From: The Kamala Scam <killing.joe.to.install@kamala.harris>
Subject: French Far Right Wins Big in First Round of Voting, Polls Suggest
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2024 10:02:24 +0200 (CEST)
Newsgroups: alt.france, alt.politics.trump, can.politics, sac.politics,
Organization: dizum.com - The Internet Problem Provider
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A surprise decision by President Emmanuel Macron to hold a snap election
appears to have backfired badly, giving the National Rally a decisive
victory, early projections showed.
The National Rally party on Sunday won a crushing victory in the first
round of voting for the French National Assembly, according to early
projections, bringing its long-taboo brand of nationalist and anti-
immigrant politics to the threshold of power for the first time.
Pollster projections, which are normally reliable and are based on
preliminary results, suggested that the party would take about 34 percent
of the vote, far ahead of President Emmanuel Macrons centrist Renaissance
party and its allies, which took about 22 percent to end in third place.
A coalition of left-wing parties, called the New Popular Front and ranging
from the moderate socialists to the far-left France Unbowed, won about 29
percent of the vote boosted by strong support among young people,
according to the projections.
Turnout was high at about 67 percent, compared to 47.5 percent in the
first round of the last parliamentary election in 2022, reflecting the
importance accorded by voters to the snap election. To many it seemed that
no less than the future of France was on the line with a far-right party
long considered unelectable to high office because of its extreme views
surging.
The two-round election will be completed with a runoff on July 7 between
the leading parties in each constituency.
The result of voting Sunday does not provide a reliable projection of the
number of parliamentary seats each party will secure. But the National
Rally now looks very likely to be comfortably the largest force in the
National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament where most power resides,
although not necessarily with an absolute majority.
Final results from the Interior Ministry are not expected to be released
until Monday.
For Mr. Macron, now in his seventh year as president, the result of the
vote was a severe setback after he gambled that the National Rallys
victory in the recent European Parliament election would not be repeated.
There was no obligation to pitch France into summer turmoil with a rushed
vote, but Mr. Macron was convinced that it was his democratic duty to test
French sentiment in a national ballot.
The first round of voting suggested the most likely outcomes now are
either an absolute majority for the National Rally or an ungovernable
National Assembly. In the second scenario, there would be two big blocs to
the right and left opposed to Mr. Macron, and his much-reduced centrist
party would be squeezed between the extremes into relative powerlessness.
If the National Rally wins an absolute majority, it is expected to take
the prime ministers office and name cabinet members, limiting Mr.
Macrons powers, though he would remain as president.
Projections from several polling stations suggested the National Rally
would win between 240 and 310 seats in the runoff for the 577-seat
National Assembly; the New Popular Front between 150 and 200 seats; and
Mr. Macrons Renaissance party and its allies between 70 and 120 seats.
The ranges are broad because much can change in the week before the second
round. For an absolute majority a party needs 289 seats.
Mr. Macron, whose party and its allies have held about 250 seats since the
last parliamentary vote in 2022, has been frustrated in his attempts to
achieve his agenda by his lack of an absolute majority and inability to
form stable coalitions. Now, with his seats likely slashed, the situation
looks much worse for him.
In a statement immediately after the projections were released, Mr. Macron
said that confronted by the National Rally, it is time for a large,
clearly democratic and republican alliance for the second round.
Whether that is still possible at a moment when the National Rally has the
wind in its sails is unclear.
Both leaders of the left and of Mr. Macrons party said they would urge
their candidates to pull out of some constituency races where they
finished in third place in the first round. The goal is to avoid splitting
the vote and to join in an effort to prevent the far right from winning an
absolute majority.
We must unite, we must vote for our democracy, we must prevent France
from sinking, said Raphaël Glucksmann, who led the center-left socialists
in the European election.
In a statement of its own, Mr. Macrons party declared: We cannot give
the keys of the country to the far right. Everything in their program,
their values, their history, make of them an unacceptable threat against
which we have to fight.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, declared that France had
voted without ambiguity, turning a page on seven years of corrosive
power. She urged her supporters to ensure that her protégé, Jordan
Bardella, 28, become the next prime minister.
Gabriel Attal, 34, once a Macron favorite and now almost certainly the
outgoing prime minister after just six months in office, said that if we
want live up to the French destiny, it is our moral duty to prevent the
worst from happening. He noted that never in its history had the National
Assembly run the risk of being dominated by the extreme right.
Mr. Macrons decision to hold the election now, just weeks before the
Paris Olympics, astonished many people in France, not least Mr. Attal, who
was kept in the dark. That decision reflected a top-down style of
governing that has left the president more isolated.
Mr. Macron was persuaded that a dissolution of the National Assembly and
elections would have become inevitable by October, because his proposed
deficit-cutting budget was expected to meet insuperable opposition.
It was better to hold the election now, said one official close to Mr.
Macron who requested anonymity in line with French political protocol. By
October, an absolute majority for the National Rally was inevitable,
according to our polling.
Of course, the National Rally might end up with an absolute majority now.
In the run-up to the election, Mr. Macron tried invoking every threatening
specter, including a potential civil war, to warn people off voting for
what he called the extremes: the National Rally with its view of
immigrants as second-class and the far-left France Unbowed with its
antisemitic outbursts.
He told pensioners they would be left penniless. He said the National
Rally represented the abandonment of all that forms the attractiveness of
our country and retains investors. He said the left would tax the
vitality out of the French economy and shut down the nuclear power
stations that provide about 70 percent of the countrys electricity.
The extremes are the impoverishment of France, Mr. Macron said.
But those appeals fell on deaf ears because, for all his accomplishments
including the slashing of unemployment, Mr. Macron had lost touch with the
people to whom the National Rally appealed. Those people, across the
country, said they felt talked down to by the president and that he did
not understand their struggles.
Looking for a way to express their anger, they latched onto the party that
said immigrants were the problem, despite an aging Frances need for them.
They chose the party, the National Rally, whose leaders did not go to
elite schools.
The rise of the National Rally has been steady and inexorable. Founded a
little more than a half-century ago as the National Front by Ms. Le Pens
father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and by Pierre Bousquet, who was a member of a
French division of the Waffen-SS during World War II, it faced for decades
an ironclad barrier against its entry into government.
This was rooted in French shame. The collaborationist Vichy government
during World War II deported more than 72,000 Jews to their deaths and
France was determined that never again would it experiment with an
extreme-right nationalist government.
Ms. Le Pen threw her father out of the party in 2015 after he insisted
that the Nazi gas chambers were a detail of history. She renamed the
party and embraced the smooth-talking and hard-to-ruffle Mr. Bardella as
her protégé. She also dropped some of her most extreme positions,
including a push for leaving the European Union.
It worked, even if certain tenets remained unchanged, including the
partys euro-skeptic nationalism and its determination to ensure that
Muslim women be banned from wearing a head scarf in public. Also unchanged
was its readiness to discriminate between foreign residents and French
citizens, and its insistence that the countrys crime level and other ills
stem from too many immigrants, a claim that some studies have challenged.
For Mr. Macron, who is term limited and must leave office in 2027, a
difficult three years appear to stretch before him. Just how difficult
will not be clear until the second round of voting is over.
How he would govern with a party that represents all he has resisted and
deplored throughout his political career is unclear. If the National Rally
gets the prime ministers job, it will be in position to set much of the
domestic agenda.
Mr. Macron has vowed not to resign in any circumstance, and the president
in the Fifth Republic has generally exercised broad control over foreign
and military policy. But the National Rally has already indicated it would
want to limit Mr. Macrons power. There is no doubt that the party will
try if it gains an absolute majority.
By calling a snap election. Mr. Macron took an enormous, discretionary
risk. No to defeat. Yes to awakening, to a leap forward for the
Republic! he declared shortly after his decision was made. But as the
second round of the election looms, the republic looks wounded, its
divisions lacerating.
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.
Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and
beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and
between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The
Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist. More
about Roger Cohen
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/world/europe/france-elections.html