French presidential election, 2022

[Хahar 🤔]

Can we get back to discussing the 2022 French presidential election? I don't care about any of these personal grievances.

[Хahar 🤔]

I don't know if this is actually relevant at all, but if we're going to bring up the politics of French Israelis then I have to mention the only French Israeli political party I know of, the pro-embezzlement Flatto-Sharon list.

[Хahar 🤔]

Thanks for the good summery. I have already noted in this thread, but it bears repeating I feel that a national top-two runoff system in the modern age - when the executive has any power rather than simply being a figurehead for the legislature of course - increasingly favors the personalization or "caudillo-ization" of politics. The first round vote becomes increasingly fragmented because there is no thresholds, limited barriers to running, and one can easily inform voters across the internet. Essentially duverger's in action. The fragmentation is however different from say the Dutch fragmentation that is resulting in multitudes of minor parties with pet issues. A single powerful seat for a single individual means that fragmentation multiplies the personalities, backgrounds, identities, who run - the things that can be represented by a person and not an ideological parliamentary party. We see this increasingly in countries across the world.

I mean look at the result. Both in 2017 and now we have most/all the major candidates effectively running with limited or irrelevant party apparatus. Now it is just more apparent since the parties that could once command almost every voter in France got a combined result under 10%. The setup for how legislative elections are contested simply means that the legislature becomes just as personalized and aligned with the executive's identity. This also is not unique to France. If Melenchon or Le Pen won last time or (could) win this time, the legislative results would no doubt be just as similar, just with a different cast of former nobodies. In my eyes, the only thing preventing France politics from fully personalizing is France's rich tradition of Ideological politics.

To the extent that a political system with a powerful president elected in two rounds would produce any particular partisan configuration, I would expect it to look a lot like Chile: a variety of parties and candidates, nearly all of whom are clearly identified either with the Left or with the Right. For a while this was the situation that prevailed in France, with the PCF and PS on one side and the UDF and RPR on the other.

That this is not the case in France now has a lot to do with France not having a "rich tradition of ideological politics" but in fact the exact opposite. In the late Third Republic, when every other rich Western democracy had a strong (perhaps too strong) culture of partisan politics, there were no real political parties to the right of the Marxist parties, only loosely defined groups of parliamentarians. Mass electoral politics in France has always been based basically around individuals. Under the present system, the PS was by, of, and for Mitterrand, the UDF was created by Giscard as an organization of his followers, and every successful Gaullist leader has created his own new political party. La République Emmanuel Macron is exactly the same. It's hard to think of anything more classically French.

[Хahar 🤔]

LR and PS are in meltdown, which may leave dozens of seats on the table for LREM, and no one has ever managed to make the losers' revenge thing work in the legislatives on the scale needed to deprive Macron of a majority under these conditions. Le Pen's core demographic is also not famous for flocking to the polls at low-turnout elections. Can we at least try not to get distracted by fantasies and shiny one-off poll results? The odds are on LREM's side here.

Crucial thing to remember here is that LR-UDI still won 130 seats last time and they're in absolute pieces now, as broken as the PS. That alone opens up a lot of room for EN MARCHE to carry on marching forwards, even if they lose ground elsewhere.

Considering that French politicians are known neither for ideological commitment or personal loyalty, there's a lot of room for local grandees from the two dead major parties to defect to Macron. Considering the remarkably low quality of the 2017 Macron legislative intake, it would be easy (and correct) for established politicians from both sides to conclude that their affiliation with a dead brand is the only thing keeping them from doing better.

Why is Brittany such a stronghold for Macron?

The past major presidential candidate whom Macron most closely resembles is Giscard, who was similarly strong in that part of the country. That observant Catholics were an extremely strong Macron demographic might shed some light on the sort of people likely to support him.

[Хahar 🤔]

So it looks like just like in America, ethnic minority voters are not as scared of voting for the far right as before (see: Trump gains with minorities).

a) Other than in New Caledonia (and the two white territories, where the vote in question would be unimportant), non-white voters in overseas territories would not have reason to regard themselves as ethnic minorities.
b) Overseas territories overwhelmingly cast their vote in the first round for the candidate of the left.
c) The choice offered in the second round was between a candidate of the right and a candidate of the far right, which would seem to limit its applicability to any other situations save those with a similar choice.

Not everything needs to be part of a world-historical narrative about whatever was read into the results of the last American election. Sometimes different things are different.

[Хahar 🤔]

Today was the day Emmanuel macron finally became president