French Legislative Election 2017

[parochial boy]

Get the f**k out of this thread you dumbass.

Lol, sorry, but I really would like to see EM's success replicated elsewhere, particularly in the UK. Plus, Corbyn really could become PM soon enough, and I think it'd be a disaster.

"Flawless, beautiful" to a tyranny-of-the-centre fault.  That is, boring as f**k.  The only un-boring thing being the plethora of first-round knockouts for sitting parliamentarians (incl. Hamon).

Maybe you do, but I don't mind politics being boring at all.

The think is, Britain was led by Flawless Beautiful Centrists from 1997-2007 and from 2010-2016. In case you hadn't noticed,  on both occasions it ended in a complete disaster.

Didn't like all recent premierships end in disaster in the UK? 2007-2010 and 2016-(hopefully 2017) probably won't be rememebered well either.

Well arguably Brown and May were both just doing a bad job of mopping up after the disasters cause by their predecessors (although that is probably quite a kind way of looking at both of them).

Alternatively, the UK has become the Weimar Germany of the 21st century

[parochial boy]

this is not the netherlands, imho, the left vote isn't dead, it's just diminished by tactical voters and splitting.

Macron has bit a huge chunk out of Sarkozy and Hollande voters. I don't think a majority of those are coming back. We'll see LREM(~35%), LR-UDI(~20%), FN(~17.5%), FI(~17.5%), and PS(~10%) for a while. Obviously the exact amounts will change, LREM's vote total will shift between the two blocs, but for now, this system has five major factions and that's how it will stay for a good amount of time.

Don't count on it - look at what happened to the Communists and the UDF over the course of the 80s/90s. All 5 parties might stick around for the time being, I suspect we'll see at least two of them going through chronic decline.

[parochial boy]

LREM's policies are simply more of the same stuff that every government since 2002 has pursued. So if you think those governments were failures, I don't know what you're expecting.

But this time its a former banker who was a cabinet minister in the previous government a new face!

[parochial boy]

One question that's been bothering me the whole campaign. I don't understand how official these DVG/DVD labels are. They're not on the actual ballots right?

Official labels as set by the interior ministry I believe.
Looking into it a bit, it appears that the labels aren't exactly always well received.

[parochial boy]

Didn't Valls say something pretty racist a few years back?

He was in some immigrant ghetto and the government official showing him around said "there are people from 500 different countries in this neighborhood! Isn't that great!" and he replied "would be nice if one of those countries was France".

Manuel Valls, who was, of course, born in Barcelona.

He also once, off record, while showing a camera crew round a street market in a diverse part of Evry commented "get me some whites in here" to avoid giving the impression that the town was completely devoid of white people.

[parochial boy]

He also once, off record, while showing a camera crew round a street market in a diverse part of Evry commented "get me some whites in here" to avoid giving the impression that the town was completely devoid of white people.

Not too diverse then...

Never been there so I can't comment, but one that has always surprised me about places like Aubervilliers and Nanterre is that there are a lot more white people than you might expect (they might all be Portugese though).

[parochial boy]

The map is actually a bit surreal when you look at it - sure, some traditional patterns hold up, the left doing well in the South West and LR doing well in the Beauce and the Grand-Est and parts of Auvergne.

But the PS winning constituencies in Mayenne, Orne and Sarthe while faling to win any in places like the Pas-de-Calais or Dordogne is pretty hillarious.

[parochial boy]

Why can't Melenchon play nice with the Communists?

To be fair, the question can also exactly be asked in reverse.

Also, it's better they have two groups, that's twice the number of assisting positions, and they would have perpetually fought and eventually split rather sooner than later. And anyway, a 27-member group can't do much more than two 16-member and 15-member groups... They don't even have half a motion of no-confidence (58 seats needed) between them !

You know, at some point the left is going to have to form some semblance of unity if it is to ever have power again

[parochial boy]

Offhandedly, what intrigues me is that for all of FN's gains, they not only couldn't win anything in Panzergirl's strongest department, Aisne, but the strongest presidential FN constituency in Aisne actually went for the Socialists!

That constituency has somehow been held consistently by SFIO/PS since 1967 despite increasingly appalling Presidential results there. Think it may be their longest continually held seat now. It's a bunch of spectacularly bleak manufacturing towns, the sort of places you don't ever have to go through unless you actually live in them. But what it does show is the extent to which a lot of FN gains were basically gifted them by the Left going mad and running a thousand candidates per seat; Left candidates can beat the Fash in the properly grim parts of postindustrial Northern France, Macarons can't...

Amazing, it's almost like working class people in Western Europe are still inclined to vote for left-wingers or something

[parochial boy]

FI candidate Farida Amrani has offficially lauched a judicial process to have the results of Essonne-1 (ie Manuel Valls) cancelled.

The complain seems to be based a few main factors, both concerning votes cast in Evry (ha ha):

- Instances where a voter's second round signature did not match to their first round signature

- Instances where a signature was initially in pencil, and then overwritten in pen (FI are claiming this is an indication that someone was practising the signature before officially writing it).

- One unidentified polling station had 23 new voters registered between the two rounds

Interesting to see where this goes.