form a cordon sanitaire against the far right.
2. It becomes impossible to maintain this cordon sanitaire without either Frankenstein coalitions of left and right or a centrist neoliberal/institutionalist leader that both coopts elites from both the former ruling parties of both left and right and then discredits those elites when voters on both sides start to detest the standard bearer of "anyone but the populists", usually an out-of-touch technocrat, as cost-of-living- and housing-crisis-fed discontent, inequality, and culture war tensions rise.
3. The center right either gives in and forms a coalition with the far right (which has happened at least once in all of Germanic Northern Europe except for Germany, at least at the Federal level) or is replaced by the far right (as has happened in Italy and seems to be happening in front of our eyes in France).
P.S. The National Rally and the National Front that preceded it have always been economically to the left of many of their far right buddies in other European Countries (a bit like the welfare chauvinist Law and Justice in Poland, but with French Republican language about a "social" economy and "solidarity." The Gaullists themselves also made a point of differentiating their policies from "Anglo-Saxon" laissez-faire policies, before starting to flirt with neoliberalism under Sarkozy.