This is not over. We have to continue to fight. Not only against the far right but for the people, for social justice for everyone. I'm so proud of France today. I'm so relieved but this is not over, what's scares me now is that the country is deeply polarized. This was a wake up call for me. These last years of politics have made me apathetic. But what happened today gave me hope. I'm gonna do something, I don't known what yet but I will. I'll vote as I always did but I'll do more. I will fight.
"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.
Without the majority in the Parliament that is very unlikely to happen. Worse, I fear that a government formed by the NFP would accept a coalition with the Macrony just so they can barely apply their program and thus give more ammo to the RN in the next presidential election.
What is a good news today could be a very bad news in 2027. Depends in how the left will handle it.
I too fear that, but for now I'll stick to hope.
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.
Hoping the same for the United States.
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.
That would be amazing but it doesn't require playing chicken with Biden's age issue and the political maneuvers the French left and center pulled off were possible because of polling, not in spite of them.
Kansas, and other red states are deeply poisoned against democrats by about 60 years of propaganda. This shows in the polling where they'd rather vote for the new RFK with brain worms and vaccine conspiracies than vote for Biden. That's not just a joke, Biden loses to RFK in Kansas if the election was held today. And RFK is competitive with Trump. He's expected to lose but nobody's really studying the non battleground states very hard.
It would be hilarious if RFK managed to siphon enough EC votes to throw it into congress. (Even though that would also mean a Trump presidency because they vote as state delegations, 26 of which are firmly controlled by the GOP)
Also, don’t get overly proud of this. The idiotic notion of “there are two extremes polarizing everyone,” where they put the left and the right on equal danger-footing, is all over this article. I mean, it’s a few quotes from a few people, but still. That kind of shit is poisonous. It not only likens what the left wants to what the fascists want, but it also shields the far right from the view that their opinions are as dangerous as they are. “We want everyone to be cared for and we think nationalism is wrong” is not the same as “nationalism.” Still a pretty scary article. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s great that the RN didn’t take the election, but they are still a huge portion of that govt. and that is very fuckin scary.
If these numbers hold, it will come down to Macron’s faction to decide who to align with. And counting on neoliberals in that scenario is…scary.
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.
In your post you literally listed all the left of center writers that The Guardian has out of all their opinion writers and journalists, many of whom loudly proclaim themselves as "opinion makers".
And that's not even mentioning their editorial direction after the editor that published the Snowden Leaks was kicked out because of doing it.
Sure, they have all of two token lefties who get maybe one article every week or two each, in an ocean of neoliberals.
This for a newspaper many here seem to think is left of center.
I've lived in a number of countries in Europe, including the UK, and The Guardian's take on European subjects (which are the ones were I can more easily compare it with newspapers from other countries) is always to the right of the take of most newspapers in Continental Europe and hence they generally, as the previous poster pointed out in this article, spin that which is just normal Left in Europe as being Far-Left and Neoliberalism (a pro-Oligarchic ideology that puts Money and those who have it above the State and hence the power of voters) as being Center-Left.
You can hardly claim that a haystack is in fact a needlestack just because there are two needles in it.
Yes? As I said they have a wide range of views giving comment. Just because it isnt Pravda doesnt mean its exclusively neoliberal. For example you'll be hard pressed to find any opinion pieces favourable to privatisation and public sector cuts which are two of the chief pillars of neo-liberal orthodoxy.
I feel like "the right gets a big showing early on but ends up losing" is a regular feature of modern French elections. It seems like it's happened multiple times in my lifetime.
Still, they are way too cocky all over the world. But great work, France. Thank you
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.
Conservatives just lost the UK in a big way. France on course to do the same (not to the same extent). Tons of money (and Russian manipulation) are pushing hard for far-right politics, but they keep losing. Remember, abortion has won every time it's on the ballot since Roe was overturned. I'm still cautiously optimistic about the US's chances
While I agree with you in general, it's the electoral college that's a uniquely American fuckery I worry about. France and the UK don't have to worry about the majority vote being the losers.
There are so many levels of fuckery in the American system. It goes all the way up to just asking the supreme court (who you appointed) to please let you win.
Yep it’s fuckery turtles all the way down
You are more optimistic than I am, but I hope you're right. At this point, my hope is that at least Democrats will retain the congressional power to do something about a Trump regime I am seeing as an increasing inevitability.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still terrified, but I think the chances are better than the media is portraying currently.
Don't forget that the media's main goal is profit. How can they make sure to make more and more profit? By constantly showing you stuff that keeps you in fear and in turn makes you want to know everything that's happening. The only way to know the current events? Watch our media segments, read our newspaper, read our website etc. (also see 24/7 news cycle)
What you said is true and in addition to that we should consider that the responsible thing to do in the face of fascism is raise the alarm. Not crying panic over far right politicians and their nightmare policy fantasies would just normalize them and help bring those nightmares about.
So while there is a fairly typical “follow the money” argument to be made here, alarmism over fascist ideologies is also just good activism and responsible citizenry.
"The French are socialist cowards who don't know shit but actually get off their asses to protest...."
-- 'Muricans
The background trend, unfortunately, is of the far right slowly but surely gaining votes. We pushed them back to third place today, but they still almost doubled the number of representatives they'll be sending to parliament (from 89 to the projected ~130 for today's elections).
In 2002, Jacques Chirac won against the far right with 82% (to the far right's 18%).
In 2017, Macron won against the far right with 66% (to the far right's 34%).
In 2022, Macron won against the far right with 58% (to the far right's 41%).
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).
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!
Not to make this about the US, but hopefully we see similar.
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.
In their presidential elections at least it's pretty much by design. It happens because they have 2 rounds.
The first round the far-right option gets a relatively large amount of votes. Then the round after only 2 options remain, so anyone who doesn't want the far-right option just votes for the only other option. Not sure what happens in general elections, but presumably it's somewhat similar because there's still 2 rounds.
As far as election systems go it has quite a lot of obvious flaws, but it's perhaps not quite as bad as first past the post. At least it makes the tactical voting a bit more straightforward.
UK: done
France: done
US: please don't let us down.
When was the last time all 3 had general elections at the same time?
I know we're not on people's radar like the three you mentioned, but South Africa also had general elections this year.
The long reigning party lost their majority for the first time since 1994, so the coalition talks were a big deal for a few weeks.
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?
Germany had Merkel
Turned out great for them (not sarcastic)
Except for her monumental mistake of giving up on nuclear and consequently giving enough leverage to Putin to finance his imperialist plans peacefully.
Mexico is where around 40 candidates have been murdered recently?
Yup...and she still won! I am not from Mexico personally, but that has to irk the cartels just a wee bit.
That or a viral snuff video soon.
It's looking like both USA and Canada are gonna fuck it up, though.
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.
I just love the people who go crazy when the government passes a law that people are sure will be unconstitutional, and of course the latest time the Liberals did it Poilievre was all over it, then when says he will not only pass unconstitutional laws but will use the Notwithstanding clause to keep them, they are suspiciously silent.
Poilievre isn't an idiot, for all his other failings. Just because he hasn't outright said how far he's willing to take things doesn't mean he doesn't have plans to. It has the potential to be very bad.
I mean I wouldn't go that far. Poilievre is going to implement the same sort of anti-porn passport bullshit that Spain introduced, so that's not a good sign.
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.
Unless something changed today with Biden's leadership meeting, his last public remarks on it were in the ABC interview. And he was flabbergasted by the idea that he was polling badly, much less that he would step down.
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)
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
The influence of Russia and China are what are inflating the rise of the far-right in both Europe and the US, when you misrepresent this fact you're helping provide cover for them.
The people who, during a time of great inequality induced by Neoliberal politics, most and most directly stand to gain from stopping the Left from getting power back, and would prefer to see the righteous rage of the average person at the worsenning of their quality of life directed to blaming "outsiders" pushing politics even more to the Right, are the ones with the most money and Assets, and not only is that gain far above and beyond the geostrategical gains for Russia and China from it, but as insiders they have far more capability to make it happen than outsiders.
Also a few years ago Steve Bannon came to Europe with money from rich Americans, very overtly and loudly to "fund Far-Right parties", so it's not as if what I say is an unsupported theory.
Blaming foreign governments is just another variant of the "blame foreigners" argumentation that's a central Far-Right slogan (i.e. blaming immigrants), and furthers exactly the same objective: blame "outsiders" so as not to look hard into the actions of the people in this country who have most of the money, most of the assets and can afford doing the most buying of politicians.
(I bet the same minds who came up with "blame the immigrants" for use by the Far-Right, came up with "blame Russia/China" for use by the Liberals).
Mind you, I absolutelly can see how Russia and China would have a geostrategical interest in influencing polics in the West. It's just that next to the insiders who captured most of the wealth and would be most negativelly affected by typical leftwing policies (such as progressive taxation), the capability of those nations to influence the political process and the gains they would get from it are way smaller - there are at stake quite literally Trillions of Dollars worth Yearly just in tax avoidance and evasion for the ultra wealthy and the corporations they control if they allow a shift of the politicis in Europe such that tax policies change from Regressive to Progressive.
I wouldn't be surprised if all those actors are pushing the same cart in the same direction, but lets not deceive ourselfs with the Liberal variant of "blame the foreigners" and put all of the blame on some very specific foreign nations (and, curiously, failing to mention the likes of Israel, which is vastly more overt in its influencing of politics at least in the US, UK and Germany) whilst ignoring those who are logically far more powerful forces (both due to their wealth and from working from the inside) with far more to gain from that specific outcome.
I mean, Russia would gain a country's worth of land if Europe and America would just fuck off, so I'd say he has as much to gain as any given billionaire in America and Europe. And politically weakening your opponents by sowing division among their electorate seems like a relatively easy way to do it. Hell, there's even a book about it.
Certainly, those billionaires have been pushing in the same direction, but I think they have help.
There is no way in hell that present day Russia could take over Europe, especially in light of what we see in Ukraine were Russia has advantages only in manpower, conventional airpower and stores of Soviet time vehicles and they've still been brought to a stop and are slowly losing most of those advantages.
They have no such advantages versus even just a small coalition of European countries as long as one of the big ones is in it: France alone in a war footing would fuck them up. I even suspect just a coalition of EE countries would fuck them up if Poland was included.
Further, Far-Right parties are nationalists - they'll hapilly take Russian money to fund their growth but they will never turn their countries into vassals of Russia, if only because their members would quite literally murder any leaders who tried it. It would only ever go as far as Orban took it - fine with taking a pro-Russia position against a different set of foreigners (whilst very likely being paid for it) but not with Hungary actually being subservient to Russia in its internal affairs.
Russia might capture one or two small EE countries if the EU breaks up, and China gains from the West being too disorganised to oppose their rise to being the prime superpower (which is mainly about the US, since Europe is pretty mild about it) and that's served by political chaos in the West, not necessarilly the Far Right (and again, the Far Right being nationalists means that their rise might actually harden the European stance towards China).
I think we are in agreement that all of them are pushing for it a bit, it's just that I think that the possible gains for the ultra rich in stopping the rise of the Left of Europe are far larger, more immediate, concrete and guaranteed - trillions in avoided taxes and keeping their wealth untaxed not to mention the money they make from markets that should never have been privatised - than the geostrategical gains for Russia, much less China, even if one has goes with a wildly fantastical idea of what the Russian military can achieve even in Europe.
A whole screen of text and you didn't even finish the first sentence of my comment, and don't appear to have read the second to last one..
Oops, "country" not "continent".
My bad.
I still think that rich insiders have vastly more influence than most foreign nations, but none the less you make a valid point.
Well shit, now I feel like a bit of an ass. Sorry for the snark.
You were right and your reaction was understandable, but thanks for the "sorry"!
My vote will be going to the lesser of the two evils but (a) between my state's Gerrymandering and the composition and voting habits of my district it won't matter and (b) until the US electoral system is meaningfully reformed (first-past-the-post, two-party system and how it affects voting in many states, Gerrymandering, lack of ranked choice, outright voter suppression, etc.), the US will continue to slide further right anyway
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?
For FPTP, we need to get more local and regional elections to move to something like ranked-choice voting and have it go from there. IIRC, some states are trying to ban it "because it's confusing" since they realize it opens up more than the traditional two parties. Voters can vote for other candidates in their primaries as well (many people do not seem to vote in primary elections).
More people also need to be voting, even as powers try to make that more difficult. We also need more young people to run for offices, but I fully understand why they wouldn't want to.
US is always bashing Cuba for being a one party state while they're just one party away from having the same electoral system.
The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.
Julius Nyerere
Iran too?
Yeah!!
Sorry bud. Biden is in the middle of shitting the bed. If we get can get a different candidate in without much issue then we'll have a chance again.
Alright! Now if France and Britain’s new left-of-center leadership can just… PLEASE not fuck it up… there may actually hope for the rest of the planet.
Britain left of centre ? . . . these are blairites, "labour" in name only , they literally propped up the second homes buy to let market through the 2000s. and they'd gladly privatise every public service we have left if they can.
I've already heard shit like "individualised healthcare" being mentioned in their "think tanks".
They're probably not worse than the tories, and they probably will fuck it up less, that's about all you can hope for them.
They aren't going to tackle anything fundamental like bank regulation, promoting domestic investment, industrial strategy or developing public services.
I hope France gets a lot better.
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...
to be determined in my opinion. he's been in office two days atm.
give him a chance
My opinion is pretty much based on their manifesto.
I don't see how they can do anything progressive when their mandate is based on that bag of shite.
It's a a democracy, representatives aren't supposed to impose what they want onto the people. They're supposed to represent what the people want. It's likely Starmer is still more left leaning than the consensus of the public. But his job isn't to impose his will on the people but to do what the people want.
And according the abysmal turnout and the fact that starmer's labour couldn't even really outcompete Corbyn's in the popular vote despite the collapse of the Tories, the people naturally want a watered down version of the Tory austerity platform and enlightened centrism?
If there's one thing the UK election will show you, the people want someone to fucking do something about their cost of living problems, not play middle of the road and keep the status quo. They go to the far right because of that.
Politics is about compromise to be a best fit to the will of the people. Starmer is a better fit to the overall will of the people in the UK. Corbyn might have been a better fit to what the left wanted, but are you really claiming he was closer to the overall will of all of the people of the UK than Starmer is?
Democracy is about following the will of the people, not imposing your will upon the people.
Considering he got 40 percent in one of his elections and Starmer didn't even get 35 percent in this one, yeah I guess I am.
At least I have a metric I'm pointing to when I'm saying what the consensus is, instead of generally pulling it out of my ass.
Fuck the metrics, Starmer is PM and Corbyn is just an independent nobody that will effect zero positive change.
But talking big and doing nothing is what socialism is all about these days, isn't it?
Ah yes, let's thank Starmer for his electoral coup of getting Farage to collapse the Tories while being unable to increase labour's vote share. He's a real dooer.
Starmer is PM and Corbyn lost to Boris Johnson. Can't change the facts no matter how much it hurts.
They’re supposed to represent what the people want
They are supposed to listen to their constituents and do whats best for them.
Sometimes that means not giving them what they want, cause the average person is a fucking moron.. and half of them are dumber than that.
Great example would be Brexit.
But who's really the moron here? People that don't like people that call them morons, or socialists who say they're for the working class, need the support of the working class for their movement to succeed, but publicly call the people they need support from "fucking morons"?
Trump also says similar things about people whose support he needs BTW.
Yes yes the "b-b-both sides!" false equivalency again. Thats totally not tried and tired.
You sound basically the same, but if you're wrapping yourself in the red flags of failure while Trump is wrapping himself in the American flag, why would you think someone would even bother to hear you out?
You can't win over the working class because modern socialism doesn't care about being appealing to the working class. It's entirely focused on being holier than thou towards liberals which accomplishes less than nothing. Net negative effect on society in real terms.
Thats nice, Dear.
Thanks, sweetie.
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.
This was not a vote for leadership. It was a vote for one of our houses. Unless the president decides to play nice (spoiler: he won't), we won't have a prime minister from any left party, causing things to be difficult for the right but not impossible, as there are provision to force some laws to pass for the prime minister, and outright impossible for the left to do anything because they're unlikely to get support from a right-oriented prime minister, and are unlikely to get an actual majority vote on anything.
Basically, unless something really unexpected happens, this will result in a stalemate for a while. Which is, admittedly, the lesser of two evils, but kinda sucks anyway.
Well done france
That might look like good news, but it's just delaying the problem. Far right has only gained votes for the last 20 years, and it's only through jolts like the first round of these elections that other candidates unify to not let them pass. Nothing is done to address the underlying problems that make people vote for these fuckers, so it's only a matter of time before they end up accessing power.
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.
Wasn't the right poised to take it all in a landslide only just... checks notes - yesterday?
Yes they were, and both the NFP and the Macronists collaborated to drop their own candidates strategically to beat the NR. Had either one of them not done that, the NR would have won. Had both of them not done that the NR would have had a majority.
i mean, they got the most votes. the only reason they didn’t win is cause all the other parties are forming a coalition. they got 1/3 of the vote
Start listening to the working class and the far right won't even be a fart in the night
The centrists worked together with the left to beat the far right. Absolute mad-lads.
Take note, America.
Tell that to our centrists. They hate our left more than our right.
We don't really have a 'left' here, unfortunately.
relative left
We only have "centrists". There's no 'left' for them to work with. The democrats do everything they can to keep anyone remotely leftist from being elected within their party, and to maintain the political duopoly.
This perspective really bugs me.
The terms left and right are relative.
It's absolutely fine that the dems are not as far left as you would like, but they are still your left of center major party.
The more elections they win, the more the whole spectrum moves to the left.
That's fine, but this comment thread is about centrists and the left working together to defeat the right. There is either no political left, or there is no political center. The democrats are already all united. It just isn't really analogous to a parliamentary system.
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.
Didn't see the NPR article, but this absolutely rings true to me. I live in a blue city in a red state. We were littered by Green Party ads for the primaries that were funded by right wing groups. I wouldn't say that the far left and far right are working together, but the right is for sure posing as leftist in local outlets and actively encouranging the left's tendency to eat their own.
but the right is for sure posing as leftist in local outlets and actively encouranging the left's tendency to eat their own.
Of course they are, and they've been doing it for decades at this point all over the Internet. Anybody remember #walkaway? The movement founded by a 'former liberal' who ended up at J6 3 years later.
It's funny how often they barely try to hide their right wing roots
Centrists don't like the far right for some reason.
In Belgium, even the right don't like the far right. And would rather work together with the left. Lol
Might be that WW2 still lingers in their mind.
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.
Thank you, UK.
Thank you, France.
Hat trick, USA?
Putin getting nervous.
Crossing my fingers and will be contributing to this hat trick come November
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.
Fact
America is trying to do the opposite by getting MORE candidates in to split the vote more on the lib/dem side, because to many people in Media are invested in the ratings from the next Trump shitshow.
Also extremely rare Iran W
Let's hope for a good election in Germany next year 🙏
We are hoping to defeat the conservatives AND idiot single-issue liberals(to end genocide they are going to support both continued and more aggressive genocide AND turn the US to the path of joining the WW3 axis powers...). It's an uphill battle.
Some big-name stores in Paris are protecting their windows in case of unrest as results come out, but that’s a pretty common precaution.
They party like it's 1799, guys.
Today, in my heart I am French.
Hard to believe with the error-free English
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.
Mmm petit déjeuner
Flocons de mais, tabarnak...
We learned
"Aujourd'hui, ma baguette est levée pour la France."
(more or less)
Does a baguette pee Chardonnay?
Depends on the baguette.
thats a pleasant surprise and all but the nazis will be back.
electoralism wont fix this and we better be prepared for the next time they have any opportunity. another pink wave won't resolve our problems now for the same reasons it didnt before.
nazis need to be dealt with asap, or else, and the best way is for leftists to actually organize.
I want my scalps. And all y’all will git me one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis.
France’s national assembly has 577 seats, with 289 seats needed for an absolute majority.
Here is the first projected seat distribution, from Ipsos. It shows the left in the lead, in a major shift compared to opinion polls during the campaign.
Hey hey - tomorrow. Right now we’re gonna fucking LOVE this.
The French show us the correct path.
I feel like the real lesson is being missed here:
Do not mess with Mbappé.
Facts. He's a national hero over there.
are you guys finally dusting off the guillotines?
Good job France!
Joe Biden, take note of how rigged the polks and press are and keep going.
This isn't the example you want. Candidates from two other parties stepped aside to change the election math. This isn't the polls being wrong, it's people who care about the country listening to the polls and doing what they have to do in order to stop the bad guys. The analogy here would be Biden withdrawing.
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.
And what happens if Joe dies in his sleep before election day? No one is talking about this as a liability but given the speed of his cognitive decline and the stress of the job and schedule, why is it outside the realm of possibility? Trump will of course live to be 180 years old since he’s literally a conglomerate of McDonalds microplastics and literally one of the worst pieces of shit to walk the earth in the post modern era. Why would anyone want Trump over Kamala outside of being an impotent right wing Russia cuck?
Kamala sucks but she’s the contingency plan. She’s part of his admin that passed the IRA, CHIPS, etc. and trying to put forth executive action that would seemingly be beneficial for the American people. Presumably she’d continue many of the same policies as her predecessor. There is no perfect candidate in a FPTP two-party system.
My point was less Kamala sucks, and more people probably want to vote for her even less than they do Joe Biden.
Its kind of telling when he talks about dropping out the first name everyone talks about is Sanders instead of Harris. Despite how unfortunately far fetched the idea is.
Think the point is that there's no good option known and an overly short runway to build momentum, and the likely option would be Harris, and she's already the default option.
Instead of "Biden should step aside", the calls should be more specific in what they affirmatively do want.
Same with rhetoric about "just any third party", that's so vague that no one should want that, as third parties are very different and in opposition to each other.
So calls for 'not Biden' or 'just any third party' are utterly useless except for screwing up chances for a D win, without any particular actionable agenda being advocated for.
In the US it doesn't have to be another party. The Democrats could nominate Jesus the Pug at the convention if they wanted to.
A positive outcome few expected.
It's funny because that required that all parties left of the far right work together and remove candidates so the vote wouldn't get split in order for the results to be closer to what the population actually wanted, shows just how broken democracy is...
feature not a bug
Yes, FPTP is a shit system, even with the multi round elections. If they had ranked choice / IRV it wouldn't have needed these games to work properly.
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".
Having lived in a country with Proportional Vote, that's exactly it in my experience: all those other, mathematically-rigged, parliamentarian allocation systems are not broken Democracy, they're subversions of Democracy that twist what is supposedly the will of the voters to achieve some other objective (generally we're told it's "Stability", which curiously always end us as a power duopoly of parties whose politicians have to worry about getting votes far less than they would otherwise, and which are easilly corrupted by those with lots of money).
Democracy isn't broken, it has however been subverted to control it in most of the West, very deeply so in some cases like the US.
The US didn't "subvert it", they're just running a pre-alpha version that never worked and was built for entirely different hardware.
Because ultimately all representative democracy is game design. Democracy isn't majority rule, it's majority rule tempered by a lot of pre-existing agreements and ongoing compromises.
Very representative systems have a lot of advantadges, but they also have different issues. Coalitions can be hard to sustain, manifestos and programs aren't expected to see implementation. People argue, and they do have a point, that an overly fragmented legislative doesn't represent popular will, since the policy implemented by coalitions necessarily will be mismatched to every option people voted for. It's also true that in extreme cases you end up with systems where people run as an audition to get a job in the ruling coalition, rather than to push an agenda.
So yeah, ultimately all electoral systems are constantly being gamed by both politicians and voters. That's just how politics work. But within that we can fine tune all these systems for optimal outcomes, and I do think that a legislative that genuinely needs to trade and deal and compromise is going to be more functional and less prone to extremism than direct majoritarian rule, where there are no checks beyond the other powers. I think even a system like the French would be a big improvement for both the US and UK systems, but it's probably only applicable in the UK, where there is already a multiparty system. The US is so entrenched that at this point you probably need a full reinvention of their entire constitution. The thing was always a first draft at best anyway.
From my experience living in a country with Proportional Vote, one with First Past The Post and one with something in between (multiple representatives per electoral circle) my conclusion is that Democracy works best with variety and frequent change - you don't want Stability, because that just entrenches some people in control of the State and inevitably leads to frequent abuse of that power for personal upside maximisation, including via outright corruption, as well as the steady takeover of the various mechanisms of the State (most notably the subversion of the supposedly independent Pillar Of Democracy which is the Judicial System, something you see reaching its natural outcome right now in the US).
Change and many eyes with many conflicting interests and a real likelihood of reaching power are the best way to delay and even undo the natural subversion of the State by the kind of people who seek power - which happens in all systems, not just autocratic ones - whilst the highly stable "Two Party Systems" in supposed Democracies are barely better than dictatorships in their resilience to the rotting of the State from the inside.
Proportional Vote, which isn't at all Mathematically rigged for "stability" is the best system I've seen so far at keeping the politicians in power from pillaging and subverting the State, mostly because they fear both their coalition partners (Government there is always by coalition) finding it out and using it for political advantage (by loudly bringing down government and triggering new elections in order to capture more votes) and that the next government might very well be a wholly different coalition whose politicians are not "people like them" and would just love to catch and bring to Justice any funny business done by the previous guys.
In places with two dominant parties that alternate in power, the politicians of both those parties make lots of noise for the audience simulating deep differences but often are mates and frequent the same social circles and even when they're not there's generally on subjects like Corruption a "gentleman's agreement" of "I don't go after you in my turn and you don't go after me in your turn".
Not even PV systems are immune to crooked politicians but they certainly seem way more resilient to their actions and even much more capable of self-healing before the rot is too far along.
There are a good couple of decades of Italian politics that would no align with that.
Honestly, all that is fairly misinformed and superficial. Cross-checks in politics are hard to design and very susceptible to details. I just don't think we disagree enough on the fundamental (i.e. FPTP with no adjustments is an outright bad system) to be worth getting caught in the weeds. If I'm gonna argue I'd rather spend the time arguing with someone I actually disagree with :)
I know there's still a long way to go but maybe the future won't be as completely horrofying as I thought. Fuck the facists and fuck the nazis, well done France!
Hell yeah
Dodged a bullet
Lavrov already calls this a treachery, so I guess it's absolutely a good thing.
Unfortunately, it doesn't mean Macron will name a leftist prime minister. He already asked his center-right prime minister to remain in office for a while. But the message from the population is clear.
The PM gave his request for demission, but Manu rejected it... WTF.
The current pm stays in order to run the country before the transition happens. He has to pick a candidate that the left party will present.
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.
If the Canadian left could do this the Conservatives would never win an election ever again
I can also dream, but we have to be prepared for a Poilievre majority and a very decent chance of Trump in the white house at the same time. I worry that a lot of things that would be unthinkable in Canada 10 years ago will enter mainstream political conversation.
Oh thank goodness. Worst fear allayed, now on to the next one.
How is it that a French political party can get 15% fewer votes than a rival party, and end up with 8 more seats in Parliament than that rival party?
Vote distribution
Win seats by a small margin, lose seats by a wide margin
You new to politics?
1000 people vote in 10 districts. Their choices are a Hard-Right party, a Centrist Party, and a Left coalition, representing the Left-Centre, Left, and Hard Left. PS: This is what the French had going on.
Let's say 373 people wanted the Hard Right party, 269 people wanted the Left-Wing Coalition, 223 wanted the centre, 51 picked a minor libertarian party, 50 picked from a slew of minor parties not on the Right, and 35 picked from other Right-Wing parties.
In a proportional representation system, you'd expect 37.3% of the representatives be from the Hard-Right party, 26.9% from the Left-Wing Coalition, 22.3% from the Centrist party, plus about 14% being from minor parties. But France uses a First Past the Post system and so does our hypothetical nation. So here we go:
Riding 1: 95 people voted Hard Right. 3 vote Centre, and one each vote other Right and Libertarian. Hard Right wins this riding.
Riding 2: 90 vote Hard Right, 5 vote Centre, 2 vote Other Right, 1 votes other Non-Right, and two vote Libertarian. Right wins this riding.
Riding 3: 85 vote Hard Right, 10 vote Centre, 1 votes Left, 3 vote Other Right, and one votes Libertarian. Winner is Hard Right.
Riding 4: 15 vote Hard Right, 65 vote Centre, 10 vote Left, while 2 vote Other Right, 5 vote Other Non-Right, and 3 vote Libertarian. Centre wins.
Riding 5: 12 vote Hard Right, 60 vote Centre, 12 vote Left, while 4, 8, and 4 vote for minor parties. Centre wins.
Riding 6: 20 each vote Hard Right and Centre, while 3, 4, and 2 vote third parties. Left gets 51 votes and wins the riding.
Riding 7: 22 vote Hard Right and 11 vote Centre. 2, 9, and 4 vote Third Party, and Left wins the riding with 52 votes.
Riding 8: 15 vote Hard Right and 21 vote Centre. 3, 5, and 5 vote Third Party, and Left wins again, this time with 51 votes.
Riding 9: 10 vote Hard Right and 14 vote Centre, while an amazing 8, 10, and 8 votes being sent to the Third Parties. However, Left once again takes the riding with 50 votes.
Riding 10: 9 people vote Hard Right, while 14 vote Centre. Another 21 vote Libertarian, with 7 voting minor right-wing third parties, and 7 voting for non-right-wing minor parties. Despite these 50 people likely having more in common with each other than with the Hard Right or the Left, because they couldn't agree on one candidate to vote for, their votes get split, allowing the Left to win the riding with 42 votes.
End result: 3 Right, 2 Moderate, and a whopping 5 Left. It didn't go this badly for the non-Left parties in France, but it illustrates how a party with a lower vote share can get more representation in a First Past the Post system. It illustrates why Gerrymandering is bad. If those voters in the first three districts are packed there because some partisan power broker got into the redistricting process, they've basically been defanged by political shenanigans. Doubly so if the left-wing coalition managed to spread all their voters out so that they had a solid lock on 5 of the districts.
This is a fundamental problem with FPTP, so that's why many of us advocate for RCV or Proportional systems.
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.
The difference in the UK was far more ridiculous. Labour got roughly two thirds of the camera with one third of the votes.
What happens when you frighten French with Marine.
Now the left needs to get serious about immigration issues, RN has been gaining and only gaining, we are just delaying the win of far right, so many issues with left, they need to do right things.
And Macron started he won't accept a coalition that includes France Unbowed. Something something antisemitism.
Something something antisemitism.
What is this claim based on? Got an example?
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.
Appreciate the response now days that terms doesn't mean much of anything so got to check before before jumping to conclusions.
Hardly a shock.
Fuck yeah frogs. Well done.
B-B-But POLLS!!!!
What a joke....
This is going to be the last warning shot I'm sure.
The far right rise because they are the only ones talking about immigration.
The left won right now. Two things can happen, either the left listen to millions of people screaming for reduced immigration and we never hear from the far right again. Or the left continue to ignore people and think this is the end of it. It won't be the end.
For one, EU immigration policy has already hardened significantly and is now being directly catered to Meloni's far right government. You'll notice the far right hasn't stopped bleating about it.
And the reason for that is that immigration simply cannot be curved effectively without literally solving inequality worldwide. That's why it's such a convenient scapegoat. Xenophobia doesn't need to make sense, and since desperate migrants being smuggled by human traffickers are unresponsive to posturing you can just bang that drum indefinitely.
So we can either explain this effectively to people (and also help improve the inequality bit) or we can resign ourselves to a fascist government elected by racist useful idiots.
Genuine question, is immigration really an issue or just something right-wing tries to prop up as an issue? Where I live the right-wing also campaigned heavily on immigration issue claiming that immigrants are coming and ruining the country. Year after year the average immigration was less than 1% of the entire population and in the special occasion where it went above 1% was when we took in Ukrainian refugees. But right wing kept propping it up until some people started to believe we actually have an immigration issue.
With that I mind I think we should always question whatever right-wing presents because they're not above making shit up. If some right wing politician says the sky is blue I would get a second opinion before believing it.
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
I think you might've missed my point. Policy can be taken as "always as issue" in the same as taxation is "always an issue", because people will always have opinions on how to do things. But my question was more along the lines of there being an actual problem with the current policy or did people just start complaining about immigration because the right wing complains about immigration.
My experience was that people didn't really mind immigration until the right wing started complaining how the current policy is bad and we're letting freeloaders and other questionable individuals in.
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.
This reads exactly like a list of right-wing talking points, no real numbers and just a bunch of fear mongering.
1% per year is huge
I said less than 1%, you present it as 1%.
By the time someone is born and get into the workforce and look at buying a house the population has gone up ~25%.
Which would also happen if you had high birth rates but somehow right-wing groups tend to promote more births. Why they do it is because the overall population in Europe is in decline. Without immigration and at current birth rates Europe's population is projected to go down not up.
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.
Immigration is not stagnating wages and forcing the cost of living up. Immigration can play a role in that but without you giving any actual numbers I have a hard time blaming immigration for that. You should be asking your government why they're not addressing stagnating wages and rising cost of living instead of blaming it on immigrants.
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.
This is literally the "immigrants are ruining our country" argument.
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.
I love how you said how the left plays on feels and not stats, but I pretty much asked for stats send you're playing for feels. Not a single number, just a bunch of vague "some immigrants are bad".
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.
And this is the crux of the issue. You acknowledge that workers are "selling out everything in the life for the gain of businesses and the upper class at the expense of themselves", but then instead of blaming the wealthy you blame immigrants? That is literally what right-wing groups want. They take legitimate grievances people have and then instead of pointing at the culprits, who also tend to be their party members, they point at the outsiders, immigrants, and say they're to blame.
If that's all you have then I don't think you have an actual immigration problem, just one propped up by the right wing.
This is exactly what I mean.
People have an issue with immigration but you have your talking points. You said them while ignoring concerns and that's the end of it. Yet the issues are still there.
Genuine question, is immigration really an issue
I guess it wasn't a genuine question after all. I told you the issues people have with immigration and you just act like they don't exist.
You want to know why people vote for the far right and I'm telling you. I have personally voted only voted for parties left of every single party that has ever been in power in my country. The last time I voted. I voted for the party that was most concerned about reducing immigration because I think it's that much of an issue.
You was talking about how less than 1% of immigration a year is fine. That was your point. So I used your less than one percentage at least mathematically and did an estimation. If you said less than 0.5 or less than 0.01 I would have used those numbers. You used 1 that's where it came from. You acted like anything less than 1 is fine, don't act like you didn't.
Of course immigration is stagnating wages it's supply and demand. "No one wants to work anymore we need to hire foreigners" no no one wants to do that shitty job at a below market wage, raise your wages and locals will take the job. The actual upper class know how to keep wages down and they do. When working class had actual bargaining power they shit themselves and undermined them.
We live in a capitalist world the labour market will correct itself with a reduction in supply. Dont get things mixed up, I have issues with the government for things but that doesn't mean immigration isn't a problem.
This is literally the "immigrants are ruining our country" argument.
What argument is that then and why is everyone that disagrees with you on the matter not worth listening to?
I'd love some stats. Give me some stats on financial contribution to country, crime, unemployment, cultural integration, based on immigration from country of origin, education and visa type for both first and second generation. Please I'd absolutely love that. But the only thing that is anything close is the Danish study and hidden figures from German and Sweden for crime. People are scared of reporting that because they know its going to show immigration isn't bad. I'd also love to know how the law of supply and demand are broken for housing and labour when it comes it immigration.
I have issue with the wealth and the upper class for a lot of reasons that are apart from the immigration issue. But I also blame them for the immigration issue too.
Problem is the left is so irrational there is no one to talk to. They just do everything of what feels good and live in a bubble.
You think immigration is that much of an issue but then lay out right-wing talking points as the issue and offer literally nothing to back them up. And then you act like I'm not asking genuinely and I should give you the stats about things you can't even properly specify.
I'm going to stick with there's no actual immigration issue you just don't want immigrants.
I don't have a problem with immigration as a concept.
I have an issue with how immigration is being used in large parts of the west currently.
I've seen first hand what happens to wages/jobs and housing and cities because of immigration. Everyone knows about the crime issues from certain countries but most governments won't release that data.
The only reason they are "right wing talking points" is because the left are living in denial. This is the wokness feeling of immigration must be good because we say it's good. Yet whenever data comes out about immigration (when broken down not over all) it shoes bad things.
So please provide me with evidence. Maybe you will change my view. Like I said I used to vote left but seeing as the left live in denial. The right as you call them have figures showing immigration so bad. I'm going to have to go on what I've seen in reality and what the figures say. I'm not going to live in some leftie make believe land where every immigrant is an upstanding university educated, secular, LGBT loving, non sexist who believes in western values and integrates perfectly.
Immigration is legit just a scapegoat for the right and in reality isn't that big of an issue. People in France agreed as well, even though NR was only shouting about immigration (literally, it's unclear what their other policies are apart from the classic right-wing policies of lowering taxes for corporations), and also ranked #1 in polls, immigration came out 8th in the "most important issues" ranking poll.
It's not 2016 anymore, immigration has decreased significantly since the big flood.
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.
While yes, I don't doubt that people do care about immigration and that's why they vote far-right, the point of my original comment was that a lot of this "anti-immigration" sentiment is just an easy scapegoat by the right. It's something they puff up, blame most issues on then try to get votes by promising to deal with that said issue they pretty much manufactured, while leaving actual issues that they're going to make worse unaddressed (like low minimum wages, tax cuts for the rich, weakening of workers rights, mass privatization, etc).
Liberals (left doesn't exist in most of EU still) rarely ever vow to do anything about immigration precisely of how overblown it is, and yeah they do lose votes because of it from people who do end up believing the far-right, the "easy" answer if you will.
And here's a fun tidbit - most of the voters who vote far-right in European countries (checked Poland and French but undoubtedly there are many more examples) come from rural regions, which are the least affected by immigration.
Of course a lot of people that talk about reducing immigration, and not do anything about it. Usually the liberals and the right. They wont actually fix it because it is good for business.
The hope if by voting for something like the far right it shows the left parties. "Hey if you don't do something about immigration you won't get our vote". It's now a standoff. If we have to get a far right government in to stop immigration, well that's personally something I'm happy to vote for. But I would much much rather a left government that wants to drastically reduce immigration.
Denying entry for people in need can't be the answer. Honestly, it's unfair that we were lucky enough to be born into a stable country. It's unfair that other people have to live under dictators looking only for their personal interest. It's unfair that people have to live under the consequences of global power struggles and it's also unfair that Western countries exploit other nations and then don't lend assistance when everything turns to shit.
How can you justify sending away these people that are fleeing from warzones or due to global warming. They are losing family and their homes and yet, they spent their life worrying while we can go to restaurants, cafes, play in parks, go hiking, swimming or biking without ever having to worry.
Leaning into the immigration policy of the right cannot be the answer, there has to be another solution.
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.
I appreciate that you put some thought into this but woooooof you have terrible ideas. It's like you looked at the "it's poverty that makes them criminals! They need better social support" and then specifically did everything you could to form systems that solve it in a different way even though you were correct the first time, they need better social support.
There was no reason to shy from the truth. Immigration is good with social support. Also should be better social support for non-immigrants in poverty too. You don't need to worry about "convincing far right voters" because the far right doesn't come to power if you have a fair, transparent, and low-inequality economy and government programs that serve everyone well.
I didn't say that "poverty makes them criminals" was wrong. I know it is true. Was trying to think what it would get to take an alt right's vote.
its a media problem, always has been. Web media is going through the same chaos that broadcast media did at the turn of the 20th century: those willing to use the new media to lie and defraud people will do so until enough people die that the powers that be crack down'
Immigration can be a problem. One thing you might notice is the far right when they do gain power they never "solve" immigration, they consolidate power and hand power to oligarchs. Oligarchs on the other hand always benefit from immigration. So what they do is create an "immigrant class" and treat both immigrant and non-immigrant groups worse.
It's because immigrants carry the symptoms of poor people, people don't like having homeless in the streets but openly saying "we're a party that's against poor people" doesn't get votes like being against immigrants does.
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
Thank you France
This is not over. We have to continue to fight. Not only against the far right but for the people, for social justice for everyone. I'm so proud of France today. I'm so relieved but this is not over, what's scares me now is that the country is deeply polarized. This was a wake up call for me. These last years of politics have made me apathetic. But what happened today gave me hope. I'm gonna do something, I don't known what yet but I will. I'll vote as I always did but I'll do more. I will fight.
"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.
Without the majority in the Parliament that is very unlikely to happen. Worse, I fear that a government formed by the NFP would accept a coalition with the Macrony just so they can barely apply their program and thus give more ammo to the RN in the next presidential election.
What is a good news today could be a very bad news in 2027. Depends in how the left will handle it.
I too fear that, but for now I'll stick to hope.
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.
Hoping the same for the United States.
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.
That would be amazing but it doesn't require playing chicken with Biden's age issue and the political maneuvers the French left and center pulled off were possible because of polling, not in spite of them.
Kansas, and other red states are deeply poisoned against democrats by about 60 years of propaganda. This shows in the polling where they'd rather vote for the new RFK with brain worms and vaccine conspiracies than vote for Biden. That's not just a joke, Biden loses to RFK in Kansas if the election was held today. And RFK is competitive with Trump. He's expected to lose but nobody's really studying the non battleground states very hard.
It would be hilarious if RFK managed to siphon enough EC votes to throw it into congress. (Even though that would also mean a Trump presidency because they vote as state delegations, 26 of which are firmly controlled by the GOP)
Also, don’t get overly proud of this. The idiotic notion of “there are two extremes polarizing everyone,” where they put the left and the right on equal danger-footing, is all over this article. I mean, it’s a few quotes from a few people, but still. That kind of shit is poisonous. It not only likens what the left wants to what the fascists want, but it also shields the far right from the view that their opinions are as dangerous as they are. “We want everyone to be cared for and we think nationalism is wrong” is not the same as “nationalism.” Still a pretty scary article. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s great that the RN didn’t take the election, but they are still a huge portion of that govt. and that is very fuckin scary.
If these numbers hold, it will come down to Macron’s faction to decide who to align with. And counting on neoliberals in that scenario is…scary.
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.
The Guardian has a pretty broad ideological base stretching from centre/centre-right all the way out to moderate left. Unless you think George Monbiot and Owen Jones are neo-liberals too? (Sample articles Things are not going to get better as long as oligarchs rule the roost in our democracies and Natalie Elphicke is a hard-right Tory. Her defection sums up Labour’s contempt for progressive voters )
In your post you literally listed all the left of center writers that The Guardian has out of all their opinion writers and journalists, many of whom loudly proclaim themselves as "opinion makers".
And that's not even mentioning their editorial direction after the editor that published the Snowden Leaks was kicked out because of doing it.
Sure, they have all of two token lefties who get maybe one article every week or two each, in an ocean of neoliberals.
This for a newspaper many here seem to think is left of center.
I've lived in a number of countries in Europe, including the UK, and The Guardian's take on European subjects (which are the ones were I can more easily compare it with newspapers from other countries) is always to the right of the take of most newspapers in Continental Europe and hence they generally, as the previous poster pointed out in this article, spin that which is just normal Left in Europe as being Far-Left and Neoliberalism (a pro-Oligarchic ideology that puts Money and those who have it above the State and hence the power of voters) as being Center-Left.
You can hardly claim that a haystack is in fact a needlestack just because there are two needles in it.
Yes? As I said they have a wide range of views giving comment. Just because it isnt Pravda doesnt mean its exclusively neoliberal. For example you'll be hard pressed to find any opinion pieces favourable to privatisation and public sector cuts which are two of the chief pillars of neo-liberal orthodoxy.
I feel like "the right gets a big showing early on but ends up losing" is a regular feature of modern French elections. It seems like it's happened multiple times in my lifetime.
Still, they are way too cocky all over the world. But great work, France. Thank you
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.
Conservatives just lost the UK in a big way. France on course to do the same (not to the same extent). Tons of money (and Russian manipulation) are pushing hard for far-right politics, but they keep losing. Remember, abortion has won every time it's on the ballot since Roe was overturned. I'm still cautiously optimistic about the US's chances
While I agree with you in general, it's the electoral college that's a uniquely American fuckery I worry about. France and the UK don't have to worry about the majority vote being the losers.
There are so many levels of fuckery in the American system. It goes all the way up to just asking the supreme court (who you appointed) to please let you win.
Yep it’s fuckery turtles all the way down
You are more optimistic than I am, but I hope you're right. At this point, my hope is that at least Democrats will retain the congressional power to do something about a Trump regime I am seeing as an increasing inevitability.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still terrified, but I think the chances are better than the media is portraying currently.
Don't forget that the media's main goal is profit. How can they make sure to make more and more profit? By constantly showing you stuff that keeps you in fear and in turn makes you want to know everything that's happening. The only way to know the current events? Watch our media segments, read our newspaper, read our website etc. (also see 24/7 news cycle)
What you said is true and in addition to that we should consider that the responsible thing to do in the face of fascism is raise the alarm. Not crying panic over far right politicians and their nightmare policy fantasies would just normalize them and help bring those nightmares about.
So while there is a fairly typical “follow the money” argument to be made here, alarmism over fascist ideologies is also just good activism and responsible citizenry.
"The French are socialist cowards who don't know shit but actually get off their asses to protest...."
-- 'Muricans
The background trend, unfortunately, is of the far right slowly but surely gaining votes. We pushed them back to third place today, but they still almost doubled the number of representatives they'll be sending to parliament (from 89 to the projected ~130 for today's elections).
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!
Not to make this about the US, but hopefully we see similar.
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.
In their presidential elections at least it's pretty much by design. It happens because they have 2 rounds.
The first round the far-right option gets a relatively large amount of votes. Then the round after only 2 options remain, so anyone who doesn't want the far-right option just votes for the only other option. Not sure what happens in general elections, but presumably it's somewhat similar because there's still 2 rounds.
As far as election systems go it has quite a lot of obvious flaws, but it's perhaps not quite as bad as first past the post. At least it makes the tactical voting a bit more straightforward.
UK: done
France: done
US: please don't let us down.
When was the last time all 3 had general elections at the same time?
I know we're not on people's radar like the three you mentioned, but South Africa also had general elections this year.
The long reigning party lost their majority for the first time since 1994, so the coalition talks were a big deal for a few weeks.
That's exciting, thanks for bringing it up!
Oh right I remember that! Thanks for reminding!
Don't forget Mexico!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Sheinbaum
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?
Germany had Merkel
Turned out great for them (not sarcastic)
Except for her monumental mistake of giving up on nuclear and consequently giving enough leverage to Putin to finance his imperialist plans peacefully.
Mexico is where around 40 candidates have been murdered recently?
Yup...and she still won! I am not from Mexico personally, but that has to irk the cartels just a wee bit.
That or a viral snuff video soon.
It's looking like both USA and Canada are gonna fuck it up, though.
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.
I just love the people who go crazy when the government passes a law that people are sure will be unconstitutional, and of course the latest time the Liberals did it Poilievre was all over it, then when says he will not only pass unconstitutional laws but will use the Notwithstanding clause to keep them, they are suspiciously silent.
Poilievre isn't an idiot, for all his other failings. Just because he hasn't outright said how far he's willing to take things doesn't mean he doesn't have plans to. It has the potential to be very bad.
I mean I wouldn't go that far. Poilievre is going to implement the same sort of anti-porn passport bullshit that Spain introduced, so that's not a good sign.
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.
Unless something changed today with Biden's leadership meeting, his last public remarks on it were in the ABC interview. And he was flabbergasted by the idea that he was polling badly, much less that he would step down.
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)
The influence of Russia and China are what are inflating the rise of the far-right in both Europe and the US, when you misrepresent this fact you're helping provide cover for them.
The people who, during a time of great inequality induced by Neoliberal politics, most and most directly stand to gain from stopping the Left from getting power back, and would prefer to see the righteous rage of the average person at the worsenning of their quality of life directed to blaming "outsiders" pushing politics even more to the Right, are the ones with the most money and Assets, and not only is that gain far above and beyond the geostrategical gains for Russia and China from it, but as insiders they have far more capability to make it happen than outsiders.
Also a few years ago Steve Bannon came to Europe with money from rich Americans, very overtly and loudly to "fund Far-Right parties", so it's not as if what I say is an unsupported theory.
Blaming foreign governments is just another variant of the "blame foreigners" argumentation that's a central Far-Right slogan (i.e. blaming immigrants), and furthers exactly the same objective: blame "outsiders" so as not to look hard into the actions of the people in this country who have most of the money, most of the assets and can afford doing the most buying of politicians.
(I bet the same minds who came up with "blame the immigrants" for use by the Far-Right, came up with "blame Russia/China" for use by the Liberals).
Mind you, I absolutelly can see how Russia and China would have a geostrategical interest in influencing polics in the West. It's just that next to the insiders who captured most of the wealth and would be most negativelly affected by typical leftwing policies (such as progressive taxation), the capability of those nations to influence the political process and the gains they would get from it are way smaller - there are at stake quite literally Trillions of Dollars worth Yearly just in tax avoidance and evasion for the ultra wealthy and the corporations they control if they allow a shift of the politicis in Europe such that tax policies change from Regressive to Progressive.
I wouldn't be surprised if all those actors are pushing the same cart in the same direction, but lets not deceive ourselfs with the Liberal variant of "blame the foreigners" and put all of the blame on some very specific foreign nations (and, curiously, failing to mention the likes of Israel, which is vastly more overt in its influencing of politics at least in the US, UK and Germany) whilst ignoring those who are logically far more powerful forces (both due to their wealth and from working from the inside) with far more to gain from that specific outcome.
I mean, Russia would gain a country's worth of land if Europe and America would just fuck off, so I'd say he has as much to gain as any given billionaire in America and Europe. And politically weakening your opponents by sowing division among their electorate seems like a relatively easy way to do it. Hell, there's even a book about it.
Certainly, those billionaires have been pushing in the same direction, but I think they have help.
There is no way in hell that present day Russia could take over Europe, especially in light of what we see in Ukraine were Russia has advantages only in manpower, conventional airpower and stores of Soviet time vehicles and they've still been brought to a stop and are slowly losing most of those advantages.
They have no such advantages versus even just a small coalition of European countries as long as one of the big ones is in it: France alone in a war footing would fuck them up. I even suspect just a coalition of EE countries would fuck them up if Poland was included.
Further, Far-Right parties are nationalists - they'll hapilly take Russian money to fund their growth but they will never turn their countries into vassals of Russia, if only because their members would quite literally murder any leaders who tried it. It would only ever go as far as Orban took it - fine with taking a pro-Russia position against a different set of foreigners (whilst very likely being paid for it) but not with Hungary actually being subservient to Russia in its internal affairs.
Russia might capture one or two small EE countries if the EU breaks up, and China gains from the West being too disorganised to oppose their rise to being the prime superpower (which is mainly about the US, since Europe is pretty mild about it) and that's served by political chaos in the West, not necessarilly the Far Right (and again, the Far Right being nationalists means that their rise might actually harden the European stance towards China).
I think we are in agreement that all of them are pushing for it a bit, it's just that I think that the possible gains for the ultra rich in stopping the rise of the Left of Europe are far larger, more immediate, concrete and guaranteed - trillions in avoided taxes and keeping their wealth untaxed not to mention the money they make from markets that should never have been privatised - than the geostrategical gains for Russia, much less China, even if one has goes with a wildly fantastical idea of what the Russian military can achieve even in Europe.
A whole screen of text and you didn't even finish the first sentence of my comment, and don't appear to have read the second to last one..
Oops, "country" not "continent".
My bad.
I still think that rich insiders have vastly more influence than most foreign nations, but none the less you make a valid point.
Well shit, now I feel like a bit of an ass. Sorry for the snark.
You were right and your reaction was understandable, but thanks for the "sorry"!
My vote will be going to the lesser of the two evils but (a) between my state's Gerrymandering and the composition and voting habits of my district it won't matter and (b) until the US electoral system is meaningfully reformed (first-past-the-post, two-party system and how it affects voting in many states, Gerrymandering, lack of ranked choice, outright voter suppression, etc.), the US will continue to slide further right anyway
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?
For FPTP, we need to get more local and regional elections to move to something like ranked-choice voting and have it go from there. IIRC, some states are trying to ban it "because it's confusing" since they realize it opens up more than the traditional two parties. Voters can vote for other candidates in their primaries as well (many people do not seem to vote in primary elections).
More people also need to be voting, even as powers try to make that more difficult. We also need more young people to run for offices, but I fully understand why they wouldn't want to.
US is always bashing Cuba for being a one party state while they're just one party away from having the same electoral system.
Iran too?
Yeah!!
Sorry bud. Biden is in the middle of shitting the bed. If we get can get a different candidate in without much issue then we'll have a chance again.
Alright! Now if France and Britain’s new left-of-center leadership can just… PLEASE not fuck it up… there may actually hope for the rest of the planet.
Britain left of centre ? . . . these are blairites, "labour" in name only , they literally propped up the second homes buy to let market through the 2000s. and they'd gladly privatise every public service we have left if they can. I've already heard shit like "individualised healthcare" being mentioned in their "think tanks".
They're probably not worse than the tories, and they probably will fuck it up less, that's about all you can hope for them.
They aren't going to tackle anything fundamental like bank regulation, promoting domestic investment, industrial strategy or developing public services.
I hope France gets a lot better.
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...
to be determined in my opinion. he's been in office two days atm.
give him a chance
My opinion is pretty much based on their manifesto. I don't see how they can do anything progressive when their mandate is based on that bag of shite.
It's a a democracy, representatives aren't supposed to impose what they want onto the people. They're supposed to represent what the people want. It's likely Starmer is still more left leaning than the consensus of the public. But his job isn't to impose his will on the people but to do what the people want.
And according the abysmal turnout and the fact that starmer's labour couldn't even really outcompete Corbyn's in the popular vote despite the collapse of the Tories, the people naturally want a watered down version of the Tory austerity platform and enlightened centrism?
If there's one thing the UK election will show you, the people want someone to fucking do something about their cost of living problems, not play middle of the road and keep the status quo. They go to the far right because of that.
Politics is about compromise to be a best fit to the will of the people. Starmer is a better fit to the overall will of the people in the UK. Corbyn might have been a better fit to what the left wanted, but are you really claiming he was closer to the overall will of all of the people of the UK than Starmer is?
Democracy is about following the will of the people, not imposing your will upon the people.
Considering he got 40 percent in one of his elections and Starmer didn't even get 35 percent in this one, yeah I guess I am.
At least I have a metric I'm pointing to when I'm saying what the consensus is, instead of generally pulling it out of my ass.
Fuck the metrics, Starmer is PM and Corbyn is just an independent nobody that will effect zero positive change.
But talking big and doing nothing is what socialism is all about these days, isn't it?
Ah yes, let's thank Starmer for his electoral coup of getting Farage to collapse the Tories while being unable to increase labour's vote share. He's a real dooer.
Starmer is PM and Corbyn lost to Boris Johnson. Can't change the facts no matter how much it hurts.
They are supposed to listen to their constituents and do whats best for them.
Sometimes that means not giving them what they want, cause the average person is a fucking moron.. and half of them are dumber than that.
Great example would be Brexit.
But who's really the moron here? People that don't like people that call them morons, or socialists who say they're for the working class, need the support of the working class for their movement to succeed, but publicly call the people they need support from "fucking morons"?
Trump also says similar things about people whose support he needs BTW.
Yes yes the "b-b-both sides!" false equivalency again. Thats totally not tried and tired.
You sound basically the same, but if you're wrapping yourself in the red flags of failure while Trump is wrapping himself in the American flag, why would you think someone would even bother to hear you out?
You can't win over the working class because modern socialism doesn't care about being appealing to the working class. It's entirely focused on being holier than thou towards liberals which accomplishes less than nothing. Net negative effect on society in real terms.
Thats nice, Dear.
Thanks, sweetie.
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.
This was not a vote for leadership. It was a vote for one of our houses. Unless the president decides to play nice (spoiler: he won't), we won't have a prime minister from any left party, causing things to be difficult for the right but not impossible, as there are provision to force some laws to pass for the prime minister, and outright impossible for the left to do anything because they're unlikely to get support from a right-oriented prime minister, and are unlikely to get an actual majority vote on anything.
Basically, unless something really unexpected happens, this will result in a stalemate for a while. Which is, admittedly, the lesser of two evils, but kinda sucks anyway.
Well done france
That might look like good news, but it's just delaying the problem. Far right has only gained votes for the last 20 years, and it's only through jolts like the first round of these elections that other candidates unify to not let them pass. Nothing is done to address the underlying problems that make people vote for these fuckers, so it's only a matter of time before they end up accessing power.
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.
Wasn't the right poised to take it all in a landslide only just... checks notes - yesterday?
Yes they were, and both the NFP and the Macronists collaborated to drop their own candidates strategically to beat the NR. Had either one of them not done that, the NR would have won. Had both of them not done that the NR would have had a majority.
i mean, they got the most votes. the only reason they didn’t win is cause all the other parties are forming a coalition. they got 1/3 of the vote
Start listening to the working class and the far right won't even be a fart in the night
Far Right Night Fart?
The centrists worked together with the left to beat the far right. Absolute mad-lads.
Take note, America.
Tell that to our centrists. They hate our left more than our right.
We don't really have a 'left' here, unfortunately.
relative left
We only have "centrists". There's no 'left' for them to work with. The democrats do everything they can to keep anyone remotely leftist from being elected within their party, and to maintain the political duopoly.
This perspective really bugs me.
The terms left and right are relative.
It's absolutely fine that the dems are not as far left as you would like, but they are still your left of center major party.
The more elections they win, the more the whole spectrum moves to the left.
That's fine, but this comment thread is about centrists and the left working together to defeat the right. There is either no political left, or there is no political center. The democrats are already all united. It just isn't really analogous to a parliamentary system.
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.
Didn't see the NPR article, but this absolutely rings true to me. I live in a blue city in a red state. We were littered by Green Party ads for the primaries that were funded by right wing groups. I wouldn't say that the far left and far right are working together, but the right is for sure posing as leftist in local outlets and actively encouranging the left's tendency to eat their own.
Of course they are, and they've been doing it for decades at this point all over the Internet. Anybody remember #walkaway? The movement founded by a 'former liberal' who ended up at J6 3 years later.
It's funny how often they barely try to hide their right wing roots
Centrists don't like the far right for some reason.
In Belgium, even the right don't like the far right. And would rather work together with the left. Lol
Might be that WW2 still lingers in their mind.
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.
Thank you, UK.
Thank you, France.
Hat trick, USA?
Putin getting nervous.
Crossing my fingers and will be contributing to this hat trick come November
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.
Fact
America is trying to do the opposite by getting MORE candidates in to split the vote more on the lib/dem side, because to many people in Media are invested in the ratings from the next Trump shitshow.
Also extremely rare Iran W
Let's hope for a good election in Germany next year 🙏
We are hoping to defeat the conservatives AND idiot single-issue liberals(to end genocide they are going to support both continued and more aggressive genocide AND turn the US to the path of joining the WW3 axis powers...). It's an uphill battle.
Eat shit fascists
Lol, from the AP.
They party like it's 1799, guys.
Today, in my heart I am French.
Hard to believe with the error-free English
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.
Mmm petit déjeuner
Flocons de mais, tabarnak...
We learned
"Aujourd'hui, ma baguette est levée pour la France."
(more or less)
Does a baguette pee Chardonnay?
Depends on the baguette.
thats a pleasant surprise and all but the nazis will be back.
electoralism wont fix this and we better be prepared for the next time they have any opportunity. another pink wave won't resolve our problems now for the same reasons it didnt before.
nazis need to be dealt with asap, or else, and the best way is for leftists to actually organize.
I want my scalps. And all y’all will git me one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis.
Beat turn out projections and upended polling results.
Vive La France!
This is why it's so, so, so important for us to vote this November in the US! I'm proud of you, France!
It looks like the Far Right did worryingly well.
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.
The French show us the correct path.
I feel like the real lesson is being missed here:
Do not mess with Mbappé.
Facts. He's a national hero over there.
are you guys finally dusting off the guillotines?
Good job France!
Joe Biden, take note of how rigged the polks and press are and keep going.
This isn't the example you want. Candidates from two other parties stepped aside to change the election math. This isn't the polls being wrong, it's people who care about the country listening to the polls and doing what they have to do in order to stop the bad guys. The analogy here would be Biden withdrawing.
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.
And what happens if Joe dies in his sleep before election day? No one is talking about this as a liability but given the speed of his cognitive decline and the stress of the job and schedule, why is it outside the realm of possibility? Trump will of course live to be 180 years old since he’s literally a conglomerate of McDonalds microplastics and literally one of the worst pieces of shit to walk the earth in the post modern era. Why would anyone want Trump over Kamala outside of being an impotent right wing Russia cuck?
Kamala sucks but she’s the contingency plan. She’s part of his admin that passed the IRA, CHIPS, etc. and trying to put forth executive action that would seemingly be beneficial for the American people. Presumably she’d continue many of the same policies as her predecessor. There is no perfect candidate in a FPTP two-party system.
My point was less Kamala sucks, and more people probably want to vote for her even less than they do Joe Biden.
Its kind of telling when he talks about dropping out the first name everyone talks about is Sanders instead of Harris. Despite how unfortunately far fetched the idea is.
Think the point is that there's no good option known and an overly short runway to build momentum, and the likely option would be Harris, and she's already the default option.
Instead of "Biden should step aside", the calls should be more specific in what they affirmatively do want.
Same with rhetoric about "just any third party", that's so vague that no one should want that, as third parties are very different and in opposition to each other.
So calls for 'not Biden' or 'just any third party' are utterly useless except for screwing up chances for a D win, without any particular actionable agenda being advocated for.
In the US it doesn't have to be another party. The Democrats could nominate Jesus the Pug at the convention if they wanted to.
A positive outcome few expected.
It's funny because that required that all parties left of the far right work together and remove candidates so the vote wouldn't get split in order for the results to be closer to what the population actually wanted, shows just how broken democracy is...
feature not a bug
Yes, FPTP is a shit system, even with the multi round elections. If they had ranked choice / IRV it wouldn't have needed these games to work properly.
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".
Having lived in a country with Proportional Vote, that's exactly it in my experience: all those other, mathematically-rigged, parliamentarian allocation systems are not broken Democracy, they're subversions of Democracy that twist what is supposedly the will of the voters to achieve some other objective (generally we're told it's "Stability", which curiously always end us as a power duopoly of parties whose politicians have to worry about getting votes far less than they would otherwise, and which are easilly corrupted by those with lots of money).
Democracy isn't broken, it has however been subverted to control it in most of the West, very deeply so in some cases like the US.
The US didn't "subvert it", they're just running a pre-alpha version that never worked and was built for entirely different hardware.
Because ultimately all representative democracy is game design. Democracy isn't majority rule, it's majority rule tempered by a lot of pre-existing agreements and ongoing compromises.
Very representative systems have a lot of advantadges, but they also have different issues. Coalitions can be hard to sustain, manifestos and programs aren't expected to see implementation. People argue, and they do have a point, that an overly fragmented legislative doesn't represent popular will, since the policy implemented by coalitions necessarily will be mismatched to every option people voted for. It's also true that in extreme cases you end up with systems where people run as an audition to get a job in the ruling coalition, rather than to push an agenda.
So yeah, ultimately all electoral systems are constantly being gamed by both politicians and voters. That's just how politics work. But within that we can fine tune all these systems for optimal outcomes, and I do think that a legislative that genuinely needs to trade and deal and compromise is going to be more functional and less prone to extremism than direct majoritarian rule, where there are no checks beyond the other powers. I think even a system like the French would be a big improvement for both the US and UK systems, but it's probably only applicable in the UK, where there is already a multiparty system. The US is so entrenched that at this point you probably need a full reinvention of their entire constitution. The thing was always a first draft at best anyway.
From my experience living in a country with Proportional Vote, one with First Past The Post and one with something in between (multiple representatives per electoral circle) my conclusion is that Democracy works best with variety and frequent change - you don't want Stability, because that just entrenches some people in control of the State and inevitably leads to frequent abuse of that power for personal upside maximisation, including via outright corruption, as well as the steady takeover of the various mechanisms of the State (most notably the subversion of the supposedly independent Pillar Of Democracy which is the Judicial System, something you see reaching its natural outcome right now in the US).
Change and many eyes with many conflicting interests and a real likelihood of reaching power are the best way to delay and even undo the natural subversion of the State by the kind of people who seek power - which happens in all systems, not just autocratic ones - whilst the highly stable "Two Party Systems" in supposed Democracies are barely better than dictatorships in their resilience to the rotting of the State from the inside.
Proportional Vote, which isn't at all Mathematically rigged for "stability" is the best system I've seen so far at keeping the politicians in power from pillaging and subverting the State, mostly because they fear both their coalition partners (Government there is always by coalition) finding it out and using it for political advantage (by loudly bringing down government and triggering new elections in order to capture more votes) and that the next government might very well be a wholly different coalition whose politicians are not "people like them" and would just love to catch and bring to Justice any funny business done by the previous guys.
In places with two dominant parties that alternate in power, the politicians of both those parties make lots of noise for the audience simulating deep differences but often are mates and frequent the same social circles and even when they're not there's generally on subjects like Corruption a "gentleman's agreement" of "I don't go after you in my turn and you don't go after me in your turn".
Not even PV systems are immune to crooked politicians but they certainly seem way more resilient to their actions and even much more capable of self-healing before the rot is too far along.
There are a good couple of decades of Italian politics that would no align with that.
Honestly, all that is fairly misinformed and superficial. Cross-checks in politics are hard to design and very susceptible to details. I just don't think we disagree enough on the fundamental (i.e. FPTP with no adjustments is an outright bad system) to be worth getting caught in the weeds. If I'm gonna argue I'd rather spend the time arguing with someone I actually disagree with :)
I know there's still a long way to go but maybe the future won't be as completely horrofying as I thought. Fuck the facists and fuck the nazis, well done France!
Hell yeah
Dodged a bullet
Lavrov already calls this a treachery, so I guess it's absolutely a good thing.
Unfortunately, it doesn't mean Macron will name a leftist prime minister. He already asked his center-right prime minister to remain in office for a while. But the message from the population is clear.
The PM gave his request for demission, but Manu rejected it... WTF.
The current pm stays in order to run the country before the transition happens. He has to pick a candidate that the left party will present.
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'm not familiar with France's parties. Are these real Greens, or Greenpeace or crypto-Russian greens?
Part real Greens, part Greenpeace, part Green-washing.
If the Canadian left could do this the Conservatives would never win an election ever again
I can also dream, but we have to be prepared for a Poilievre majority and a very decent chance of Trump in the white house at the same time. I worry that a lot of things that would be unthinkable in Canada 10 years ago will enter mainstream political conversation.
Oh thank goodness. Worst fear allayed, now on to the next one.
How is it that a French political party can get 15% fewer votes than a rival party, and end up with 8 more seats in Parliament than that rival party?
Vote distribution
Win seats by a small margin, lose seats by a wide margin
You new to politics?
1000 people vote in 10 districts. Their choices are a Hard-Right party, a Centrist Party, and a Left coalition, representing the Left-Centre, Left, and Hard Left. PS: This is what the French had going on.
Let's say 373 people wanted the Hard Right party, 269 people wanted the Left-Wing Coalition, 223 wanted the centre, 51 picked a minor libertarian party, 50 picked from a slew of minor parties not on the Right, and 35 picked from other Right-Wing parties.
In a proportional representation system, you'd expect 37.3% of the representatives be from the Hard-Right party, 26.9% from the Left-Wing Coalition, 22.3% from the Centrist party, plus about 14% being from minor parties. But France uses a First Past the Post system and so does our hypothetical nation. So here we go:
Riding 1: 95 people voted Hard Right. 3 vote Centre, and one each vote other Right and Libertarian. Hard Right wins this riding. Riding 2: 90 vote Hard Right, 5 vote Centre, 2 vote Other Right, 1 votes other Non-Right, and two vote Libertarian. Right wins this riding. Riding 3: 85 vote Hard Right, 10 vote Centre, 1 votes Left, 3 vote Other Right, and one votes Libertarian. Winner is Hard Right. Riding 4: 15 vote Hard Right, 65 vote Centre, 10 vote Left, while 2 vote Other Right, 5 vote Other Non-Right, and 3 vote Libertarian. Centre wins. Riding 5: 12 vote Hard Right, 60 vote Centre, 12 vote Left, while 4, 8, and 4 vote for minor parties. Centre wins. Riding 6: 20 each vote Hard Right and Centre, while 3, 4, and 2 vote third parties. Left gets 51 votes and wins the riding. Riding 7: 22 vote Hard Right and 11 vote Centre. 2, 9, and 4 vote Third Party, and Left wins the riding with 52 votes. Riding 8: 15 vote Hard Right and 21 vote Centre. 3, 5, and 5 vote Third Party, and Left wins again, this time with 51 votes. Riding 9: 10 vote Hard Right and 14 vote Centre, while an amazing 8, 10, and 8 votes being sent to the Third Parties. However, Left once again takes the riding with 50 votes. Riding 10: 9 people vote Hard Right, while 14 vote Centre. Another 21 vote Libertarian, with 7 voting minor right-wing third parties, and 7 voting for non-right-wing minor parties. Despite these 50 people likely having more in common with each other than with the Hard Right or the Left, because they couldn't agree on one candidate to vote for, their votes get split, allowing the Left to win the riding with 42 votes.
End result: 3 Right, 2 Moderate, and a whopping 5 Left. It didn't go this badly for the non-Left parties in France, but it illustrates how a party with a lower vote share can get more representation in a First Past the Post system. It illustrates why Gerrymandering is bad. If those voters in the first three districts are packed there because some partisan power broker got into the redistricting process, they've basically been defanged by political shenanigans. Doubly so if the left-wing coalition managed to spread all their voters out so that they had a solid lock on 5 of the districts.
This is a fundamental problem with FPTP, so that's why many of us advocate for RCV or Proportional systems.
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.
The difference in the UK was far more ridiculous. Labour got roughly two thirds of the camera with one third of the votes.
if you think that's bad/weird
https://www.bbc.com/news/election/2024/uk/results
Labour
total votes 9,686,329
share 33.7%
412 seats
Conservative
What happens when you frighten French with Marine.
Now the left needs to get serious about immigration issues, RN has been gaining and only gaining, we are just delaying the win of far right, so many issues with left, they need to do right things.
And Macron started he won't accept a coalition that includes France Unbowed. Something something antisemitism.
What is this claim based on? Got an example?
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.
Appreciate the response now days that terms doesn't mean much of anything so got to check before before jumping to conclusions.
Hardly a shock.
Fuck yeah frogs. Well done.
B-B-But POLLS!!!!
What a joke....
This is going to be the last warning shot I'm sure.
The far right rise because they are the only ones talking about immigration.
The left won right now. Two things can happen, either the left listen to millions of people screaming for reduced immigration and we never hear from the far right again. Or the left continue to ignore people and think this is the end of it. It won't be the end.
For one, EU immigration policy has already hardened significantly and is now being directly catered to Meloni's far right government. You'll notice the far right hasn't stopped bleating about it.
And the reason for that is that immigration simply cannot be curved effectively without literally solving inequality worldwide. That's why it's such a convenient scapegoat. Xenophobia doesn't need to make sense, and since desperate migrants being smuggled by human traffickers are unresponsive to posturing you can just bang that drum indefinitely.
So we can either explain this effectively to people (and also help improve the inequality bit) or we can resign ourselves to a fascist government elected by racist useful idiots.
Genuine question, is immigration really an issue or just something right-wing tries to prop up as an issue? Where I live the right-wing also campaigned heavily on immigration issue claiming that immigrants are coming and ruining the country. Year after year the average immigration was less than 1% of the entire population and in the special occasion where it went above 1% was when we took in Ukrainian refugees. But right wing kept propping it up until some people started to believe we actually have an immigration issue.
With that I mind I think we should always question whatever right-wing presents because they're not above making shit up. If some right wing politician says the sky is blue I would get a second opinion before believing it.
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
I think you might've missed my point. Policy can be taken as "always as issue" in the same as taxation is "always an issue", because people will always have opinions on how to do things. But my question was more along the lines of there being an actual problem with the current policy or did people just start complaining about immigration because the right wing complains about immigration.
My experience was that people didn't really mind immigration until the right wing started complaining how the current policy is bad and we're letting freeloaders and other questionable individuals in.
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.
This reads exactly like a list of right-wing talking points, no real numbers and just a bunch of fear mongering.
I said less than 1%, you present it as 1%.
Which would also happen if you had high birth rates but somehow right-wing groups tend to promote more births. Why they do it is because the overall population in Europe is in decline. Without immigration and at current birth rates Europe's population is projected to go down not up.
Immigration is not stagnating wages and forcing the cost of living up. Immigration can play a role in that but without you giving any actual numbers I have a hard time blaming immigration for that. You should be asking your government why they're not addressing stagnating wages and rising cost of living instead of blaming it on immigrants.
This is literally the "immigrants are ruining our country" argument.
I love how you said how the left plays on feels and not stats, but I pretty much asked for stats send you're playing for feels. Not a single number, just a bunch of vague "some immigrants are bad".
And this is the crux of the issue. You acknowledge that workers are "selling out everything in the life for the gain of businesses and the upper class at the expense of themselves", but then instead of blaming the wealthy you blame immigrants? That is literally what right-wing groups want. They take legitimate grievances people have and then instead of pointing at the culprits, who also tend to be their party members, they point at the outsiders, immigrants, and say they're to blame.
If that's all you have then I don't think you have an actual immigration problem, just one propped up by the right wing.
This is exactly what I mean.
People have an issue with immigration but you have your talking points. You said them while ignoring concerns and that's the end of it. Yet the issues are still there.
I guess it wasn't a genuine question after all. I told you the issues people have with immigration and you just act like they don't exist.
You want to know why people vote for the far right and I'm telling you. I have personally voted only voted for parties left of every single party that has ever been in power in my country. The last time I voted. I voted for the party that was most concerned about reducing immigration because I think it's that much of an issue.
You was talking about how less than 1% of immigration a year is fine. That was your point. So I used your less than one percentage at least mathematically and did an estimation. If you said less than 0.5 or less than 0.01 I would have used those numbers. You used 1 that's where it came from. You acted like anything less than 1 is fine, don't act like you didn't.
Of course immigration is stagnating wages it's supply and demand. "No one wants to work anymore we need to hire foreigners" no no one wants to do that shitty job at a below market wage, raise your wages and locals will take the job. The actual upper class know how to keep wages down and they do. When working class had actual bargaining power they shit themselves and undermined them.
We live in a capitalist world the labour market will correct itself with a reduction in supply. Dont get things mixed up, I have issues with the government for things but that doesn't mean immigration isn't a problem.
What argument is that then and why is everyone that disagrees with you on the matter not worth listening to?
I'd love some stats. Give me some stats on financial contribution to country, crime, unemployment, cultural integration, based on immigration from country of origin, education and visa type for both first and second generation. Please I'd absolutely love that. But the only thing that is anything close is the Danish study and hidden figures from German and Sweden for crime. People are scared of reporting that because they know its going to show immigration isn't bad. I'd also love to know how the law of supply and demand are broken for housing and labour when it comes it immigration.
I have issue with the wealth and the upper class for a lot of reasons that are apart from the immigration issue. But I also blame them for the immigration issue too.
Problem is the left is so irrational there is no one to talk to. They just do everything of what feels good and live in a bubble.
You think immigration is that much of an issue but then lay out right-wing talking points as the issue and offer literally nothing to back them up. And then you act like I'm not asking genuinely and I should give you the stats about things you can't even properly specify.
I'm going to stick with there's no actual immigration issue you just don't want immigrants.
I don't have a problem with immigration as a concept.
I have an issue with how immigration is being used in large parts of the west currently.
Here you go have a read of this.
https://inquisitivebird.substack.com/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-denmark
https://archive.is/YghSG
I've seen first hand what happens to wages/jobs and housing and cities because of immigration. Everyone knows about the crime issues from certain countries but most governments won't release that data.
The only reason they are "right wing talking points" is because the left are living in denial. This is the wokness feeling of immigration must be good because we say it's good. Yet whenever data comes out about immigration (when broken down not over all) it shoes bad things.
So please provide me with evidence. Maybe you will change my view. Like I said I used to vote left but seeing as the left live in denial. The right as you call them have figures showing immigration so bad. I'm going to have to go on what I've seen in reality and what the figures say. I'm not going to live in some leftie make believe land where every immigrant is an upstanding university educated, secular, LGBT loving, non sexist who believes in western values and integrates perfectly.
Immigration is legit just a scapegoat for the right and in reality isn't that big of an issue. People in France agreed as well, even though NR was only shouting about immigration (literally, it's unclear what their other policies are apart from the classic right-wing policies of lowering taxes for corporations), and also ranked #1 in polls, immigration came out 8th in the "most important issues" ranking poll.
It's not 2016 anymore, immigration has decreased significantly since the big flood.
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.
While yes, I don't doubt that people do care about immigration and that's why they vote far-right, the point of my original comment was that a lot of this "anti-immigration" sentiment is just an easy scapegoat by the right. It's something they puff up, blame most issues on then try to get votes by promising to deal with that said issue they pretty much manufactured, while leaving actual issues that they're going to make worse unaddressed (like low minimum wages, tax cuts for the rich, weakening of workers rights, mass privatization, etc).
Liberals (left doesn't exist in most of EU still) rarely ever vow to do anything about immigration precisely of how overblown it is, and yeah they do lose votes because of it from people who do end up believing the far-right, the "easy" answer if you will.
And here's a fun tidbit - most of the voters who vote far-right in European countries (checked Poland and French but undoubtedly there are many more examples) come from rural regions, which are the least affected by immigration.
Of course a lot of people that talk about reducing immigration, and not do anything about it. Usually the liberals and the right. They wont actually fix it because it is good for business.
The hope if by voting for something like the far right it shows the left parties. "Hey if you don't do something about immigration you won't get our vote". It's now a standoff. If we have to get a far right government in to stop immigration, well that's personally something I'm happy to vote for. But I would much much rather a left government that wants to drastically reduce immigration.
Denying entry for people in need can't be the answer. Honestly, it's unfair that we were lucky enough to be born into a stable country. It's unfair that other people have to live under dictators looking only for their personal interest. It's unfair that people have to live under the consequences of global power struggles and it's also unfair that Western countries exploit other nations and then don't lend assistance when everything turns to shit.
How can you justify sending away these people that are fleeing from warzones or due to global warming. They are losing family and their homes and yet, they spent their life worrying while we can go to restaurants, cafes, play in parks, go hiking, swimming or biking without ever having to worry.
Leaning into the immigration policy of the right cannot be the answer, there has to be another solution.
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:
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:
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.
I appreciate that you put some thought into this but woooooof you have terrible ideas. It's like you looked at the "it's poverty that makes them criminals! They need better social support" and then specifically did everything you could to form systems that solve it in a different way even though you were correct the first time, they need better social support.
There was no reason to shy from the truth. Immigration is good with social support. Also should be better social support for non-immigrants in poverty too. You don't need to worry about "convincing far right voters" because the far right doesn't come to power if you have a fair, transparent, and low-inequality economy and government programs that serve everyone well.
I didn't say that "poverty makes them criminals" was wrong. I know it is true. Was trying to think what it would get to take an alt right's vote.
its a media problem, always has been. Web media is going through the same chaos that broadcast media did at the turn of the 20th century: those willing to use the new media to lie and defraud people will do so until enough people die that the powers that be crack down'
Immigration can be a problem. One thing you might notice is the far right when they do gain power they never "solve" immigration, they consolidate power and hand power to oligarchs. Oligarchs on the other hand always benefit from immigration. So what they do is create an "immigrant class" and treat both immigrant and non-immigrant groups worse.
It's because immigrants carry the symptoms of poor people, people don't like having homeless in the streets but openly saying "we're a party that's against poor people" doesn't get votes like being against immigrants does.
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