Emmanuel Macron is re-elected French President, defeating Marine Le Pen

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/world/europe/emmanuel-macron-france-election-marine-le-pen.html

by jbegley • 4 years ago

54 55 4 years ago

_Microft• 4 years ago

I wonder how many times we can dodge the bullet before it goes wrong eventually.

NicoJuicy2• 4 years ago

One person can't manage everything. In a democratic country you need a lot of people to mobilize from a different direction.

That's eg. Why the damage of trump has been relatively low.

aaronbrethorst• 4 years ago

thus far.

bradknowles5• 4 years ago

The former guy fundamentally changed the nature of the judiciary.

That's going to have tremendous effects throughout the country for decades.

Not to mention the negative impact that's going to have on the world over the same timeframe.

polotics• 4 years ago

Some simple arithmetic: five years ago Macron got 66%, this time he got 8 less with 58%, so all things being equal in five years it's a coin toss at 50.

olivierduval• 4 years ago

Actually, it's his last term... so we won't know ;-)

sto_hristo2• 4 years ago

In nature there are no guarantees. Eventually you're going to trip and fall. Point is not to trip and fall all the time and recover quickly. That is just how it is. People will eventually pick their French Trump, then get sober, then revert back to someone normal (but hopefully not ancient years old and with the balls to fix problem directly).

bradknowles5• 4 years ago

Pick another Hitler, and the kind of fall it will take to fix that problem will be World War III.

There won't be a World War IV. There won't be a world left.

alkonaut• 4 years ago

Being afforded a close call like this is at least better than the Trump election where the unthinkable happened and the populist won narrowly in an upset no one believed would happen. Now at least Macron gets a chance to adjust policy for 5 years to not lose next time.

rendang• 4 years ago

Did anyone do polls based on a theoretical h2h between Macron and the other candidates like Melanchon?

hef198983• 4 years ago

Google "Presidentielle 2022 Sobdages", plenty were done. Le Pen actually performed best of all potential runner ups.

rvz3• 4 years ago

Off-topic. [0]

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dhconnelly• 4 years ago

From the same link:

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

nicce2• 4 years ago

Also considering the world situation, this might not be off-topic

rayiner4• 4 years ago

Much narrower margin, even after Macron moved significantly to the right on cultural issues over the last 5 years: https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/emma...

https://www.newsweek.com/macron-france-reject-american-woke-...

France seems like it’s between a real rock and a hard place. On one hand they don’t have the cultural infrastructure to assimilate Muslim immigrants. On the other hand, they can’t keep their economy running without immigrants. Neither Macron nor Le Pen have a solution to that fundamental problem.

ss1083• 4 years ago

Saying they don't have the "cultural infrastructure" to assimilate immigrants sounds like it's letting them off the hook for a lot.

rayiner4• 4 years ago

You can’t create a society welcoming to immigrants with sympathetic, cosmopolitan liberals brow beating everyone else into toleration. As someone from a Muslim country I’d never move to a place like that.

_fizz_buzz_• 4 years ago

Marine Le Pen moved a lot more towards the center though.

jkmcf• 4 years ago

Her "talk" might have moved towards center. If she was in power the talk would be forgotten -- Just like with other politicians pandering for votes. The tiger doesn't change its stripes.

car_analogy5• 4 years ago

On the other hand, they can’t keep their economy running without immigrants.

Can't they? Have they tried? Many countries manage to do so, and their populations aren't crying out for more immigration - China, Japan, pretty much all of eastern Europe...

einszwei• 4 years ago

There is a dire shortage of skilled and blue collar workers (nursing, construction, sanitation etc.) in Japan. So much so that a country like Japan is considering indefinite residence for these workers [1].

China is a very populous country now and is in its demographic golden age. It can do fine without any inward immigration. But with rapidly cratering birth rates it will be interesting to see what China does in next few decades to solve the problem.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/11/18/japan-mulls-ind...

rich_sasha3• 4 years ago

Poland in recent years has been one of the most immigration-receiving countries, just in the quiet. A lot of people coming from the Subcontinent and also from Ukraine (well before the war too).

On the one hand lots of shouting about evil migrants stealing our honest bread, at the same time giving them all visas and work permits. Go figure.

mytailorisrich3• 4 years ago

France does not need migrants to run its economy. This is no longer the 60s.

Systemic unemployment is high, unemployment among the young is very high. Economically there is no need for immigrants.

I don't think any European country has a solution (at least an 'acceptable' solution) to assimilate Muslim immigrants. Very bluntly, IMHO assimilation is not possible, only integration with society becoming multi-cultural.

TMWNN• 4 years ago

I don't think any European country has a solution (at least 'acceptable' solution) to assimilate Muslim immigrants. Very bluntly, IMHO assimilation is not possible, only integration with society becoming multi-cultural.

It doesn't help that worldwide media suppresses news coverage of the problems Muslim immigrants bring.

Over the past week there has been a series of Muslim riots in Sweden against a Dane's threat (not actually carried out, as I understand) to burn a Quran. When I heard about the rioting, I searched for news coverage on YouTube. Here are the first two I found:

* France 24: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey0XIy2rXBk>

* BBC <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C00R1gjsT6A>

Pay attention to both what is said and is not said.

What would someone who has watched the videos, and knows nothing else, conclude regarding who is rioting, and what are they upset about?

I then found

* Global News <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRtv33CLSOc>

* The Telegraph <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-k5qLi1MAM>

which also obfuscate. NBC News <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=325v8PPbWe0> was the first outlet that I found that actually attributed the rioting to Muslims. (All three sources use the same/similar footage from a press agency.)

At the same time, /r/worldnews had two posts on Islamic countries' condemnations of the Swedish government not banning Quran burnings. Such were the only mention of the riots; absolutely nothing on the riots themselves. Four days later, nothing has changed, except one article ... blaming the riots on Russia. <https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=subreddit%3Aworldnews+riot&...>

bradknowles5• 4 years ago

The young people don't want the jobs that the immigrants are willing to take.

They want their cake and bread served to them on a silver platter, to which they can then pitch a hissy fit and knock the platter away as not being made out of gold.

We have a similar problem here in the US.

rcpt• 4 years ago

wdym cultural infrastructure?

I know nothing about France fwiw

rayiner4• 4 years ago

America has machinery within the culture that allows immigrants to assimilate. Americans treat them as American and they feel American. I don’t mean the sympathy liberals feel to immigrants—this is a cultural pattern that operates in South Georgia as much as it operates in New York City. I’d call it “legalistic pluralism.” You’re “an American” if you’re legally a citizen and can recite some platitudes about the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and apple pie.

In France, “Frenchness” is bound up in a millennium of shared culture and history, a thousand different kinds of cheese, etc. That’s what causes friction with Muslim immigrants. They don’t want to be French—in particular, embrace the deeply held value of secularism—and that drives French people nuts.

hdjjhhvvhga2• 4 years ago

Neither Macron nor Le Pen have a solution to that fundamental problem.

They don't have it as it's a few decades too late. Bataclan didn't happen by accident. Whoever decides to do something about it, they will have to move with extreme care.

rich_sasha3• 4 years ago

UK tried pretending everyone is white and plays cricket in the summer. This has stopped and reversed if anything, at least in the public sphere.

I don’t know how effective it is but at least there isn’t a chunk of population being continuously told “this is British and you aren’t it”.

Brexit of course threw a lot or confusion, who knows what the official line is now...

tptacek• 4 years ago

It's essentially the same margin as Reagan's landslide against Mondale.

car_analogy5• 4 years ago

Reading her auto-translated program (https://mlafrance.fr/programme), this point caught my eye:

11 Introduce the Citizens' Initiative Referendum and introduce proportional representation.

Does France currently have a first-past-the-post style system, the kind that usually devolves into only two viable parties? What is Macron's stance on this?

Barrin92• 4 years ago

Not strictly first past the post but a similar two round system, which devolves into the same thing as people have to tactically vote or risk wasting them. And even worse is that the legislative has the same system with single members being elected to the legislative through local two-round elections as well, which meant that in 2017 En Marche, Macron's party ended up with a large majority of seats but basically 25% of popular support.

France generally produces the most disproportionate election results in any Western democracy.

mytailorisrich3• 4 years ago

For Parliamentary elections there's a two round system that works this way:

First round candidates who got more that a certain threshold (percentage of registered voters) go through to second round unless a candidate gets more than 50% of the vote and is then elected. Usually that means 2 candidates, sometimes 3.

Second round is first past the post.

Le Pen has been campaigning for decades to change the system to a more proportional representation because although they get something like 20-30% of the votes overall they get very few MPs, approx 0 to 5 out of 577 because they don't reach majorities in constituencies.

This is standard in electoral systems based on constituencies vs. systems based on share of national vote ( for instance, Israel?)

hef198983• 4 years ago

And that is the sole reason Le Pen want's to change it. Her RN, ex FN, doesn't get the seats and powerbase she wants.

car_analogy5• 4 years ago

although they get something like 20-30% of the votes overall they get very few MPs, approx 0 to 5 out of 577 because they don't reach majorities in constituencies.

Sounds like the current system is very undemocratic. Concerns about gerrymandering in the US seem utterly trivial in comparison.

hef198983• 4 years ago

France doesn't have a two party system. Presidents are directly elected by a sinple majority, in most cases this requires a run off between the two leading candidates.

"Citizens Referendums" are a commen trope in Europes far right, as long as they are not part of government that is. Basically, it's populism through the back door.

Emmanuel Macron is re-elected French President, defeating Marine Le Pen

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