How Macron and Le Pen swapped places and the Socialists remembered
The first round of the French presidential election showed that political technology there is at a very high level. The electorate is predominantly left-wing, but a moderate right-wing politician is running against the far-right – again Emmanuel Macron against Marine Le Pen, as he did in 2017.
Another paradox is that the French electorate is even more Eurosceptic than the British, but the supposed winner (Macron) will be the biggest supporter of European integration among all major European leaders. This is aerobatics!
Third paradox – the candidate of the Socialist Party ranked tenth with only 1.74 percent of the vote. And only 10 years ago, this party could take a random florist from the street and she would still get at least 20 percent in the first round. And on the second he could easily win. And now – poof! – and there is no such party! Disappeared, put on an invisible hat!
In our country, the BSP has been trying to disappear without a trace for decades, but it still fails – not quite, not quite. If he learns from the French experience, he will succeed.
After the first round, Emmanuel Macron led Marin Le Pen with 27.60 and 23.41% of the vote. In 2017, the two were again in the runoff and the first round and the difference was even smaller. In the second, however, the difference reached 33 percent and Macron emerged victorious on a white horse and with a laurel wreath. In the next 2-3 months, his rating hit 70 points. But at the height of his popularity, he was still considered a leftist, a socialist of the third kind, born from within the Socialist Party and its former minister.
Alas,
as soon as he started
to rule,
his right
essence shone
His rating quickly plummeted below 30. Only the war in Ukraine gave him the opportunity to shine as a peacemaker and score a few points. Now, between the two rounds, he has one more strong trump card left – to follow the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and land in Kyiv. There he will take several selfies with Zelenski, promise full support and triumph in the elections in 2 weeks, in May.
Or maybe Le Pen will get in his way. In principle, the Le Pen trade and political brand was created to rob the anti-systemic semi-fascist vote in the first round and then guaranteed to lose the runoff, where the more moderate ones generally win. So was her father, so was she, but lately she’s been changing. She changed the name of her party from “National Front” to “National Assembly” to sound more unifying and benevolent.
At the same time, he intensified his flirtation with the working class. For example, he promised to return the wealth tax that Macron abolished. He proposed that VAT on gas, petrol and electricity fall from 20% to 5%. He also promised a more blue-collar version of pension reform. All that the Socialists had thrown on the pavement, she bent down and gathered him like a caring mistress, blew it out of the dust and hung it on her flag.
Man even
begins to
wonder why
Le Pen passes
for the final
right,
when on monetary matters Le Pen is definitely more left-wing than Comrade Macron. But she is known to be a Eurosceptic, anti-globalist and conservative who wants to stop the unstoppable influx of migrants from Africa and the Middle East. He also proposed a law to reduce relative migration by 75 percent and also introduced the concept of “national priority”. This means that if you are a pure Frenchman, you have an advantage over foreigners in entering the service. Her law was rejected in parliament, but if she becomes president, she will propose it in a referendum. Then it may be clear that France does not have such open arms to the world.
For the “left brahmins,” as the famous left-wing economist Thomas Piquetti calls them, this would be a humanitarian catastrophe, an apocalypse, and genocide. But for the former left-wing electorate, which is already leaning to the right, this is wonderful. In his book “Capitalism and Ideology” Pickett shows with convincing statistics how the French Social Democrats are gradually losing the so-called blue collars, but instead winning positions among graduates.
Here is a graphic from this wonderful book. The graph shows that while in the 1956 parliamentary elections for the Socialists (in red) 57 percent of voters with primary education voted, who were 72 percent of the entire electorate, in the 2012 elections this category was has shrunk to 18 percent, and 47 percent of them have preferred the Socialists. Conversely, in 1956, 37 percent of university graduates voted for the left, but they were only 5 percent of the electorate, while in our time they are now 26 percent, but 58 percent of them voted for the left. .
And this is what happened in 2017. The then French president and leader of the Socialists
Francois Hollande
quite
deliberately ruined
your party
The red column went to Le Pen, and the blue went to Emmanuel Macron’s brand new party. This was definitely a conspiracy of the left elite against the left electorate. They sold it like a flock of sheep. Even the BSP failed to get rid of its electorate so effectively, and has been procrastinating for over 30 years.
That is how the Socialist Party in France collapsed. Macron’s movement took with it the entire “Brahmin” left, ie. educated socialists, and the lower castes began to look for another leader and party.
And if in the last century the virtual dividing line between the left and the right passed between the richest 10 percent and the other 90 poorer, in the 21st century the “Brahmins” turned it so that it passes between “nativists” (i.e. such as Le Pen) and “progressives” – ie. enlightened proponents of globalism, tolerance, gender relativism.
For the Social Democrats, this portended a catastrophe, and the catastrophe happened. But it has also become a disaster for democracy.
Why? First, because for now democracy, ie. the participation of the whole people in power is possible only within the nation-state. The participation of the people in power, which would take place on a global level, has not yet been invented. There is no such democratic institution. It is
preserved
territory of
superheroes
and that is why everyone who works for globalization works for them, not for the other 99 percent.
And secondly, because at the national level, wage workers are terrified of the waves of migrants. Oversupply of low-skilled labor creates unemployment and lowers wages, deprives of social funds, worsens conditions in poorer neighborhoods. Globally, migration seems like a very humanitarian process, but within nations the picture is very different. Encouraging migration, the Social Democrats cut off the branch on which they sit. In France, they have already beaten.
If the BSP claims a hundred-year history, the French claim over 150 years. And here’s what happened – poof and disappeared, because she decided to become redundant and raised the man to bury her – Emmanuel Macron.
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