#far right won the European election

[resuri-art]

I hate this fucking country

[itwoodbeprefect]

voting has concluded everywhere!! the results embargo has been lifted!! and i won't lie it's not Great (on some national levels it Sucks) but oh boy. it's not hopelessly terrible either, so i'll take it

i did my duty as a european citizen (went on a scavenger hunt to find the voting place which they moved from a nearly impossible to miss spot at the outer edge of a huge outdoor sport complex to a little building all the way at the back end of the complex which, near as i could tell while cycling winding deserted little roads that direction, is not accessible without navigating through a barely-signaged maze)!

[owlingroof]

Macron, hope you die

After the far-right won the european elections, this guy dissolved half of Parliament to "let the people decide who they wanted" and when the left-wing coalition won the legislatives he put off taking a prime minister for 2 MONTHS only to name a right-wing dude no-one wanted at the post because he hates leftists so much

Macron is killing french democracy with his bare hands

[mariacallous]

A far-right party founded by former Nazis whose leader has adopted a moniker used by Adolf Hitler won in Austria’s national elections on Sunday.

The showing by the Freedom Party, known by the acronym FPO, is unprecedented there since the end of World War II and adds to a wave of support for far-right parties across Europe.

FPO took 29% of the vote on Sunday, twice its tally from the last election in 2017, according to early results. The center-right party that currently leads the government came in second, with center-left and left-wing parties posting historically poor results.

Whether the FPO is actually able to form a government remains to be seen. Leaders of the other parties have sworn not to enter a coalition with its leader, Herbert Kickl, who has said he wants to be seen as “Volkskanzler,” a term meaning “people’s chancellor” that Hitler used to describe himself. FPO was founded in the 1950s by former members of the Nazi SS paramilitary group.

Just before the election, top-ranking FPO leaders attended the funeral of a longtime party politician, Walter Sucher, where attendees sang a song popularized by the Nazis that praises the “holy German Reich.” Sucher, who was 90 when he died, himself drew criticism two decades ago when, as a party representative, he saluted a meeting with the word “heil,” which is largely associated with Hitler.

In the lead-up to the election, the Austrian Jewish Students Union protested against FPO, saying that the group’s rise augured danger for Jews and others in the country.

“As young Jews, we often confront the tragic question of who would have hidden us during the Nazi era,” Alon Ishay, the group’s president, said in a statement shared by the European Jewish Congress. “The FPÖ leader’s response is brief and chilling: Herbert Kickl would have deported us.”

The wave of far-right successes across Europe are driven largely by rising anti-immigrant sentiment and discontent with the governing parties; the parties are typically fiercely nationalist and, in many cases, pro-Russia. A far-right politician, Geert Wilders, won the Netherlands’ national election in December, not long after a politician once photographed wearing a Nazi armband won Italy’s election. The far right in France posted stronger-than-expected results in the country’s surprise elections this summer. And earlier this month, a far-right party won a state election in Germany for the first time since World War II.

[qqueenofhades]

Man, the Russia/Ukraine war has led to a lot of terrible takes from far leftists. I have a mutual from Brazil, a self identified socialist, who is convinced that Ukraine is full of nazis. While they don't support Russia, they questioned why they have to be "pro-Ukraine" or "pro-Russia". They call Ukraine a "nazi hole" but call Russia merely "fascist". Am I wrong in thinking that they've been influenced by Russian propaganda? I know Ukraine does have a nazi/far right problem, but so does the US? And most European countries? idk they strongly hate the US/US government too, and it seems to create some kind of brainrot. at least they don't blindly support China or Russia like tankies do (nor identify with them), but it's still frustrating to take a neutral position on a pretty black and white situation.

I don't want to confront them 1) cause I'm not the type to argue over serious things like this and this may break our long friendship and 2) I'm not super educated on the nazi situation in Ukraine.

Anyway thank you for letting me rant in your inbox.

Yes, Russia has specifically focused its propaganda efforts on Latin America, Africa, and other regions that HAVE suffered from Western/European/American imperialism and are thus predisposed to take the worst view of them/believe that this situation is their fault somehow. This is similar to what the USSR did in newly postcolonial Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, positing themselves as offering the shared hand of communist brotherhood from Western oppressors. Because of more recent events like the invasion of Iraq, which was fully as unjustified as the invasion of Ukraine, Russian propagandists and their eager tankie/leftist foot soldiers have also got a lot of mileage out of "whataboutism." This is likewise an old Soviet propaganda technique designed to deflect any criticism of the actual situation by disingenuously asking "what about this other one!!!"

Likewise, the idea that Ukraine has a "Nazi problem" is itself propaganda. In the last election, far-right/Nazi-identified parties won barely 2% of the vote and AFAIK, no seats at all in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament). This is far lower than the nearly half of the USA voting for the far-right/Nazi-sympathetic Republican Party, and as noted, the far right elements in the UK and Europe. The idea that Ukraine is "full of Nazis" (with a Jewish president who just celebrated iftar with the Ukrainian Muslims/Crimean Tatars during Ramadan and instituted observance of Muslim holidays nationwide, very Nazi of him) is a line used by Russian propagandists to "justify" their attack and appeal to national memories of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) and the struggle against the Nazis, which is the central cultural grievance/memory in modern Russia. The Putin regime has referred to anyone they don't like, but especially the Ukrainians, as "Nazis" for a long time now, so it's supposedly their holy duty to kill them/commit ethnic cleansing/forcibly reunite the "fraternal" people of "Little Russia," as Ukraine has been called since the 17th century, with "Great Russia." And yeah, no.

Because the West and Europe has been pretty solidly on Ukraine's side, Russia has therefore cultivated countries like China, India, Brazil, etc, who have all suffered from Western interference and are looking to move into the first rank of global superpowers. This is, as noted, similar to the competing systems of influence built during the Cold War, but it also relies on much deeper Russian grievances that go back to the medieval era. Anybody who knows a thing about actual Russian history would therefore know that every single word it says about the Ukraine situation is a lie, but because that lie is useful for many other countries and fits into their own understanding of themselves, it is easy to repeat and act like it's a so-called superior moral position. This is also why US/American tankies so eagerly lap up Russian propaganda, because it plays into their moral sense of themselves as far better than the rest of the West and "righteously" discovering that the West is responsible for all the evil in the world etc etc. While non-Westerners are just helpless misunderstood puppets with no real agency or ability to make complex choices. This totally makes sense!!!

[yannig]

So the French legislative elections went better than expected

Which is great because I'd rather not live in a country governed by the nationalist far right.

How did we go from the far right winning the European elections less than 2 months ago to the left being the first force in the Lower Room?

I want to insist that this is a much better result than expected. We did not go in expecting to win.

Well, firstly, a long-awaited alliance of the different leftist parties.

But also and mostly: people voted.

The rate of abstention was really high for the Europeans, and the far right won.

The rate of abstention was historically low for the Legislative, and the left won.

Historically as in, hadn't been that low since 1981. In 1981, France elected it's first leftist President in decades.

Conclusion: GO VOTE

The take over of the nationalist far right isn't inevitable. We can fight back and win.

[water-weaving]

i just think it's useless to debate and guilt-trip Tumblr Users, On Tumblr, about the american elections. i understand the fear of trump winning the election, and generally i think if applicable you should vote against him, but like. this is tumblr. 70% the people who rightfully complain and make light-hearted satire and jokes about how sanctimonious and insufferable and unhinged you sound are, like, 1) not usamericans and 2) more politically savvy than you. go bother your republican uncle instead, that's where your fight is! or else the next time you start talking about kamala harris at me i'll talk you down and bully and order you to vote for jean-luc mélenchon in the fall and then accuse you of being the reason the far-right won the european elections. okay. let's have a little bit of strategy skills around here I Beg Of You

[silver-and-stars]

I kinda wanted to reblog about the 14th of july (French National Day) but somehow this year it doesn't feel right.

The far right got elected for the european election so the president desolved the National Assembly in hope to reform it with his party.

Consequently we almost got the far right winning but managed to save ourselves by electing the left and now the president is like "hmm no the left didn't really win, that doesn't count since it's not my party that won" and there is so little we can do.

So yeah we used democracy to save ourselves in extremis from the fachists but now the president, supposed to embody the democracy (freedom, equality, fraternity), is kinda denying the win.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Tim Ganser at The UnPopulist:

Since the end of World War II, Germans had by and large steadfastly resisted voting for far-right populists. That norm was shattered in the last decade by the success of the political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which seemed to gain more traction as it radicalized into a full-blown, hard right populist party. A year into its existence, spurred by widespread discontent with German fiscal policy, the AfD won seven seats in European Parliament. In 2017, after undergoing a hard-right turn, it won 94 seats in the German federal elections, good for third place overall. For the past year, the AfD has consistently ranked second in Politico’s poll aggregator tracking the public’s voting intentions.

In this Sunday’s European Parliament elections, roughly 1 in 6 German voters is expected to cast a ballot for the AfD, whose members have trivialized the Holocaust, encouraged their followers to chant Nazi slogans, and participated in a secret conference where they fantasized about forced deportations of naturalized citizens they derisively call “Passport Germans.” Worse still, the AfD is predicted to be the strongest party, with up to a third of the vote share, in the three elections for state parliament in Saxony and Thuringia on Sept. 1 and in Brandenburg on Sept. 22. And in generic polls for a hypothetical federal election, the AfD fares even better than it did in any previous election. How did Germany get to this point?

The AfD’s Origin Story

The AfD was founded in early 2013 by a group of conservatives, led by the economics professor, Bernd Lucke, greatly disillusioned with then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fiscal policy. In their view, the European debt crisis had revealed deep instability within the eurozone project as smaller nations found themselves unable to cope with the economic demands of membership, and they believed Merkel’s focus on saving the euro was coming at the expense of German economic interests. This was, however, the opposite of a populist complaint—in fact, the AfD was initially referred to as a “Professorenpartei” (a professor’s party) because of the party’s early support from various economics professors who were more interested in fiscal policy than catering to popular will. In its earliest days, the AfD could best be characterized as a cranky but respectable party of fiscal hardliners. Its anti-establishment posture stemmed entirely from its belief in the necessity of austerity. Even its name could be construed less as nationalistic and more an answer to the dictum coined by Merkel—“alternativlose Politik” (policy for which there is no alternative)—to defend her bailouts during the eurozone crisis.

Although the AfD had launched an abstract economic critique of Merkel’s policies that could be hard to parse for non-experts, its contrarian stance resonated with a significant portion of Germans. Right out of the gate, the AfD obtained the highest vote share of any new party since 1953, nearly clearing the 5% threshold for inclusion in the Bundestag, Germany’s Parliament, in its first electoral go round. Its success was also measurable in terms of membership, passing the 10,000 mark almost immediately after its formation. The rapid increase in membership, however, helped lay the groundwork for its turn toward right-wing populism. Perhaps due to pure negligence—or a combination of calculation and ambition—the party’s founders did little to stop right-wing populists from swelling its rolls. And as the German economy emerged through the European debt crisis in good financial shape, fiscal conservatism naturally faded from the public’s consciousness. However, a new European crisis having to do with migrants came to dominate the popular imagination. The AfD hardliners seized on the growing anti-migrant opinion, positioning the AfD as its champion, thereby cementing the party’s turn towards culture war issues like immigration and national identity.

Starting in late 2014, organized right-wing protesters took to the streets to loudly rail against Germany’s decision to admit Muslim migrants, many fleeing the Syrian civil war. The AfD right wing’s desire to become the political home of nativism led to a rift within the party that culminated in founder Bernd Lucke’s being ousted as leader in 2015, and his replacement with hardliner Frauke Petry. Lucke left the party entirely, citing its right-wing shift, following in the footsteps of what other party leaders had already done and more would do in the coming year. Up until this point, the AfD unwittingly helped the cause of right-wing populism. If the reactionary far-right had tried to start a party from scratch, it would have likely failed. The AfD, after all, was created within a respectable mold, trading on the credentials of its earliest founders and leaders. But with saner voices now pushed out, right-wing populists had the party with public respectability and an established name all to themselves. And they deliberately turned it into a Trojan horse for reactionary leaders who wanted to “fight the system from within.

[...]

A New Normal in Germany

As right-wing populist positions have become part of the political discourse, Germany is now in the exact same position as some of its European neighbors with established hardline populist parties. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni ascended to the premiership in October 2022 as the head of her neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party, which is poised to perform well in the upcoming European Parliament elections. In France, the Marine Le Pen-led far-right Rassemblement National (RN) is set to bag a third of votes in those elections, roughly double what President Macron’s governing coalition is expected to obtain.

What makes the situation in Germany especially worrisome is that, unlike in France and Italy, far-right parties had failed to garner any meaningful vote share in nationwide elections until just seven years ago; indeed, until the 2017 federal election, there had never been a right-wing populist party that had received more than six percent of the national vote in Germany. The nation’s special vigilance toward far right ethnonationalism in light of its history of Nazi atrocities was expected to spare Germany the resurgence of far-right populism. But it actually led to complacency among mainstream parties. By 2017, the AfD—already in its right-wing populist phase—received nearly 13% of the vote in the federal election to become the third-strongest parliamentary entity. And by then it had also made inroads in all state parliaments as well as the European Parliament. The norm against it was officially gone.

To be sure, the AfD is not on track to take over German politics. It currently has the fifth most seats among all German parties in the Bundestag, fourth most seats among German parties in the European Parliament, and is a distant eighth in party membership. Nor is it currently a threat to dominate European politics—late last month, the AfD was ousted from the Marine Le Pen-led Identity and Democracy (ID) party coalition, the most right-wing group in the European Parliament. Le Pen, herself a far-right radical, explained the AfD’s expulsion by describing the party as “clearly controlled by radical groups.” But none of the above offer good grounds for thinking the AfD will be relegated to the fringes of German or European politics.

After the election, the AfD could rejoin ID, or it could form a new, even more radical right-wing presence within the European Parliament. Some fear that the AfD could potentially join forces with Bulgaria’s ultranationalist Vazrazhdane. Its leader, Kostadin Kostadinov, said that AfD’s expulsion from ID could create an opening to form “a real conservative and sovereigntist group in the European Parliament.” Also, ID’s removal of the AfD wasn’t due to its stated policy platform being out of step with Europe’s right-wing populist project. Rather, it was because the AfD’s leading candidate, Maximillian Krah, was implicated in a corruption and spying scandal involving China and Russia, and because he said he would not automatically construe a member of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) to be a criminal. Absent these entirely preventable missteps, the AfD would be in good standing with right-wing populist partners in Europe.

Seeing far-right Nazi-esque Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) rise in prominence in Germany is a sad sight.

[racewinner]

ok, tom's last insta story is the last straw that confirms i haven't been misinterpreting all the things that were red flags to me before. he didn't say a thing after the european elections when the far right won in france, and now that the left has very surprisingly won the legislatives when the far right was supposed to be sweeping it, the ONLY thing he comments on is a very sarcastic congratulations to the country for having elected a far left deputy? this pretty much confirms what i have been suspecting for a while now, that that man is at best a right winger, if not a down right far right one

[vivelegalite]

currently in line at my town hall to deliver results of the european election. it's horrifying. all i can feel is utter dread. i'm in the know right now — i can only imagine what the people in front of their tvs are feeling.

europe took a far right turn. fascists used to have no seats in poland, now they're prognosed to gain six. they won in france by a landslide. the left lost so many fucking seats in the parliament.

according to polls, voter turnout at an all time low, in the thirties, maybe forties. people don't see the point, but fascists do.

cold sweat and dread.

[lorienn-art]

Hi

You might have seen what's been happening in France after the results of the European elections. Far right widely won those elections and our president Emmanuel Macron decided to therefore dissolve the Assembly, taking thus the huge risk of creating a far right government in less than a month.

I know you people don't follow me for politics but after all of this, I just cannot stay silent. I will not let my country become a fascist state without doing anything.

If you feel targetted and/or uncomfortable by this post, then that means you don't belong on my page. I won't stand fascists in my community.

To anyone already living under a fascist regime, I'm sending you all my strenght and all my support. Seeing all the people in France protesting ever since the results came out and calling for a union of left-wing parties for the now upcoming legislative elections has warmed my heart. The fight will never be over! We can do this together!

A mes camarades français, si vous êtes antifascistes et que vous croyez aux idéaux de gauche, qu'importe de quelle gauche vous êtes, ALLEZ VOTER LE 30 JUIN ET LE 7 JUILLET ! Soutenez l'union des partis et ne laissez pas les fachos gagner !!

SIAMO TUTTI ANTIFASCISTI NO PASARAN PLUS JAMAIS ÇA A GOOD FASCIST IS A DEAD ONE

[itsetoileerrante]

For my non-French followers: what’s happening in France is so fucked up.

Previously: the European elections were organized all over European countries that are part of the EU. In France, the results were terrifying: the far-right party (which was co-created by a Waffen SS, yes it was co-created by a literal Nazi and Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father) arrived first.

Then Macron decided to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale (our parliament) because…well he said a lot of explanations that don’t mean anything but really we all know his ego got bruised and that’s why he went and push France into a political chaos.

We were super scared because the far-right party was very high in the polls. The mainstream medias kept pushing the far-right candidates. (And they are keeping at it and it’s so so scary to have a party full of racist homophobic sexist people to be treated as if they were just like any other politicians).

Against all odds, the left parties decided to unite and presented their candidate under a union called the Nouveau Front Populaire. And we won: not by far but we won.

And then Macron: his political party arrived 3rd in number of elected members of parliament but he refused the results. Basically, as planned in our country, the prime minister presented his resignation. But Macron decided that noooope let’s not respect the vote of the French citizens and refused the resignation.

What happened today

Today, the members of parliament voted for the president of the Assemblée nationale. And who was elected? The previous president of the Assemblée : Yael Braun-Pivet. She is from Macron’s party so basically not at all the majority because they fucking lost the elections. (Also she is a terrible person who are a support of the massacres perpetrated by Israel in Palestine).

How did she got elected? Well. 17 ministers who got re-elected members of parliament voted. EVEN THOUGH our constitution says that they are not allowed to vote if they are part of the government. And the difference in the numbers of vote between her and the left parties’ candidates is 14 votes. 17 ministers, 14 votes.

It’s a dangerous time for France and a lot is happening. And we are going in a very very scary place.

All my support for my fellow French people, but especially non-white people and Muslims.

[mariacallous]

Europe’s center of political gravity is veering to the right.

Center-right and far-right parties are set to take the largest number of seats in Sunday’s European Union election in the most populous nations: Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland.

France led the rightward lurch with such a crushing victory for the far-right National Rally that liberal President Emmanuel Macron dissolved France’s parliament and called an early election. Early results suggested the National Rally would win some 32 percent of the vote, more than twice that of the president’s party.

“The president of the Republic cannot remain deaf to the message sent this evening by the people of France,” National Rally’s President Jordan Bardella told his supporters at the Parc Floral in Paris.

In Germany, the center-right is cruising to a comfortable victory, with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) coming second and beating Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Socialists into third place.

Voters across 27 nations have voted over the past week to select 720 members of the European Parliament, who will serve over the next five years. Their first main role with be to approve or reject the main candidate for Europe’s top job: president of the European Commission.

In a Continent that has sought to exorcise the ghosts of fascism for eight decades, the scale of the presence of far-right will be one of the hottest topics of conversation.

Even though they are highly unlikely to be able to coordinate as a unified group inside the European Parliament — thanks to divisions on topics such as Russia — they will still be able to influence the overall direction of the EU, on everything from immigration to climate policies.   

Collected together, the radical right parties would theoretically represent the second biggest bloc in the Parliament — being on track to come first in France and Italy, and second in Germany, the three biggest and most important countries in the 27-nation bloc. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing party secured the most support, projected to be about 28 percent.

The far-right is also expected to win in Hungary, and picked up five more seats in the Netherlands. The center-right was comfortably first in Greece and Bulgaria.

The single most ominous warning signal for the future of the EU is France, given the scale of the far right’s win over Macron. All eyes will now be on whether France’s populist wave can maintain its momentum through the impending parliamentary elections and on to presidential elections in 2027 — where a victory for far-right leader Marine Le Pen would threaten to throw the whole EU into turmoil.

The official winner of the evening looks set to be European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen whose center-right European People’s Party will still make up the single-biggest bloc in Parliament. 

With early projections showing the EPP will secure about 181 out of the 720 seats in Parliament, the center right will be the dominant force but can hardly govern alone as it will be miles from an absolute majority in the chamber.

The main challenge for von der Leyen in the coming days and weeks will be whether she can strike a deal with the traditional centrist parties — the socialists and liberals — to build a majority of 361 or more in the Parliament.

“Today is a good day for [the] EPP. We won the European elections, my friends. We are the strongest party, we are the anchor of stability … Together with others we will build a bastion against the extremes from the left and from the right. We will stop them!”

Her supporters replied with chants of “Five more years.”

In all, the three big center groups look set to have just over 400 seats. That means von der Leyen’s reapproval will go down to the wire, because she will be rejected if only about 10 percent of lawmakers from the main parties rebel against their party lines. The rebellion rate is normally higher.

This raises a big question of whether she will need to fish around for other allies, ranging from the Greens to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing Brothers of Italy.

Von der Leyen’s center-right is quick to reject the xenophobia and euroskepticism of the far right, but it knows its voters share the same concerns on the cost of living, migration and a sense that Europe’s traditional core businesses — manufacturing and farming — are being strangled by green regulation.

Staking out its ground in the culture war over the EU’s identity, the EPP opened its EU election manifesto with its commitment to Europe’s “Judeo-Christian roots.”

[sanicsmut]

Not a good day for french politics. Far right (with a program openly anti LGBT+ and racist) won the European elections and our president is dissolving (don't know if it's the same verb in English) the national assembly (or whatever its called in English)

[yougottabetheguy]

So French politics is a total mess right now.

But we need a tiny bit of backstory to fully understand why.

In 1944, France took back its' territories from invading armies. The 4th Republic was declared when De Gaulle stepped down as commander-in-chief-in-exile.

The 4th Republic tried to be parliamentary, but also incentivised coalitions, which constantly broke down. So there were massive political instabilities which came to a head in the Algerian war of independence in 1958. French soldiers, living in Algeria, threatened to invade the mainland if the head of government didn't give up peace talks with the Algerian rebels. So De Gaulle, the man who brought freedom back to France and fended off American imperialism post-WWII, was called on to solve the crisis.

He decided to form a new semi-presidential republic, that wouldn't be bogged down by giving excessive power to the elected assembly.

The President is directly elected for 5 years, and so is the lower house (Assembly). To be eligible to be president, you must have the support of at least 500 mayors or regional councillors over the entire country. (Yes, that does mean that the French people are asked to vote at least 5 times every 5 years: mayoral, regional, legislative (lower house), presidential, and European). The upper house, the Senate, is voted in indirectly by all representatives (mayors, councillors, Assembly members).

Phew.

But also, the Assembly can overturn the Presidency by a simple majority vote. And the President can, at any time, dissolve the Assembly.

This means, that since the legislative and presidential elections are very close to each other, that the presidential party/coalition has always had a majority in the Assembly, except for a few occasions. (I think Mitterrand didn't have one)

It's a presidential republic because the President has strong executive power, and can pass executive bills without the Assembly's approval: so called Article 49§3. Article 49§3 is meant to break parliamentary deadlock on critical issues, like national budgets, by forcing the Assembly to take action. The Assembly can overturn the President and block the bill by simple majority of registered Assembly members, not just those who turn up to the vote. So it is a political gamble. Mr Macron has used this to bully his party in the past: "Vote for my controversial retirement pension reform or vote me out and lose your seat."

But also, Mr Macron is a scheming, conniving bastard. He used the rise of the far right to his political gain: in 2017, he presented himself as a centrist. He was young, smart, an economist, hot, and had a wife with intrigue (they met when she was his French teacher in high school). And he won out against the far right. His party was founded in 2015, so no-one knew what to do with him.

But then, over the years, we slowly realised that he was financially liberal, socially centrist, and morally bankrupt. He was accused of putting his friends in power and generally being money grubbing. But his international appeal was pretty good.

So then he won again in 2022: hoping that the left wouldn't form a coalition (they did), that he could hold down the centre parties (he couldn't), and the far right wouldn't become larger (it did). But he still managed to get a slim majority. Thus heavy use of 49§3 to align his party.

All in all, the left were/are furious. Twice now, they did the political good deed of voting for the candidate they didn't really like to block the one they hate from getting in. So tensions were high.

Now in 2024, the far right win big in the European Elections. They get a sizeable share of french votes (mostly from low turnout by other parties). Macron decides to dissolve the Assembly 2 (?) days later.

Huh?? Why?? What?? Tf do we do now??

So now we have a legislative election in a month that no one saw coming. Everyone scrambles. The left form a coalition in 2 weeks, their manifesto cobbled together by sleepless nights. The right, once composed of 2-3 parties, has split, the vast majority of the traditional right now have joined the far right. The centre is gutted, save for Macron's party, who's effectively subsumed their voter demographic.

The legislative elections have a 2 round system: everyone votes for who they actually want in round 1 and settles in round 2.

It's chaos.

After round one, the left have a 30% hold on the country, the centre have 20%, and the far right have 35%.

Everyone realises that the far right have a real chance at winning a majority. Le Pen pushes her electorate as hard as she can: she doesn't just want to be the biggest party and get to form the government, she wants a majority and overturn the President.

The left choose to pull out of places that they aren't going to win to avoid diluting the vote. Days before the 2nd round, Macron has said nothing similar. A few days before, his message is simple: "We're not going to do anything. We won't pull out of races we might not win." It's a kick in the teeth for the left.

The end of the second round looks like this:

Purple is the left coalition, yellow is Macron, blue is traditional right, brown is far right.

With 182 seats, the left have the most, and should form the next government. Not by law, but by convention.

Macron has 168 seats, the far right have 143.

The majority is 289 seats. No one is close, but a coalition would work.

Unfortunately, that's a problem: since no government in the past 60 years has had to form a coalition, no one knows how, and aren't amenable to it in the first place.

But the left are ecstatic. They struggled so hard to unite, they defied all odds to challenge Macron, and now they have the institutional (but not legal) right to name a Prime Minister (head of the lower house).

This all happened before the Olympics. So Macron declares that there must be political unity during the Olympics. So everyone agrees and keeps quiet for a while.

Side note, Mr Macron has called himself the "God of Time" in private meetings, since he believes that he can dictate when things happen, putting off decisions and important meeting by leveraging the might of french bureaucracy at them. But that kind of tactic wears thin very quickly.

After the Olympics, and the fiasco that was, politics can start again. The left, after an awful lot of arguing and trial and error, name Lucie Castets as Prime Minister. She's smart, female, and merely socialist (as opposed to communist). The far right immediately oppose her, declaring that they would vote to overturn her as soon as she is sworn in. "Blah blah blah not strong not good too extreme".

So they try again. And again. Until Macron, who is the person who swears in the Prime Minister, invites potential candidates from different parties to his office. So now, somehow, Macron, who didn't win the majority of seats, is choosing the PM. He invites Hollande, Sarkozy, Mélenchon, Duflot, Cazeneuve, Bertrand, Castets to try and find a leader who might not be immediately overturned.

The left insist that any extreme right candidate will be overturned. The far right insist that any candidate with an inkling of leftism will be overturned. Macron's party stays quiet.

So we arrive at today: Michel Barnier is our new PM. He's right wing. He voted against decriminalising gays in the 80s.

His inauguration speech had catchphrases like: "Access to public services, security in daily life, and immigration control". He promises to establish a "German-style" cabinet, made up of ministers from all parties. But we'll see how that goes.

So...yeah...I love how the left got the most seats of all parties and is now completely out of government.

Macron _could_ have formed a left alliance and chosen to uphold french dignity. He _could_ have chosen an ex-centrist PM. He _could_ have chosen compromise, but instead bent the knee to the right because they're more vocal.

Maybe I'll update this as time goes by. Maybe I'll be too depressed to do so.