The French

Zemmour doing a pretty bad job of splitting the fash vote

French Millennials vote Marine Le Pen?"Class-party polarization is higher among Millennials than older generations.Professional class kids are more left wing & working class kids are more right wing than their parents"-@policytensor https://t.co/0d5dcE7W9Chttps://t.co/WqCMx2PQLO

— Albert Pinto (@70sBachchan) April 8, 2022

see if you can find when Macron announced he was going to raise the retirement age https://t.co/sJyiezKPJ9 pic.twitter.com/bz3MUpZiPh

— accidental larouchite (@lib_crusher) April 8, 2022

New Ipsos projection:

Macron: 27.6%
Le Pen: 23.0%
Mélenchon: 22.2%
Zemmour: 7.2%
Pécresse: 4.8%
Jadot: 4.7%

Only 0.8pt between Le Pen and Mélenchon. That's the vote share of minnow candidate Poutou. We were so, so close to an evening with a completely different narrative.

— Leonardo Carella 🇺🇦 (@leonardocarella) April 10, 2022

One exit poll has it 28.1 | 23.3 | 20.1

Oh it's the same Ipsos projection but older - so Melenchon's gained a little in the last three hours huh. Throw him in the run off too, what's the worst that can happen...

Macron should win but the problem of a quarter of French ppl voting for the sewer remains. As with a lot of politics in the UK/US/elsewhere it's where this all ends. En Marche won't go beyond Macron and climate's impacts on borders will only increase.

Macron calls to vote against Marine Le Pen. But his whole strategy over the last 2 years was to legitimate all the topics of the extreme right and hoping for a second round against her. The result of his strategy is that she is totally normalized and could now win.

— Daniel Zamora Vargas (@DanielZamoraV) April 10, 2022

OTM

Trying to use the far right to leverage themselves into power is what all French leaders have done for decades though, on the left and on the right. Mitterrand did it to try and split the right vote, Sarkozy sucked up to the far right to get elected etc etc

Muttering to myself “le wokisme”

Still uncomfortable but a little bit better.

One poll was circulating the other day showing Le Pen doing well in the subsample of youngest French people, but that’s absolutely not what today’s exit poll found. She was a distant third among voters under 25, with the left candidate well ahead. She led among middle-age folks. https://t.co/66kLqWPkvZ

— Taniel (@Taniel) April 11, 2022

Is there any good writing on the French election?

Haven't seen any, just the usual liberal-style vomit.

This is pretty good.

https://www.ft.com/content/5bd5e791-9561-42a0-ac8c-f5bdeeb81309?shareType=nongift

I don't know what the big deal about Le Pen is, she couldn't be any more far right than the current UK government.

Turnout at 5pm stands at 63.2%, accoring to the interior ministry - that’s 1.8% lower than during the first round, and 2.1% down on the second round five years ago.

For the time being, this doesn’t look like the surge in abstentions that some had feared.

bodes well?

Macron projected at 58.2%

Only 40% for the fascist, vive 👏🏻le 👏🏻 France 👏🏻

better to have a golem than a fascist

We've got both in charge here.

It’s good if everyone just goes “phew that was close” without considering the reasons why

just read earlier that Blair is proposing to put together a Macron tribute band, a "British version of En Marche" 🤮🤮🤮. The problem or even the silver lining is every UK attempt at establishing a centrist party as a "🤡home for hopeful politics🤡" has been a combination of failure and farce.

LOL @ Macron being considered a centrist.

I think that’s really unfair, Tom, he’s not just a centrist, but so much more!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FRIRrp9XIAEAC4W?format=jpg&name=large

incoherence at least has the minor advantage of not being purposeful evil

all sensible centrists in France like to take a more "nuanced" position on Marshall Petain, unlike those lefty reactionaries with their niave student politics!

Scores du Front National / Rassemblement national au second tour de la présidentielle :
- 2002 : 17, 7%
- 2017 : 33,9%
- 2022 : 41,8%

On va éviter de se réjouir ce soir, hein.

— Guillaume Champeau (@gchampeau) April 24, 2022

Ipsos poll: Mélenchon's voters were 41% various forms of choosing neither candidate, 42% Macron, 17% Le Pen. So it probably wasn't worth the moral panic about infantile radical leftists making red-brown alliances https://t.co/j9bZiDVfWA

— David Broder (@broderly) April 24, 2022

also Le Pen only got 29% of the 70+ age group votes in the 2nd round, the oldies haven't got much enthusiasm for the real fascists.

Centrists love fascists tbf so a good night for all concerned

Now they can concentrate on fighting the real enemy, muslims

Pretty concerning to see the high numbers for Le Pen among working age people

My understanding - v limited - was that Le Pen's economic proposals were solidly to the left of Macron's, and yknow, the racial policies are pretty similar so

incoherence at least has the minor advantage of not being purposeful evil

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, 24 April 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Good and evil now is it.

Would have been shocking to see a major European country elect a racist anti-immigrant party dedicated to exiting the EU... errrrrr.

who said anything about good?

(bastani content warning)

Democracies only run like this for so long. pic.twitter.com/uhCZKzmk78

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) April 24, 2022

Melenchon can go fuck himself imo, but (and this is an argument fellow ukpol despairers have heard me mane again and again) it’s 100% bullshit that voting against someone you hate is seen as preferable in most democracies than voting for someone you actually want. Assuming left French voters have several more years of being blamed for Macron’s failures while he desperately panders to the right in an attempt to set things up for…whoever he wants to succeed him, I guess?

Could see Macron trying to change the constitution to go for a 3rd term tbh.

Seems like a bad idea but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was surprised to see that Le Pen's best results anywhere were in Outre-Mer constituencies like Guadeloupe and Martinique, and hugely up on 2017:

Marine Le Pen have a LARGE LEAD Overseas:

Guadeloupe: +39.2%
Martinique: +21.8%
French Guiana: +21.4%

Results not representative for the rest of the country, but still...#Presidentielles2022 pic.twitter.com/yIQvKxoe5z

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) April 24, 2022

Only analysis I found was an interview with a local pro-independence politician: apparently they really really don't like Macron there. Still I might have expected abstention rather than a huge vote for Le Pen, esp given that Melenchon won big in the first round.

Would be interesting to see the racial make-up of the votes in those constituencies? Not much of a surprise that white ppl living in those areas would enjoy fascism.

(just remembered that French policy means these numbers will never be tallied)

who said anything about good?

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, 24 April 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Effectively that is what you were doing with that post. The politicians that say they occupy the centre will do a version of fascism without the rhetoric and you will tell yourself it's incompetent but not
capital evil. Just inventing justifications for your vote next time.

don't think aimless has a vote in the French elections

either way tho plenty of incoherent thinkers present in most totalitarian movements

Lol I know Aimless doesn't vote in this election but its a rehearsal for the ones he'll vote in.

Xpost White people are very much in the minority in Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyane so that's not going to explain the massive Le Pen vote there. These are departements, ie fully integrated politically into metropolitan France, unlike say New Caledonia, which also has a strong independence movement. These departements don't have serious independence movements, most people there consider themselves completely French but forgotten by the Paris elites, I think that's the core of the Le Pen vote, and the Melenchon vote in the first round. And Le Pen is keen on these leftovers of French Empire and has been courting them assiduously. Tldr French racism is a complicated thing

"vote for the crook not the fascist" has been the equivalent slogan since at least 2002, when jacques chirac face off against marine's dad

as a one-off it was what it was (chirac was a massive crook (who wd be convicted after he stepped down); as a now-persistent multi-reality it's an emblem of the perma-crisis that the centre has no way to resolve (and one has to assume no plan or intention to resolve = you maintain said threat primarily to discipline yr foes on the left… and normalising the framework w/o sating the beast, by goading the far right with promises you will never quite deliver on, into a weaponised presence that isn't going away

(i tried googling to find if the slogan goes back any earlier than 2002 but its massive use in 2002 stymied the search)

I was living in France at that time and I don't think that phrase had antecedents.

Although everyone is like "phew, dodged a bullet" at the moment, 41% of French voters voted fascist. That's huge. God only knows what will happen after another five years of macronisme.