French Elections have prompted hilariously crazy political fallout!

Right, so whilst the news over here in the UK obsesses over a General Election campaign as depressing as any I’ve ever known when no matter who becomes Prime Minister next month, nothing will actually change, over in France, things are getting pretty wild and I’m not talking about yet more protests, or people threatening to go for a poo in the Seine as a protest against the upcoming Olympic Games after Emmanuel Macron said he’d be prepared to swim in it, as if it wasn’t polluted enough already. Well he’s now called elections in the country following his Renaissance Party getting a rinsing at the recent EU elections, losing badly to the far right National Rally Party of Marine Le Pen, the country seemingly on a path to fascism, with all the repercussions for Europe that comes with that, but the reaction to this, especially amongst other parties is something we never see over here and frankly all bets are off right now as to how things will go.
Right, so the French, the experts in protest, might have just protested themselves off the edge of a cliff politically speaking, as their penchant for placards and setting fire to stuff in the streets doesn’t translate well to voting and when it came to the European elections, it was very much protest time again, at least I hope that’s how it’s gone, because I’m kind of hoping the support seen for the far right party of Marine Le Pen, Rassemblement National, or the National Rally Party, was very much a protest at Emmanuel Macron, the Tony Blair ripoff that has been President since 2017, his centrism, which as we full well know in this country amounts to nothing ever changing and he’s been punished at the polls for that, with Le Pen’s horrible party taking 31.4% of the vote, double that of Macron’s outfit Renaissance.
Macron’s reaction to this, can be argued to be calling the bluff of his own people. If a vote for Le Pen was a protest vote to tell him to buck his ideas up, then he’s gone to the country – within an hour of those election results coming out - and said, well let’s have a snap election then, because apparently he doesn’t believe France would pick the far right over him. Nobody saw it coming, Macron has pulled a Sunak in effect, calling an election and wrongfooting even members of his government, even his Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, knew nothing about it.
Macron as good as confirmed this was his thinking, saying that the nation needed clarification on where they stood – do they really want the far right in power then, or is this just protest voters trying to tell Macron what to do? I mean the temerity of these people! Imagine electing a President and thinking they’d do things in the interest of the French people! Who do they think they are! He’s not hanging around either, polling day in France is the 30th of June, an election period of basically just two weeks!
But for as much as Macron epitomises stereotypical French arrogance it seems, the danger is that France really could elect Le Pen this time and it’s what the smaller parties are up to, that seems the craziest in light of this.
For one there has been a sense of panic. With such a short election period, parties literally only had until this weekend to get candidates in place, decide strategies and in that sense that might be a reflection of some of the craziness going on.
The French Conservative Party, Les Républicains, for example, are clearly tired of being out of power. This was the party of Jacques Chirac and Nicholas Sarkozy, so to get back into government their current leader, Éric Ciotti, announced that his party, would form an alliance with Le Pen’s. The French establishment right, joining with the far right populists, well colour me surprised at Tories basically doing what they think will benefit themselves the most. Unfortunately for Ciotti, not all of his party thought the same way, horrified at the prospect.
President of the French Senate Gérard Larcher said:
‘Following the declarations of Éric Ciotti I believe that he can no longer chair our movement and must resign from his mandate as president of
Les Républicains.’
His National Assembly counterpart for Les Républicains Olivier Marleix echoed that in much terser terms:
‘Éric Ciotti only hires himself. He must leave the Presidency of Les Républicains.’
Demands for resignations rose to the point a vote by the party to expel Ciotti had passed. Can you imagine an election gets called and a party votes to ditch it’s leader at that point. I mean we were laughing and scoffing at the idea that some of the maddest of mad backbench Tories were going to try this to call off the election here after Sunak called it, but in France, their Conservative Party literally held a vote and did it!
Ciotti reacted by literally locking the doors to the party headquarters, effectively barricading himself inside to stop him being ousted! They had to get the Party’s General Secretary down there who had the spare keys to unlock the door and let other members in! Unfortunately for Les Républicains, Ciotti, once extracted from their HQ, took them to tribunal over it and the decision to expel him got overturned yesterday in the French court. You can imagine that is a party in tetters already, where the leader wants to join with Le Pen, but with others likely to not stand for it, it’s hardly an alliance likely to hold up.
Unfortunately it isn’t the only party looking to join with Le Pen.
Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, did not stay with the rest of her family as part of the National Front, renamed National Rally as it was, she instead joined another far right and vehemently pro Israel and anti Muslim party, Reconquête, Reconquest in English, founded in 2021 by a failed former presidential candidate called Éric Zemmour.
She went on national telly, stood next to Zemmour and declared that she wanted Reconquête to ally with Le Pen, effectively going back to her former party, or assimilating this new far right movement into it, perhaps that was always the plan, but she did so without Zemmour being consulted, and it’s his party!
Well this apparently fell through, as Auntie Marine’s Party said no, though they are still interested in allying with Les Républicains, a much bigger party and also a more mainstream one, giving the far right a veneer of being slightly less fascist I guess? Allegedly the condition for an alliance was that Zemmour had to go, too nasty even for Le Pen? Being his party though, that wasn’t going to happen.
What about the left then Damo? Well, how often is it said that the left splits itself up and can never organised? France is proving that that also isn’t necessarily true and perhaps gives France a chink of hope in all this bleakness.
The four main left wing parties in France, The Socialist Party, the Green Party, the Communist Party and Le France Insoumise, France Unbowed, have all come together under one banner to form another coalition of the left called the Popular Front, I say another because this has happened in the past, and has been called the same thing.
It nearly didn’t get off the ground though, as the lead candidate for the Socialist Party in the European elections, a guy called Raphael Gluckmann tried to stop it unless certain conditions he wanted were met, but got completely ignored by his own party and they went with it anyway.
So now Macron finds himself sat in the centre ground, which stands for nothing, versus a strengthened right wing and left wing. He thought he was throwing down a gauntlet to the far right, but as so often is the case with centrists, they end up ushering them in instead. He appears to be done for, a man who wanted to make politics all about nothing changing, that political strength was always going to be found from the middle ground that doesn’t really ever exist and by delivering what they see as stability, but which doesn’t work for so many, the parallels between what is happening in France and here stand out. Keir Starmer is set to become the next Prime Minister and will do nothing different from the Conservatives. With both parties set to have failed the country as 5 years time will no doubt show, France is arguably heralding now, what we could well see then, with the likes of Nigel Farage on our screens all the time, with Reform now polling above the Tories, in what may prove to be an outlier poll, but might not, with fools frankly cropping up in comments on videos like this one saying vote Reform, when frankly I’d sooner bleach my own eyeballs, with Tory MPs openly considering alliances with or allowing Farage to take over as their leader post Sunak, the path is being paved for the far right here too, this is what standing for nothing and expecting people to back you as a least worst option gets you. It doesn’t work.
A prime example of Starmer promising something and not delivering will almost certainly be his Palestinian State recognition plan. When, like France’s far right parties, he is pro Israel as well, and indeed reliant on pro Israel backers, he’s put too many conditions for this recognition to happen, it’ll be another Starmer lie, much like everything else he’s ever said he stands for yet turned his back on a man who promises little and won’t even deliver that in all likelihood. Get the details of that story in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.