7 July 2024
French elections - 2nd round today
The centre left is sucessful in the major conurbations, Ensemble has the managerial and technical class, the RN is doing well in the provinces.
The French voting system is two rounds. In the first round any one with over 50% wins outright - RN got 70 sears - and those where there's no overall winner go through to a runoff.
In the runoff, only candidates with more than 12.5% were allowed through from the first and then it is simple majority.
What's happening is that the centre and left are combining to exclude the right, the RN.
The weaker of the centre left candidates will drop out with the expectation that the votes of the left a d centre will combine and defeat the RN.
It worked, RN finished with only 142 seats, in third place. It would have won more seats had it not been for the gaming of the electoral system – mostly for purposes of political self-interest, though dressed up with much moral humbug.
The other parties are cooperating to exclude the RN, this is why, despite being the most popular party, the RN is unlikely to win an overall majority and they have said that they will not form a government of coalition (no one will work with them).
So it really looks like there could be a lot of chaos and confusion for years to come, but also it looks like the stock markets might muddle through.
British election results
Starmer's thumping great majority might look odd, Europe is going right and the UK left, but in reality it is voters everywhere voting against the incumbent.
What have we landed ourselves with in the UK? Prime Minister Starmer has a program that does not seem to respond to popular needs - debt, housing, NHS, war, immigration, stagnation, the financial insecurity of the people, and the insecurity that comes from open borders - and he doesn't really have the tax resource to do anything new.
So it's a government that will administer rather than govern as Mercouris put it (Mercouris is thinking of the closing years of the Habsburg Empire, but you could equally well think that Britain is bankrupt of ideas and resources, and is "in administration" to the American Order).
Meaning we'll have the same problems in five years time as we have today, national and local problems that a government looking towards its peers in the Western global elite does not really recognise or understand. What do the people care about a globalist or Western agenda that seems dominated by America's corporate needs and those of a tiny Global majority of ultra rich, by war on imaginary enemies killing hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in poorer countries and wrecking their economies, by attempts to control climate change with costly unproven NetZero policies, by a Woke social agenda of trivia at home, by open borders that destroy national identity and infrastructure and social harmony.
Preserving the status quo seems to be the priority for Western elites, when all the signs of inequality and waste and decline are making the people madder and madder.
These governments shows little interest in repaying national debt, important now that interest rates have returned to a normal 5%; nor in industrial policies that would restore productivity and competitivity and level up the balance of payments, ultimate source of national wealth, nor in social justice, nor in maintaining national sovereignty.
