French election 2024 live: exit poll shows shock win for left-green alliance as far right falls to third

"The good fight is the one you are losing" or no rest for the wicked as it where I guess

My hope is that Leftwing implements policies that undo large parts of the Money-is-King and Screw-You-Plebes Neoliberalism, thus removing at least part of the popular discontent and distrust (people feel poorer and yet the mainstream keeps telling them the Economy is Growing) that the Far-Right feeds on with their "the blame is those other people that are even worse of than you (not at all the super rich)" scapegoating.

Reduce the pain by making the State more supportive again and getting more "from those who can the most, to give to those who need the most" and you take the wind off the Far-Right's sails.

Thankfully some gerrymandered states are finally getting their maps in order. I really really hope we are in the timeline where Dems take the House, Senate, and Presidency.

A leftist hat trick would be amazing.

I see a lot of the nay sayers as a vocal minority. They yell the loudest, but only because the media gives them a platform to generate clicks. Just like how Republicans believe everyone in the nation, who doesn't worship satan, is pro-birth. Kansas, a deep red rural state proved otherwise with a vote to add abortion rights into their constitution a couple years ago, something their conservative supreme court just upheld.

Honestly, the recent ruling on the Kansas ballot initiative, which quite frankly surprised me to begin with, shows that in some places judges still do their job even when their personal beliefs may differ from the law they are entrusted with interpreting. Kansas voters, you showed us the way and stood out against the backdrop of "conservative status quo." Kansas showed, in the last two years, that when given a chance, even deep red states see the writing on the wall.

I have a feeling the outcome of this election is going to be a "silent storm" event and wake-up call to the GOP that they are out of touch with what the people really want. They've drank the loud-mouth's Kool-aid for far too long and won't believe it when it happens.

Think of it like the silent majority (maybe 80% of nationwide voters) is the massive tornado that took out the drive-in theater in the movie, Twister. In the movie, no one saw it until a random lightning strike shed light on the sheer girth of the monster bearing down on them. The GOP is the drive-in. The night of the election will be their lightning flash. We, the voters, will be the tornado.

This is The Guardian, a Liberal (not Left, Liberal) newspaper in Britain, a country whose only left of center (by European standards) party is the Green Party which has all of 4 seats out of 300 in Parliament now (and it used to be just 1, even though they had 1 million votes out of 40 million).

(Labour was once leftwing, before Blair's Third Way, and when recently it's members voted for it to go back to being Leftwing there was a massive smear campaign which included this very newspaper to bring down the leftie leader and put the neoliberals back in control of it).

From the point of view of the journalists, editors and board of The Guardian, even Social Democracy if "far left".

Britain is maybe the most "like America" (but not on the good things) country in Europe, with a very similar voting system (First Past The Post) and with and Overtoon Window far more shifted to the Right than almost any other country in Europe (basically the Tories are a posher version of Orban) and their Press is one of the least trusted in Europe, and that includes The Guardian.

Think of The Guardian as a British New York Times.

If you want to see coverage of the French elections that's not been twisted by a British hard-Neoliberal Private School Attending High Middle Class journalist in a newspaper that prides itself of being "opinion makers", try Le Monde.

I definitely wouldn't extrapolate anything about the rest of the world from this. I just remember "Le Pen is going to be the next president of France" being said more than once in my lifetime.

IMO it's largely a consequence of the center-left and center-right (Hollande, Macron) completely abandoning the working class, and demonizing the left whilst cozying up to the far-right (mostly Macron, though Hollande definitely slid right over his term).

A tale as old as time.

Thank you for giving more info, I appreciate it!

IMO it’s largely a consequence of the center-left and center-right (Hollande, Macron) completely abandoning the working class, and demonizing the left whilst cozying up to the far-right (mostly Macron, though Hollande definitely slid right over his term).

While i am no fan of Hollande and establishment socialism, I feel like he's really the butt of the joke here. Whatever we do, we always seem to punch left.

He was president for 5 years, yeah it was limp-dicked as fuck and it veered right in mid-course, but if you remember, he was basically elected on a platform of not being Sarkozy. The people were so KOed by his mandate that Hollande's whole angle was to be the "back to normal" president. And that's a promise he kind of kept, if you look at his time, sandwiched between two hyper-mediatic hard-right presidents, well yeah it felt like the kind of politics our parents talked about. Not great politics, just normal not-sadistic politics.

The far right is making a huge push around the world in recent years. Every time populations resist their influence is a giant win for humanity and the future.

I believe we have it in us but this Democratic Party is a finely oiled machine designed to blunt our progress, not lead it. Goddamn Biden said in the beginning that he wouldn’t seek reelection and he should have stuck to that. Now he’s in danger of actually losing to Shitstain L’Orange.

That's exciting, thanks for bringing it up!

Oh right I remember that! Thanks for reminding!

True i read about it some time ago. Mexico got(at least from what I heard) a very good president.

How fucking cool is it to have a woman IPCC scientist as your president?

Mexico is where around 40 candidates have been murdered recently?

Unfortunately true, but at least Poilievre is nowhere near as batshit crazy as the republicans are. Still fucking sucks that the cons are most likely going to win though. At best things will continue to get slowly worse like they already are, and at worst, things will degrade faster.

Either way the average Canadian isn't getting any help from whoever wins the next election.

Yup, and all they have to do is change leaders to win. There was that story last week about Biden thinking of stepping down, but Trudeau refuses to step down, if he, guilbaut, and freeland fucked off we could easily get another liberal government. So now we're going to a Conservative government.

As an European, I'm just happy that the cultural influence of the US has faded so much in the last couple of decades that even with massive amounts of American billionaire money trying to pump-up the Far-Right in Europe, it's still but a pale shade of what's going on in the US and, as we see, even that far-right wave seems to already be breaking: notice how already in the European Elections the Left grew in various Scandinavian countries (in my experience Northern European Countries, especially the Nordic ones, tend to be ahead of the rest of Europe in social and political terms).

There is hope on the horizon for Europe.

I am, however sad for Americans with leftwing principles, since even with a Biden victory the US will continue to be an ever more dystopic late-stage ultra-Neoliberal experiment bound for a Fascist takeover sooner or later (if not Trump now, some other Fascist will sooner or later ride the wave of misery - that the Democrates too, as hard Neoliberals, gleefully keep feeding - into the Presidence and ever more authoritarianism)

Not American but I agree. Fptp and gerrymandering is the biggest bullshit. But how will it change? Why would the two ruling parties shoot their own foot?

Yeah!!

100% agreed. Weirdly, Starmer was very left-leaning during his time as a prosecutor, and a lot of people assumed that he'd be a rising force of the left when he moved into politics. Sadly, he seems closer to the right than even Blair did...

Yeah, by European standards, I don't think New Labour are even just Center-Right: they have far too much love for "businesses", privatisation and deregulation to be an inch left of the traditional Right - in many ways they're pretty much were the Tories were back in Thatcher's day.

The far-right in Europe, with money from both Russia and American billionaires, has been ridding the wave of insatisfaction that's the side effect of the very problems created by Neoliberalism (which is now in its natural end stage were wealth is far more concentrated than ever since the early XX century and social mobility is pretty much non-existent, hence why most people feel poorer and hopeless) which itself was created with billionaire money pumped into Think Tanks and buying politicians mainly in America in the late 70s, early 80s.

As I see it, the best way for the Left to disarm the the Far-Right is to undo most of Neoliberalism - go back to higher levels of State support and State control of strategical assets, free Education, Progressive taxation with excessive wealth heavilly taxed, and so on - thus removing the very cause of the popular insatisfaction that the Far-Right feeds on using a litany of "blame everybody but the rich" excuses.

At least some of this actually seems to be what the NFP has announced it will do.

Now, Macron (and his party) being hard core neoliberals will fight this tooth and nail, as will the EU because most of the governments there are neoliberals and things like the ECB as as pure neoliberal as it gets, so for starters, they will most definitelly try to help the ultra-rich in France more evade tax even more than now.

The other problem is that part of the NFP is the old centrist "left" party (the Socialist Party, which has nothing at all to do with Socialism) who were part and parcel of the Neoliberalization of French politics (a typical corrupt as hell mainstream "centrist" European party of the last 2 decades) and eventually suffered massivelly at the polls for it. That said, the fear of being made even more irrelevant will probably put a break on their corrupt neoliberal tendencies.

The good news is that, if the French Left manages to overcome the forces in France that will be arrayed against any undoing of Neoliberalism, that country is big enough to pretty much ignore EU pressure.

Here's to hoping that "Left/Green" can tackle some of those issues.

Tell that to our centrists. They hate our left more than our right.

We don't really have a 'left' here, unfortunately.

Unfortunately our media are studiously not taking note.

Prior to these results, a few weeks back, NPR was trying to make it seem like the far-right and the "far left" were working together. It was the most bizarre, disjointed reporting I've heard in a while. They want people here to believe the center/left is extreme and uncompromising.

In America the centrists would rather have Trump than work together with the left. Though it's hard to call the Democratic party centrists anymore they are just slightly less right wing than Republicans.

Belgium being so quirky is why I love it so much.

I'll vote for a corpse over Trump, but if Biden doesn't step down I'd bet money we lose as much as it pains me to say it. No data supports a Biden reelection. And I've seen no promising path to altering the trends in the polls that are largely a result of an immutable, worsening vice: age.

You're right, I wrote that more like a German. /s

I would have gone with my epic Canadian cereal box French, but I think bad French is probably worse than no French.

We learned

Does a baguette pee Chardonnay?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/07/we-were-so-scared-frances-centre-and-leftwing-voters-breathe-sigh-of-relief

Hey hey - tomorrow. Right now we’re gonna fucking LOVE this.

Alright if there was a further left party that would take over for Joe Biden that would absolutely be the move.

The issue with Joe Biden dropping out is there's no one really to replace him other than Kamala. Conservatives don't want her because they're racists, leftists don't want her because she's a fucking cop.

This. Democracy isn't broken, FPTP is. Although, as the other comment says, this shows it still being functional in that party alignment substitutes for ranked choice by making it so that candidates the third party can tolerate get endorsed by a retiring third candidate. Less "broken", more "convoluted and ambiguous requiring custom to take over for the design flaws".

Actually he doesn't. That's what he should and kind of said he'll do, but he can shape the cabinet the way he wants. But he's no Trump so I dont think he will outrageously abuse this powers. I would'nt be surprised tho if decides to name a prime minister from his own party and offer some "key" ministy to the left, claiming the country is too divided to be managed by what he calls extreme parties. Or put in place some kind of technical government. Anyway you can't really trust him.

I know how gerrymandering works in USA's system - the last two far-right Presidents were elected despite the center-right candidate getting more votes. But the margins were tighter in those contests - a few percentage points not double digits. I'm curious about the peculiarities of the French system that lead to such an apparently wide gap between votes versus representation.

I'm not French, but it seems to be because they're anti-zionist with a Muslim immigrant constituency and the center and the right like to use that as a political lever. That's why I said "something something." I have yet to see anything with substance but I obviously can't go digging either.

An example I saw was the party leader was accused of being antisemitic because he said the finance minister was in the pocket of international banking. He later clarified he had no idea the guy was even Jewish, just that he was a centrist finance minister that he thought was in the pocket of international banking.

Then when the media reports on this as antisemitism and they complain that the media is biased against them they're supposedly using the trope that the Jews control the media. In actuality it's the capitalists that control the media and they're more than happy to do a hit job on the left.

Immigration is always "an issue" regardless of what your political position is*, but only in the sense that the government should have a policy about it. The policy can be to build infrastructure in advance and create opportunities that benefit both immigrant communities and non-immigrants, or it can be to police the borders more like you're holding back rising sea levels. Not responding in any way leads to instability and "crisis" (or more often, the opposition manufacturers the feeling of crisis).

*except for anarchism

1% per year is huge. By the time someone is born and get into the workforce and look at buying a house the population has gone up ~25%.

Yea immigration is an issue depending on how you see it. If you want to keep wages down and house prices up it's good.

If you concerned about increasing wages, having a house, your culture, low crime, less government spending then certain immigration is really bad. People against immigration aren't usually against a doctor coming from a closely alined friendly country. People against immigration is against how it has become an issue, not immigration in general. People want a say on the matter.

But the stats on immigration. Not just the feels as portrayed by a lot of people on the left show there are significant issues with crime and how it impacts working class people, never mind culture changing drastically. But this isn't immigration as a whole, this is some immigration.

But for a lot of people, even talking about it immediately makes you a Nazi. So people vote for people that don't treat them like shit for wanting to keep the way of life as is rather than selling out everything in the life for the gain of businesses and the upper class at the expense of themselves.

People don't want a far right government. The fact they are willing to vote for one just shows how much of the population do care about immigration and feel like they need to vote for the far right because there is no one else.

Countries where the left have hardened up their immigration views has caused a dramatic decrease in votes for the far right.

Keep banging on the walls of Fortress Europe!

There are many ways to address immigration. And not all of them consist on not letting people in.

You can take in consideration what the average person thinks about immigrants and fix that:

• Immigrants are stealing our jobs.
• Immigrants are criminals.

I'm gonna try and think outside the box instead of the normal "it's poverty that makes them criminals! They need better social support" which is probably true, but won't convince the far right voters to vote for you.

The first one is the easiest to solve of the two. Since in most western countries, immigrants coming to work is actually good for the economy, since the native population has a declining birth rate and is aging, so they need working people that don't come from births (immigrants). But you can still:

• Enforce that employers pay the minimum wage
• Have a higher minimum wage for immigrants, so employers only hire them if they're actually better than the natives (or there are no natives applying for the job). And while we're at it, raise the minimum wage for everyone.
• Only allow immigrants without a special visa to work in certain sectors (for example those that native people don't want to do).

I know 2/3 of those treat immigrants as "lower" people, but it's still better than illegal immigration or don't letting them in.

For the second one, the main problem is that 1st generation immigrants are not the issue, but their children are. Because their children were born in that country so most of the time they're citizens and you can't just deport them like 1st generation. The only way I can think of to fix this is don't give them citizenship until they've passed an actually hard exam that shows they've integrated into the culture, and have a clean record. They would be "2nd class citizens" at that point. 2nd class and normal citizens are legally the exact same, with only one difference. If a 2nd class has children after having committed a crime, their children are also 2nd class. If they have a clean record, it is assumed that they have integrated in the local culture and their children are born as normal citizens.

These ideas probably have a thousand things i didn't consider, but I believe they're better than not letting immigrants in.

This, and also the far right sells the idea that the nation is actually great and rich but the immigrants cause all the poverty and the poverty will go away if the immigrants are expelled