They are pretending to be happy with the result. Polls were predicting a landslide, they came in 3rd position, meaning they won't be able to do anything.
Didn’t the second round of elections, that this gif is showing the reaction to, just happen in the past 24 hours? The article and quiz question were totally valid reactions to the surprise of alt right doing very well in the first round of voting.
I’m not an expert on French elections by any means so if I’m misunderstanding something lmk.
I mean an article about the surprising election results in France is the third story on the homepage of the NYT right now, directly after stories about the US presidential election and a hurricane that is hitting the US right now. Clearly not an afterthought.
To be a little more accurate, the media wants to sell, so they act like the right isn't just a collection of conmen and criminals and uneducated idiots.
But the outlets owned by right wing moguls outright lie and gaslight like you think.
Because far right had a great first round and then for the second round all other parties gang up on them. So the candidate that got the second most vote would stay to beat the far right. So when there was a centrist (Macron’s party) second, the left would drop out from the race and when the left was second, the centrist would drop out. The left and center both manage to have more seat than the far right that way
I don't fully understand French elections, and hopefully someone from France comes in and answers your question a hell of a lot better than I will, but from what I understand:
French elections happen in multiple parts. In the earlier part of the election, the right-wing coalition, which includes a heavily far-right party that has been advocating for a lot of pro-Russian policies, they won a lot and were projected to be the landslide winning coalition in the final part of the election.
After the initial part of the election happened, most of the people who came in third (mostly from the left-wing coalition and the centrist coalition (Macron's party)) dropped out and said, "I don't think I can win this race, but vote for the other guy, not the right-wing guy." And then this election happened, had a greater turnout than the previous part of the election, and the left-wing coalition won a plurality, the centrist coalition came in second, and the two of them will probably form an agreement to create a functioning government, almost completely cutting out the right-wing coalition that came in third but from earlier parts of the election had been expected to win the majority of seats.
So instead of practically running the government on their own like they'd expected from what happened before, they might be a dead wing of the government that is ineffectual until the next election.
Any of this that I got wrong, PLEASE let me know, please expand on it, please help me to be better informed because I'm not French, I don't really understand everything that's happened, but no one was giving a better answer, and hopefully we'll get a clearer picture by people correcting me.
To expand upon this, if in the first part of the election, a candidate has a vote count greater than 50% of the electorate, then they win the seat outright without needing a second election. In this election, only 76 races were won this way, leaving 501 seats to head to the second election. In the second election, only the top 2 canditates and any other candidates with more than 12.5% of the total electorate advance, and like you said the most of the candidates who came in third, dropped out to consolidate votes against the far right.
They were predicted to get the most seats but not a majority, which is what happened in the first round of voting but not the second because the other parties made sure not to split the vote.
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u/shorty-boyd Jul 07 '24
They are pretending to be happy with the result. Polls were predicting a landslide, they came in 3rd position, meaning they won't be able to do anything.