French President Emmanuel Macron has lost his party's absolute
majority in Parliament.
This follows the French elections that just took place and
the results are pretty grim for his party.
Now, while his party still has a majority the fact of the matter is he
lost the absolute majority and that is going to stifle his ability.
Honestly, there are some upsides stifle his ability to implement
some policies that are actually very unpopular and
pretty terrible including raising the retirement age.
But here are the details.
So Macron's Centrist Alliance Ensemble came first in Sunday's second
round of legislative elections, securing 245 out of a total 577,
according to final results released by the French interior
ministry more than any other political party.
However, it still fell short of the 289 seat threshold for
an absolute majority in the National Assembly, France's lower house.
So the results have shown that voters in France have honestly gravitated to both
what's being referred to extremes in the country, right, extreme political party.
So more voters ended up supporting the far left and more voters unfortunately
also decided to support the far right with Marine Le Pen's party.
And so Leftist coalition, New Ecological and Social People's Union or
NUPES, a pan-left coalition came in second with 131 seats.
And to be quite honest with you, I'm definitely not concerned about that.
But what I'm concerned about is that Marine Le Pen's Party has
unfortunately increased its support.
They went from 8 to 89 figures in the National Assembly.
And we have a quick video explaining the consequences of that.
Let's watch.
>> Celebrations in the national rally headquarters as results come in on Sunday
evening, an unexpected and historic score for the party.
>> [FOREIGN] >> My feeling, it's obvious, I'm happy.
With 89 Members of Parliament The National Rally multiplies by
10 times its presence in the National Assembly.
>> [FOREIGN] >> After disappointing results in
the municipal and regional elections in the last two years,
the National Rally is now the third largest party in the lower house.
Marine Le Pen lands a comfortable win with 61% of the votes in her district against
the Leftist alliance, NUPES.
The French people have severely punished a government whose
decisions made them suffer a lot in the past five years.
>> Now, Marine Le Pen is awful.
We've talked about her on this show quite a bit, but
the results of the election don't really surprise me.
In the presidential election, Marine Le Pen lost against Macron obviously,
however, she did manage to close the lead, which seemed to surprise
Emmanuel Macron and his party, luckily she didn't end up winning.
But this is very similar, to be quite honest with what we're experiencing in
the United States, where we keep getting told over and over again that centrist
politics, neo liberal policy is really the way to go, that's what the voters want.
But that is not the case.
It's actually driven more polarization and division within the party.
In fact, we've always had a pretty big problem in the United States when it comes
to low voter turnout.
That wasn't the case with France, until fairly recently, and
the abstentions here were incredibly high,
about 53% of the French electorate decided to abstain from voting.
And if you look at what Macron has accomplished or was wanting to accomplish,
you can kind of understand why, because he was protested by the yellow vest for
wanting to essentially implement regressive taxation.
He's pro austerity, he wanted to raise the Social Security age or I'm sorry,
the retirement age, I shouldn't say Social Security age, the retirement age,
all sorts of policies that destroyed the social safety net in the United States.
And so why would we not expect a similar response to it in France?
We're honestly relatively speaking,
there's a lot more political engagement than we have here, Emma.
>> I mean, his strategy, Macron's strategy of conceding many points to the right
is a lesson that we can learn as you say, Ana, the left needs to learn everywhere.
We just saw amazing election results for the left in Colombia, for example,
and that was based on a bold economic climate change agenda among other things,
where if you actually sell your vision to the people of your country
it's being bolder is good, standing for something is good.
And it's not just good because it's the right thing to do,
it's in your best interest politicians.
And that's what we keep trying to tell people.
It may not be in your best interest right away.
I mean, Bernie Sanders built a movement and
there have been some winds electorally in the House etcetera,
built on that movement and it takes some time, and it takes some courage.
But you need to get it started somewhere because restoration politics,
which is what Biden is doing in my opinion.
I'm gonna restore our democracy to what it was, which is just putting a plug
in the many gaping holes that Trump caused and other right wingers have caused.
And as soon as another right winger inevitably gets elected,
they will create more holes.
So restoration still moves the country further and further to the right.
And the same thing is happening here with Emmanuel Macron.
Macron conceded all of these anti-Muslim points to the right wing,
he's been aggressive in targeting Muslim mosques,
areas of faith in prayer in order to help demonize them.
So that he turns out his voters, well, it didn't work out that well,
very low turnout for him.
And who's gonna keep turning out, the actual racist because the racists always
wanna go with the real thing, they're not gonna go for the guy that just says,
I'm a little bit racist, but not as racist as Le Pen.
No, they want the real thing and
he's helped stoke islamophobia in the process of a failed election strategy.
So he's both an idiot and he's doing the wrong thing morally for Muslim people who
are incredibly vulnerable to the extreme racism that's in France right now.
>> Yeah, you're exactly right about that.
And as a result of the losses for his party in this
recent election, he has to figure out a way, I mean,
it'll be a lame duck situation unless he finds a way to work or
create a coalition within parliament.
And so just to show you that he has learned nothing.
He has decided to work with the traditional right instead of like,
hey, the left has actually made some pretty significant gains here.
Why don't I see why?
[LAUGH] Why don't I see what's appealing about their platform?
Maybe that's the coalition, maybe that's the direction I should go into.
But much like the mainstream Democratic Party here,
he's digging his heels in and has decided to work with a coalition of
the traditional right instead of moving to the left and maybe listening to
all of those people who took to the streets in the yellow vest movement.
He doesn't really care too much about that, just wants to continue on with
the same failed policies that has led to major losses for his party.
So we'll see how it plays out, actually we know how it's gonna play out.
It's playing out here in the United States as well, just one failure after the next.