Hear is a revelatory report from Le Monde on the 2022 election in France, and a comparison with 2017!
Headline: French election results if abstentions, blank and invalid votes were included
Sub-headline: Counting the 2.2 million blank or invalid ballots as well as the 13.6 million abstentionists in the second round of the French election creates a very different result for Sunday’s French presidential runoff.
Published on April 25, 2022, at 4:05 pm (Paris), updated on May 24, 2022, at 12:48 pm Lire en français
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A record 13,600,000 voters, or 28% of the electorate, abstained in the second round of the French presidential election on Sunday, April 24. Blank and invalidated votes, meanwhile, declined in proportion compared to the 2017 presidential race, which featured the same two finalists, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen.
Under current rules, the blank vote is indeed counted separately (from invalid ballots) but is not considered as part of the votes cast. Recognition of the blank vote would amount to counting it in the total votes cast, as if the blank vote were a candidate in its own right, de facto lowering the percentage of votes cast for the two other candidates.
If the blank vote was recognized, Emmanuel Macron would not have been elected with 58.5 % of the votes cast but with 54.7% of the recognized votes, 41.5% for Marine Le Pen (compared to 38.8% taking into account the white votes) and 6.5% for the blank vote. There are many possible ways to determine how to deal with the percentage of blank votes, and it is not possible to detail them here.
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If we add the invalid ballots and abstention, Mr. Macron was re-elected president with only 38.5 % of the votes among the registered voters.
These pie charts show the proportion of votes obtained by the finalists according to whether you calculate it from only the ballots cast or by taking into account the blank and invalid votes as well as abstentions (source : Ministry of the Interior
On the vexing question of Macron’s ‘Pension Reform’:
Editorial
Headline: French pension reform: The damage of a never-ending conflict
Sub-headline : To get out of the pension dispute, Emmanuel Macron cannot simply invoke the legality of the Constitutional Council’s decision, which on Friday approved the key elements of his controversial reform.
Published on April 15, 2023, at 11:23 am (Paris), updated on April 15, 2023, at 1:23 pm 2 min read Lire en français
As France has been going through a never-ending conflict since January, the decision of the Constitutional Council to approve the core of President Macron’s pension reform did not, as expected, contribute to lowering the social temperature by even one degree. The French president decided to sign the bill postponing the retirement age from 62 to 64 as soon as it was validated, and without listening to calls to not rush into anything. This quick promulgationwill not calm the unions’ anger, who immediately declined Emmanuel Macron’s invitation for a meeting on April 18. The unions have instead promised to make Labor Day, on May 1st, the high point of a popular mobilization that left-wing parties also intend to support.
The legal argument the executive branch can now lean on is not a minor onein the face of the opposition’s accusations that it abused the weapons of rationalized parliamentarianism to restrict the debate and get its unpopular reform adopted no matter the cost. In the end, only six provisions – including the “senior index” which was intended to improve the employment rate of senior citizens – were censured as they “had no place” in this financial law. The government used a specific type of financial bill for its reform, one that is used to amend the social security budget. This procedure was one of the main arguments put forward by the opposition before the Constitutional Council.
Simultaneously, the proposal carried by the left-wing oppositions to organize a referendum to counter the reform was rejected. It will however be followed by another bid. Apart from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who blamed the Constitutional Council for “being more attentive to the needs of the presidential monarchy than to those of the sovereign people,” no one questioned its decision, which is fortunate for the functioning of our institutions.
Undermined morale:
It is not, however, the end of the social and political crisis for Macron, who is constantly fueling it dangerously. Even if the country wasn’t brought to a standstill and the rate of strikers was not as high as during previous conflicts, the protests consistently held in Paris and other smaller cities across France for three months still testify to the level of incomprehension and anger that retirement at 64 arouses, particularly in the middle and working-class electorate. The President of the Republic cannot fail to see that the reform he wanted to impose provides powerful fuel for Marine Le Pen, who, according to all polls, appears to be the only one to benefit politically from the conflict. Nor can Macron ignore the intensity of the democratic quarrel that his determination to impose his reform has created in a context of relative majority in the Assemblée Nationale and of the fragility of representative democracy. While a great majority of the French remains hostile to his project, he must listen instead of fanning the fire, as he did once again on Friday by declaring, “Never give up, that’s my motto.”
…
The opening paragraphs of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s essay/apologetic is mock-epic of a kind, in it’s modest way…
Better late than never. Emmanuel Macron has moved full spectrum from Putin appeaser to arch-warrior, belatedly seizing the stage as the impassioned leader of the Continental war alliance.
He has not backed down from talk of deploying French troops on Ukrainian soil. His speech this week in Prague was a Churchillian tour de force, evoking the failure of the liberal democracies to stand behind Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, out of spinelessness and complacency. “We are at a moment in Europe where we cannot afford to be cowards,” he said.
Some saw it loaded with thinly-veiled attacks on Chancellor Olaf Scholz, others as a cri de coeur against the mood of fatalistic defeatism taking hold as Europe contemplates life without the American security umbrella.
Evans-Pritchard then invokes a moment, of what might be named fatalism?
If only Mr Macron’s epiphany had come earlier when his standing at home and abroad was still high, and his political capital was large. The tragedy for him, and for Europe, and for Ukraine, is that this capital is greatly depleted. Fellow leaders are weary of his oratory, apt to roll their eyes at every new demarche. At home, everything is going wrong at once.
Le Point against Macron :
Even the Macroniste weekly Le Point has turned against him. Its cover splash this week, “The Circus of the Sun King”, is a cruel portrait of an isolated leader lurching from one random position to another, surrounded by sycophants who dare not tell the truth. “Only the shoe shiners remain,” it said.
Le Figaro against Macron:
Le Figaro is scarcely kinder about a “hyperpresident” who wants to be in charge of everything and consults nobody, exasperating everybody with erratic grandstanding.
Editor: some selective quotation:
His Renaissance party is in incipient mutiny. Disloyal would-be successors are looking beyond him, not that they will inherit much.
…
It was never going to be easy for Mr Macron after he lost his parliamentary majority in 2022. His strategic mistake was to think that he could plough ahead as if nothing had changed, relying on the decree powers of article 49:3 to ram through laws.
…
This week he warned that more austerity would be needed, admitting that France had become “addicted to public spending” and that the budget deficit for 2023 will be much higher than the expected 4.9pc of GDP.
Editor: Why would the gilets jaunes continue demonstrating, if they were bribed, is the question! Perhaps as retaliation against violent French Police?
When the gilets jaunes revolt erupted over fuel duties, Mr Macron threw money at them. When the farmers rebelled this winter, he threw money at them, too, adding Gosplan “price floors” for different products to the horror of his own farm minister.
…
Mr Macron lavished subsidies on rich and poor alike during the energy crisis, radically suppressing the price signal for electricity and gas.
…
Editor: ‘Gallic Thatcherism’ …
Little remains of his once-bold plans for market reform and Gallic Thatcherism.
…
Editor: Evans-Pritchard hits paydirt, by mistake!
Mr Macron is an incomprehensible figure. He seeks to be the heir of Charles de Gaulle. His copy of Mémoires de Guerre sits open on his desk in the official Élysée portrait. He sports the Croix de Lorraine, the heraldic double cross carried by the Free French forces on Juno Beach in 1944.
Editor: Evans-Pritchard as New Cold Warrior:
The mystery is what took him so long to grasp that a Russian victory in Ukraine would set in motion the disintegration of his beloved EU project, starting with a fabricated “persecution” of ethnic Russians in the Estonian pocket of Narva, no doubt swallowed hook, line, and sinker by Putin’s useful idiots in the West.
A cynic might note that he has failed to match his rhetoric with commensurate action at every stage over the last two years. If only he had actually put the French economy on a “war footing” instead of just talking about it.
Editor: Evans-Pritchard as munitions expert:.
Even at this juncture, France can barely make enough 155mm artillery shells in one year to supply Ukraine for four days. If only he had not kept vetoing EU purchases of spare shells from South Africa. Yes, French SCALP missiles and Caesar howitzers have been vital for Ukraine, but France is far down the list of military donors.
Editor: Evans-Pritchard as Political Farceur!
Mr Macron’s falling star is no cause for celebration. From a British point of view, he has metamorphosed from first-term foe to second-term friend. The Brexit hatchet is largely buried. Events have thrown Britain and France back into each other’s arms in a fresh Cordiale Entente, akin to the anti-Tsarist pact with Napoleon III.
We badly need Mr Macron at his best – idealistic, courageous, and willful – to help prevent a colossal disaster unfolding in Europe. He can now see with 20/20 clarity that we are facing the cascading collapse of the liberal democratic West if Putin prevails in Ukraine. It is shocking that so many other politicians of our age cannot.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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