Politico: American nationalists’ European vacation

“It’s a definite paradox,” said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, a social media analytics firm that tracks these campaigns. “The U.S. far right, a nationalist and racist movement, is now trying to go global itself.” [...]

Despite a groundswell in the volume of American-made misinformation in Europe, activists’ efforts largely failed to sway public opinion, according to online campaign analysts, hate-speech experts and policymakers who have tracked the growth of American digital activists operating in the EU over the last four years. [...]

Soon, the hashtags #GetBrexitDone and #TakeBackControl started trending in the U.S., despite most Americans being largely apathetic toward Brexit. The idea of a polarized Britain — and a leader like Johnson who rose to the occasion to champion the will of the people — served to boost Trump’s “stick it to the elites” narrative. [...]

While the groups failed to get much attention in France, their anti-Macron hashtag was soon trending back home in the U.S. — despite most American Twitter users not interested in European politics. That allowed these activists to portray the soon-to-be French president as someone from a corrupt political elite and to link the scandal to Trump’s pledges to “drain the swamp.” [...]

Ahead of the European Parliament election in May, 2019, for instance, European activists grew tired, and even angry, over American groups’ interest. The efforts coincided with the failed attempt by Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, to unify the region’s nationalist political parties under one umbrella. [...]

Increasingly, political operators — on the right and the left — are moving away from paid-for social media ads and toward so-called organic content, or regular social media posts published in private Facebook groups to reach their target audiences.

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UnHerd: Marine Le Pen: a populist who will never win the popular vote

Marine’s poll rating as ‘potential future President’ has fallen to around 16% . Her party remains more resilient than its leader electorally, but financially it is in a mess. The Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National, is struggling to keep afloat after being denied €2 million of government election funds, for defrauding the European Parliament.  [...]

Florian Philippot, her estranged former number two and the man who masterminded the de-toxification of the FN, has painted a chaotic picture of the party in his book Frexit, published last month, Few party officials are capable of writing a speech or preparing a candidate for a TV interview, he claims. Those who are capable rarely bother. The Front National under Marine, he wrote, became a “universe of laziness”.  [...]

Without Philippot’s influence, the Rassemblement National has moved back closer to the identity politics of Le Pen père – though without Jean Marie’s vulgarity, his anti-Semitism or his obsession with the Second World War. Marine Le Pen has returned to the themes of allegedly uncontrolled immigration and the internal threat from militant Islam. Unlike her father, she tries to put these issues into a “Republican” rather than “racial” context. Like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, she portrays Islam as a threat to western traditions of tolerance and democracy. [...]

To appeal to these new electorates, Marine and Philippot bolted on to the old Frontiste, anti-Socialist, small-government doctrine a statist devotion to early retirement, high pensions, industrial intervention and agricultural protectionism. No attempt was made to rationalise the conflicting programmes or explain how they would be funded. [...]

The RN will probably perform well in the European elections in May. The low turn-out always favours parties outside the mainstream.  But this is unlikely to be the “game-changer” that Marine Le Pen pretends. She will have to do very well indeed to match her stunning performance in the last European elections, when she took 25 per cent of the French seats. The fact that she is not leading the RN list herself will be a handicap. She has chosen to keep her seat in the National Assembly rather than try again for a seat in Strasbourg. Under a new French law, she cannot have both. The RN European campaign will probably be led by her romantic partner, Louis Aliot, the party’s vice President. He is a poor campaigner and a poor public speaker but in the RN/FN family comes first.

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The Guardian: Don’t be fooled by Emmanuel Macron the ‘moderate’

Macron is far more popular internationally than in France, where dissatisfaction with his presidency has surged to 58% less than a year after his election. Here is a man who owes his power to good luck rather than any vindication of his political philosophy. In the first round of the French presidential election, he scored less than a quarter of the vote, and not dramatically more than three other candidates including the far-right Marine Le Pen and radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Macron’s thumping second-round victory was less an endorsement and more a rejection of fascism.

French scepticism towards Macron contrasts sharply with his own lack of self-doubt. He refused to be questioned by journalists because his “complex thought processes” were ill-suited for such a setting. His denunciations of his opponents would not be out of place on Donald Trump’s Twitter feed: they are “slackers” and “do-nothings”, while workers protesting over job losses should stop “wreaking havoc” and look for a job elsewhere. Macron is a pound-shop Margaret Thatcher, redistributing wealth to those with too much of it, while assaulting workers’ rights and France’s hard-won social model. His tax changes have gifted the hundred wealthiest households more than half a million euros a year: the top 1% captured 44% of his new tax breaks. [...]

So-called centrists are supposed to be socially liberal. Macron exposes this pernicious myth for what it is. A man who courted left-leaning voters by promising a humane policy towards migrants and refugees now has them firmly in his sights. The number of days a person without papers can be imprisoned in a detention centre is to be doubled; the consideration time period for asylum has been halved, meaning fewer refugees will be accepted. Charities warn that refugees fleeing war will be deported. Macron’s interior minister, Gérard Collomb, claims that communities are “breaking up because they are overwhelmed by the inflow of asylum seekers”. No wonder the far-right Front National has described his policies as a “political victory”.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Politics of France Insoumise

Perry Anderson described France Insoumise’s April 2017 presidential campaign as “an impressive feat.” Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s rallies gathered huge crowds, and he was widely recognized as the winner of the televised debates. In the final weeks of the campaign he achieved a spectacular increase in his support. Despite this major advance, Mélenchon came in fourth place, after Emmanuel Macron, the Front National’s Marine Le Pen, and François Fillon, the candidate of the conservative Les Républicains. In the parliamentary elections that took place in June, France Insoumise (FI) obtained seventeen seats, an insufficient number to have any real influence in parliamentary negotiations. Macron’s party La République En Marche secured a majority in the National Assembly, while Les Républicans came in second place. [...]

In this context, France Insoumise has at least three major resources that it can rely on while building itself as the main opposition to Macron and his neoliberal policies: Mélenchon’s charisma; the enthusiasm aroused by his presidential campaign; and the party’s parliamentary presence, which grants it a certain media visibility. FI intends to oppose Macron both in parliament and the streets, which also means using its platform to call for protests. The first test for this strategy arrived last September, when the party called a demonstration against Macron’s labor reform, which deepens the liberalization of labor relations and slashing of labor rights promoted by former president François Hollande. The protest was a success (around 100,000 people took part in the march) but it was not enough to stop the so-called XL labor reform, which was eventually approved in November. This raised the question of where the formation would go next. [...]

At the same time, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his collaborators have created a new kind of political organization, which they refuse to call a party. Indeed, France Insoumise’s membership is flexible and there are no elected decision-making structures. This organizational model raises questions. Who, then, makes the decisions? How legitimate are France Insoumise’s present leaders? How much power do militants have? These questions recall the insights in American activist Jo Freeman’s 1970 essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Freeman argued that the absence of formal decision-making structures in political organizations is “a way of masking power,” and put forward a set of principles for promoting democracy which are applicable both to social movements and parties, such as the circulation of tasks, the distribution of authority among a wide array of individuals, and the accountability of leaders to the people who have elected them.

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The Atlantic: Macron’s War on 'Fake News'

In a Wednesday address to journalists at the Élysée Palace, the French president announced his plan to introduce legislation that would curb the spread of misinformation during the country’s future election campaigns—a lofty goal he said would be made possible by enforcing more media transparency and blocking offending sites. “Thousands of propaganda accounts on social networks are spreading all over the world, in all languages, lies invented to tarnish political officials, personalities, public figures, journalists,” Macron said, adding that “if we want to protect liberal democracies, we must have strong legislation.”

Though the exact details of the proposed bill are not yet known, Macron said the law—which would apply only during campaigns—would boost transparency online by mandating that social media platforms must reveal who is paying for sponsored content, as well as impose a cap on how much can be spent. He said judges would be empowered to take down false content and even block access to websites where such content appears. The country’s media watchdog, the CSA, would be given additional powers to “fight any destabilization attempt by television channels controlled or influenced by foreign states.” [...]

France, like the United States and others, has laws that protect freedom of speech. In fact, Article 11 of the country’s Declaration of Human and Civic Rights guarantees that all citizens “may speak, write, print freely, except what is tantamount to the abuse of this liberty in the cases determined by Law.” Still, some critics fear the proposed law could represent a violation. Bruno Retailleau, a senior conservative senator, warned that “in a democracy, misinformation is better than state information,” adding that “only authoritarian regimes claim to control the truth.” Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front and Macron’s former presidential election opponent, called the proposal “very disturbing,” adding: “Who will decide if the information is false?”

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Quartz: The far right is reeling in professionals, hipsters, and soccer moms

Last Sunday (Sept 24), German voters put a far-right party into parliament for the first time since the Second World War. Right-wing nationalists Alternative for Germany (AFD) won 13% of the vote, easily overcoming the 5% threshold needed to enter the German Bundestag. A previous study (link in German) showed that AFD supporters come from different social classes, including workers, families with above-average incomes, and even academics. The study concluded that what was common among AFD voters was their dislike for Angela Merkel’s so-called open-door policy to refugees. [...]

In France, the far-right Front National (FN) enjoyed support from almost 40% of voters aged 18-24-year-old in the run up to the election. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the FN, courted young voters by taking up traditionally left-wing causes, such as women’s rights, and championing the welfare state (albeit for French citizens, and not foreigners). At the end of the first round of the election, 21% of young people cast their vote for Le Pen (young voters had broken for the far left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon in the first round). But by the second round of voting, which saw Le Pen against Emmanuel Macron, the former won 34% (paywall) of the vote among 18-24-year-old. [...]

It’s not just men shoring up right-wing populists. Le Pen was backed by a quiet army of women. Le Pen’s attempts to rebrand her party has clearly had an effect on women; a study by French pollster Ifop found that women made up 48% of voters who have voted for the FN previously. Women played an important role in the US too. While women did vote overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, white women did not. Overall, 52% of white women voted to elect Donald Trump. That figure jumps to 62% when looking at non-college-educated women. [...]

Yes, angry, working class men disillusioned by globalization have supported right-wing populism. But so did the hipsters, the soccer moms, and well to do suburbanite, highlighting the deep chasms in societies across the Western world.

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The Atlantic: The Education of Emmanuel Macron

While the initial enthusiasm that drove Macron to victory—and that encouraged me to work as a U.S. representative for his campaign—has faded, there’s little to justify the widespread anger against him. Something deeper is at work. As a Frenchman living in Washington witnessing the rise of Donald Trump first hand, I came to see that, at heart, Macron’s fall reveals the profound challenges that moderate liberals face in a polarized political climate. As he pursues his reforms, he is also trying to reshape French politics, bringing together a coalition of reformists from both sides of the political aisle, elected with center-left votes but governing with a mostly center-right cabinet. But he will have trouble building a lasting base if he is seen only as a moderate technocrat—a fate he escaped during the campaign. His success or failure to hold the center in the face of populists may well shape the fate of liberals across Europe.

Macron’s political gamble succeeded, in part, because of the unpopularity of his chief opponents, the scandal-marred Francois Fillon of the right-wing Republicans party and the divisive Marine Le Pen of the National Front. More importantly, beyond his policy platform, he captured much of the anti-establishment anger sweeping France (and indeed, the world). In January, a vast majority of French voters felt their political leaders were “corrupt”; 49 percent wanted a “strongman that wouldn’t have to worry about parliament or elections.” He pledged to run against the failures of both traditional parties, and was well-positioned to do so: At the age of 39, he had never run for office, and built a party from scratch. Only five percent of the candidates he endorsed were incumbents—most had never run for office.

But Macron is no failure. In addition to getting new candidates elected, he and his allies in parliament successfully passed a bill that sought to make France’s politics more transparent, and roll back the conflicts of interest that have poisoned the country’s institutions for decades, by imposing stricter controls on parliamentary spending. Furthermore, the inexperienced president’s first steps in the international arena, especially his handling of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, were largely hailed as successes. Now with his labor-market reforms, Macron continues to execute on his campaign promises.  [...]

But it’s unclear whether voters will follow him down this path. After all, he captured only 24 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election, and benefited from the collapse of the Socialist party after Hollande’s unsuccessful term. As the Socialist share in parliament fell from 295 to 31 seats, orphaned center-left voters turned to him. And yet, Macron’s cabinet tilts to the right, with a prime minister, economics minister, and budget minister, poached from the right-wing Republicans party. His first economic measures, from tax cuts to reduction in housing subsidies and labor market reforms, are drawn from the center-right. Macron may see all this as a way of building a new liberal pole that unites center-left and center-right. But disgruntled voters might see his triangulation as a betrayal. 

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Politico: Euroskeptics in free fall at European Parliament

In the latest blow, Ludovic de Danne, the secretary-general of the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF), one of the two main anti-EU groups in Parliament, was dismissed last week in what he described to French media as an “inevitable divorce,” partly due to his alleged role in the group’s recent problems with its finances and corruption allegations. [...]

And in a twist, even the Euroskeptics’ success on Brexit has worked against them in the European Parliament: the other main anti-EU group of MEPs, the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD), now stands to lose 20 of its members from the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) when Britain leaves the EU in 2019. Without UKIP, the EFDD would fall short of the minimum of 25 MEPs required to form a group in Parliament, and may have to disband. [...]

The populist Alternative for Germany party is expected to win seats in Germany’s parliamentary election later this month and other anti-EU parties like the National Front in France and the Populist Party for Freedom in the Netherlands made gains in their national legislatures, even though they fell well short of their targets. In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) is expected to make a strong showing in parliamentary election next month. [...]

But in the European Parliament, the weakening of Euroskeptics suggests that pro-EU leaders have had at least some success in imposing their cordon sanitaire  — essentially an effort to choke off the anti-EU groups and deny them influence in policymaking. Leaders have also sought to keep the Euroskeptics off balance by pushing for investigations into alleged corruption, including misuse of Parliament funds for national political purposes. [...]

France’s National Front is in the midst of an investigation by OLAF, the EU’s anti-fraud agency, and the Paris prosecutor involving allegations of “breach of trust,” “organized fraud,” “forgery and use of forged documents,” and “undeclared work.” The investigation will determine whether some assistants in the group were paid by the Parliament to carry out non-parliamentary work.[...]

Last year, the Parliament suspended payment of some €90,000 to a think tank linked to Nigel Farage’s UKIP because of suspicions that it accepted donations from firms and individuals, only to pay the money back using cash from the Parliament by awarding them contracts that far exceeded the amount they had donated.

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Jacobin Magazine: Populist Billionaires

The paradox at the heart of these populist right-wing movements is that while they are products of popular anger — and appear a rejection of the globalized, hyperconnected world extolled by the elite — it’s also segments of this elite that are helping power these movements.

These aren’t outliers. A study last year found that just ten wealthy donors made up more than half the donations for EU referendum campaigns, with pro-Brexit donors making up six of those ten. One of these donors was Peter Hargreaves, the founder of a financial services company, who donated £3.2 million to the Leave.EU campaign. [...]

This isn’t limited to the United Kingdom. In the Netherlands, the largest donor to Geert Wilders’ far right Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) is the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an American organization that funds various conservative and Islamophobic outlets, including Jihad Watch. The center gave the PVV €108,244 in 2015, the largest individual contribution in the Dutch political system in a single year, though it’s donated to the party over the course of a number of years, as well as paying for Wilders’s trips to the United States. [...]

All this at first seems counter-intuitive. After all, it’s generally assumed that xenophobic and anti-immigrant attitudes are the domain of the white working class, which goes to explain the success of Trump and Brexit among such voters. But data analyses like this one from Vox paint a more complicated picture. It suggests that the most active elite donors have significantly harsher anti-immigration and authoritarian views than others, including other wealthy people who aren’t political donors. 

None of this is to say that these movements and ideas are simply astroturfed. They’re not. Nor is it to say that the far right would be unsuccessful without the backing of big donors. A party founded by actual Nazis nearly won the Austrian elections despite the country’s public funding of elections, and Marine Le Pen had tremendous success despite the strict restrictions on French campaign finance laws (though she, too, comes from less than humble beginnings).

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The Conversation: We frown on voters’ ambivalence about democracy, but they might just save it

We often equate ambivalence with indecision or indifference. But it’s a more complex and more spirited idea than that. Ambivalence reflects our capacity to say both “yes” and “no” about a person or an object at the same time. [...]

Ambivalence is even rational, in that it requires an awareness of mutually exclusive choices and a refusal to choose; just as wanting a bit of both is also rational. [...]

Yet, as Zygmunt Bauman noted, the more we try to eradicate ambivalence by calling it ignorance and “mere opinion”, the more the opposite is likely to occur.

Furthermore, people who have been reduced to decision-takers will be more likely to see radical, revolutionary, even destructive change as the only way to resolve their ambivalence.

Democracy and ambivalence, rather than being antithetical, may be strange bedfellows. At the heart of the democratic idea is a notion of “the people” as both the source and guardians of power. [...]

The trouble is that the 21st-century democratic state has little tolerance of our scepticism about power. Citizens are pressured to turn their trust over to a bureau-technocratic order led by “experts” in order to deal with complex, contemporary problems. The role of voters is transformed into that of passive bystanders, prone to chaos and irrationality, and not to be trusted.

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openDemocracy: A new leftist narrative is required

Nancy Fraser (NF): Yes and no. The problem isn’t the struggle for feminism, LGBTQ-rights and against racism, but the separation of this struggle from the struggle for social justice. [...]

NF: Yes. For around the last three decades, neoliberal forces in the United States have aligned themselves with progressive powers and their struggle for emancipation and diversity. Neoliberalism, in other words, borrowed its progressive charisma from the progressives. It was the same forces, namely the Clintons, who signed over the US economy to Goldman Sachs and who ruthlessly pushed through neoliberal globalization. [...]

NF: Yes, and this has played into the hands of Trump’s reactionary populism. He seemed to come along with a plausible alternative. Finally, someone who would stand up for the ones who are left behind. And with the departure of Sanders, the only choice that was available to people was between the progressive neoliberalism of Clinton and a reactionary populism. An impossible choice. [...]

NF: We have to offer a new, left-wing narrative. A seriously egalitarian social movement has to ally itself with the abandoned working class. It has to explain why the struggles for emancipation and social equality belong together. I have committed myself for example to a feminism of the 99 per cent, which explicitly opposes "glass ceiling feminism".

We are fighting for the (female and male) workers as well as migrants and those who slave away on unpaid care work. This fight can only be fought together. The progressive populism of Bernie Sanders provides a positive example of how to do this. [...]

NF: Perhaps a more precise analysis is helpful. Trump’s voters consist of about three blocks. Most are the traditional voters for the Republicans. They elected Trump while – in many cases – holding their noses. Then there are the "alt-right" people, right-wing extremists, who in my opinion make up only a small part of his electorate. The third part consists also of former trade union members. Here, we don’t find committed racist sentiment, even if there is a certain existing tendency there. These people are reachable.

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The Atlantic: Donald Trump's Defenders on the Left

When it comes to possible collusion with Russia, Donald Trump’s most interesting defenders don’t reside on the political right. They reside on the political left. [...]

For left-wing defenders like Max Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald, by contrast, ideology is king. Blumenthal and Greenwald loathe Trump. But they loathe hawkish foreign policy more. So they minimize Russia’s election meddling to oppose what they see as a new Cold War. [...]

Blumenthal is right that Democrats don’t have “a big economic message.” But that’s not primarily because of the Russia scandal. Parties that are out of power rarely have a clear agenda. It’s hard to develop a clear message when you don’t have a clear leader. Narratives emerge during presidential campaigns. And the early evidence is that the progressive themes Bernie Sanders pushed last year—single-payer health care, free college tuition, a $15 minimum wage—will carry more weight inside the Democratic Party in 2020 than they did in 2016. [...]

But the problem with downplaying Russian election meddling because you’re afraid it will fuel militarism is that it evades the central question: How worrisome is the meddling itself? When it comes to Russian’s interference in the 2016 election, progressives like Blumenthal are behaving the way many conservatives behave on climate change. Conservatives fear that progressives will use climate change to impose new regulations on the economy. And because they oppose the solution, they claim there’s no problem. [...]

Blumenthal and Greenwald have an ideological problem. On foreign policy, they are anti-interventionists, or what Walter Russell Mead calls “Jeffersonians.” They believe that America’s empire threatens not only peace and justice abroad, but liberty at home. They want the United States to stop defending its “imperial” borders in Eastern Europe, South and East Asia, and the Middle East, because they believe such efforts cost Americans money, cost American lives, and create a pretext for surveillance that makes Americans less free.

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Politico: Le Pen’s soul-searching: 5 key issues for her party

Some point the finger at Le Pen herself. A Le Monde magazine article last week showed how the National Front chief dismayed her inner circle during a live TV debate by being far too aggressive and getting her facts mixed up, causing senior aide Sébastien Chênu to shed tears of frustration in the control room of TF1 television. [...]

Still other critics put the blame on party vice president Florian Philippot and his brother, Damien, a former Ifop pollster. The Philippots were dead-set on keeping withdrawal from the European Union as one of the party’s main campaign pledges. Convinced that Le Pen could win if she rallied the same majority of voters who opposed a European Union treaty change in 2005, they argued against dropping the proposal despite polls showing it was deeply unpopular even with National Front supporters. [...]

Philippot is sticking to his anti-euro stance, for an obvious reason: admitting that pushing for withdrawal from the EU was a disastrous mistake that cost Le Pen the election would amount to an admission of personal failure and set the stage for his own ouster, as well as that of his brother. “It’s obvious that as soon as the National Front announces it is giving up on the fight for reconquering monetary sovereignty, a number of problems come up,” Philippot wrote. “How can we imagine economic patriotism without a national currency?” Other senior executives are sure to fight hard against Philippot and argue for abandoning the anti-euro argument outright. “The French did not follow us” on this question, said election strategist and executive board member Nicolas Bay in June. Le Pen herself seems to be leaning away from the anti-euro position. She barely raised it in the final weeks of her campaign — and trying to explain how France would have two parallel currency systems after an EU exit was a traumatic low point of her debate performance.

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FiveThirtyEight: Donald Trump Is Making Europe Liberal Again

The beneficiaries of the right-wing decline have variously been politicians on the left (such as Austria’s Van der Bellen2), the center-left (such as France’s Emmanuel Macron) and the center-right (such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, whose Christian Democratic Union has rebounded in polls). But there’s been another pattern in who gains or loses support: The warmer a candidate’s relationship with Trump, the worse he or she has tended to do. [...]

So if you’re keeping score at home, right-wing nationalist parties have had disappointing results in Austria, the Netherlands, France and the U.K., and they appear poised for one in Germany, although there’s a long way to go there. I haven’t cherry-picked these outcomes; these are the the major elections in Western Europe this year. If you want to get more obscure, the nationalist Finns Party underperformed its polls and lost a significant number of seats in the Finnish municipal elections in April, while the United Patriots, a coalition of nationalist parties, lost three seats in the Bulgarian parliamentary elections in March.

Despite the differences in electoral systems from country to country — and the quirky nature of some of the contests, such as in France — it’s been a remarkably consistent pattern. The nationalist party fades as the election heats up and it begins to receive more scrutiny. Then it further underperforms its polls on election day, sometimes by several percentage points. [...]

While there’s no smoking gun to attribute this shift to Trump, there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence. The timing lines up well: European right-wing parties had generally been gaining ground in elections until late last year; now we suddenly have several examples of their position receding. Trump is highly unpopular in Europe, especially in some of the countries to have held elections so far. Several of the candidates who fared poorly had praised Trump — and vice versa. He’s explicitly become a subject of debate among the candidates in Germany and the U.K. To the extent the populist wave was partly an anti-establishment wave, Trump — the president of the most powerful country on earth — has now become a symbol of the establishment, at least to Europeans.

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Quartz: Macron is draining the swamp in France—or trying to

Sex and money are hot topics for which my two countries exhibit inverted cultural hangups. Here in the US, we freely discuss our money, but experience a countrywide conniption when a singer shows a tiny bit of nipple. In Paris, we happily discuss carnal mischief but would never think of asking someone how much they paid for their apartment—it’s tantamount to grabbing someone’s pudendum. The French demonize money just like we Americans demonize sex. Money is a very private affair. [...]

During France’s recent presidential election campaign, we were treated to revelations of corruption that led to the indictments of two candidates and a few close associates. Angry shouts of “tous pourris” (they’re all rotten!) were heard at both ends of the political spectrum, from the extreme leftist Jean- Luc Mélenchon and the no-less-extreme Marine Le Pen on the right (who herself was embroiled in the kind of financial shenanigans she accused the “rotten” political class of condoning). [...]

Next up: There’s a parliamentary election mid-June, with 577 seats in play. If Macron is to implement the reforms he articulated during his presidential campaign, he needs an indisputable legislative majority at the Assemblée Nationale, colloquially referred to as a majorité de gouvernement (governing majority). These reforms—modernizing France’s paleo-marxist labor code, cleaning up unemployment compensation, making retirement regulations and payments more equitable for present and future generations—will arouse opposition from a wide range of stakeholders, and Macron’s parliamentary support will inevitably suffer defections as afflicted voters put pressure on their representatives.

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The Atlantic: Macron, Standing Alongside Putin, Says Russian Media Spread 'Falsehoods'

French President Emmanuel Macron did not mince words during his joint news conference Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, during which he labeled Russian state media outlets Russia Today and Sputnik “agents of influence and propaganda.” [...]

The remarks, which were made during the leaders’s first face-to-face visit, comes at a time of fraught relations between Paris and Moscow—particularly due to their differences over the six-year Syrian civil war, in which they back opposing sides. Despite these differences, however, the two leaders said they took part in a “frank, sincere dialogue” and expressed their willingness to pursue their shared priority of combatting terrorism and maintaining stability in Syria. [...]

Russia has long appeared to favor Macron’s far-right rival Marine Le Pen, who the Kremlin invited to Moscow a month before the French election’s first round. Putin denied any interference, noting “it would have been very strange on our part to refuse to have a meeting with a leading political figure in Europe who wishes to develop good relations with Russia. It doesn’t mean we tried to influence the result of the French presidential election—this is impossible.”

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The New York Review of Books: A Better Way to Choose Presidents

Our essay proposed two improvements to US presidential elections. First, in both presidential primaries and the general election, we would replace plurality rule (in which each voter chooses a single candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins, even if he or she falls short of 50 percent) with majority rule (in which voters rank candidates, and the candidate preferred by a majority to each opponent wins). Second, we would reform the Electoral College so that nationwide vote totals rather than statewide totals determine the winner. [...]

By contrast, majority rule avoids such vote-splitting debacles because it allows voters to rank the candidates and candidates are compared pairwise: if a majority of voters rank candidate A ahead of B, this ranking holds whether or not C runs too, and so there is no sense in which C can take votes away from A. Several readers have suggested going a step further by having voters grade candidates (say, on a scale of 1 to 5) and electing the candidate with the highest average score—much as gold medals are awarded in Olympic diving. But there is a big difference between grading in the Olympics—where standards are clear and judgments reasonably impartial—and grading in politics, where criteria are highly variable and personal. Thus we doubt that grading schemes could work successfully in political elections: grades would have no common meaning, and voters would have strong incentives to distort the grades they award candidates.

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Vox: 6 things to watch as Macron takes office in France

Macron, who formed a new political party called En Marche in 2016, has promised to strengthen France’s ties to Europe, simplify the tax system, overhaul the labor market, and scale back needless regulations. But without a clear governing coalition, he will face a number of obstacles. If he’s unable to lift France out of its economic malaise, all those festering anxieties will come bubbling up five years from now when the next presidential election is held. [...]

We don't know what will happen or what the mode of failure will be if Macron fails. Who knows, it could empower the far left. Mélenchon [the far-left candidate who quit the Socialist Party in 2008] did better than expected in the first round, so people might turn in that direction. If you were to ask me today, I would say that's the most probable direction in which things would turn if Macron became as unpopular as Hollande.

It's still a deeply divided country, and Macron's vote is by no means an endorsement of Macron's program. Estimates are that as many as 40 or 45 percent of the people who voted for him voted to block Le Pen and not for Macron positively. And he's probably going to alienate quite a number of those people because he said that his first move will be to reform the labor code, which even the mild reforms attempted under Hollande elicited quite a strong reaction and there were demonstrations in the streets, lots of union protests. So the divisiveness is going to come to the fore immediately, and we'll see how he responds to that.

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FiveThirtyEight: Macron Won, But The French Polls Were Way Off

Emmanuel Macron’s 32-percentage-point victory in France’s presidential election runoff may end up being touted as a triumph for French pollsters, who consistently gave him a huge advantage. But it shouldn’t be. The polls leading up to the contest between the centrist Macron and his far-right opponent were the least predictive in French history, underestimating Macron’s support, rather than Marine Le Pen’s, to the surprise of some. [...]

The average poll conducted in the final two weeks of the campaign gave Macron a far smaller lead (22 percentage points) than he ended up winning by (32 points), for a 10-point miss. In the eight previous presidential election runoffs, dating back to 1969, the average poll missed the margin between the first- and second-place finishers by only 3.9 points. [...]

All that said, even the biggest polling miss France has ever seen isn’t a totally shocking result. With a limited sample size of previous elections (as is often the case), there’s a decent chance that the true margin of error of the final polling averages will be underestimated (i.e., you underestimate how many results are in the tail ends of the distribution). Before this year, there had been only eight previous French runoff elections with polling during the final two weeks of the campaign. That’s why I noted on Friday that the true margin of error in the French runoff polling was likely somewhere between 10 and 12 percentage points even though there had never been a runoff in which the polling average had missed by that much.2 [...]

Indeed, the French presidential election is the sixth consecutive European election in which the populist right-wing candidate or party underperformed its polling. This includes Le Pen in the first round of France’s presidential election. Of the European elections that have involved a far-right wing candidate or party and have taken place since Trump won the White House in November 2016, the only candidate or party to win when polling projected a loss was left-wing Austrian presidential candidate Alexander Van der Bellen. (Van der Bellen beat the far-right, candidate Norbert Hofer.)

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Jacobin Magazine: Lessons From the French Election

The result is apparent from the numbers: at least 25% abstention and 8.8% blank votes. In total, one-third of the electorate said that they were being forced to take an impossible choice. This was a little less than 1969 (when the total abstentions and blank votes reached 35.6%). This time we can note the particular indication represented by the record level of blank votes, almost doubling the previous highest levels in 1995, 2012, 1969, and 2002. While abstention is both a social phenomenon (the marginalization of popular layers) and an index of political dissatisfaction, the blank vote is a conscious political act, proper to an often educated and politicized population. For some time, the idea that the blank vote should be fully counted as a separate choice has been gaining strength: the 2017 presidential contest incontestably reinforces this demand yet further. [...]

So there is no use in leveling accusations against those who thought they had nothing to choose between globalization and national exclusion. Rather, the blame is to be sought among those who have eroded the sense of conflict that historically separated the Left and the Right, and which revolved around the question of freedom and equality. So long as we prefer competitiveness, flexibility, budget balancing, the state of war, and the state of emergency, we end up feeding the idea that the Left and Right have joined together in accepting the norms of competition and governance. [...]

In getting close to 44% of registered voters’ backing, certainly he is not the numerically weakest in the annals of the presidential contest (see table below). He is well above Georges Pompidou in 1969 or Jacques Chirac in 1995. But he is far from the 60% Chirac got in 2002. Indeed, if we take into account the share of François Fillon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s voters that transferred to him against Marine Le Pen (around half, in each case) he did not get much beyond the electoral feat he pulled off the first round. He may well, then, be the president with the most fragile basis for the so-called “honeymoon” that used to be promised to the newly elected.

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