France: Left and right traditional parties surround after the first round

The right and left conservative parties have already been in agony for years in France, with the first round of Sunday’s presidential election putting a new nail in their coffin.

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According to initial estimates, Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo received a humiliating, unprecedented result of almost 2% or less, while Republican (right) Valerie Pekresse signed a historic defeat with nearly 5% of the vote.

As soon as the results were announced, the Paris room where the Socialist evening took place was frozen in silence.

Ms. Hidalgo called for a vote on Emmanuel Macron on April 24, but promised that the outgoing president would continue to fight the “unfair projects” he was carrying out.

“We will work to unite the (…) dispersed left parties who are unable to unite (…) to deeply restore ties with the working class,” she declared.

The collapse of the Socialist House, undermined by its ideological divisions and its ego struggles, forced President Franకోois Hollande to give up running for a second term in 2017 at the behest of (2012-2017).

The Socialist Party, promoted by Emmanuel Macron from its ranks, recorded a historic defeat in the first round, with its candidate Benoit Hamon winning only 6.36% of the vote.

The mayor of Paris, 62, recorded an even more bitter defeat today.

She has never been able to take off and her campaign has been marked by proposals that have been described as unrealistic or rhetorical, such as dithering teachers’ salaries and dithering on a basic management to bring the left together.

Quarterd

For Dominic Renee, the political scientist and former moderate elected official who ushered in the fall of the PS in the mid-1980s, he said, “The Left has never been able to find its kind of revolution instead of making a kind of revolution. They have remained a party of elected officials and civil servants. He said.

On the right, the Gallist-inspired party LR (Les Republicans) did not really recover after the defeat of its leader and outgoing president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012 and struggled for a long time to find a leader.

Valerie Pécresse, president of the Île-de-France region (Paris region), once created the illusion that she would rise to the top in elections after her appointment following a militant primary. But she ends up in the background, with estimates of between 4.5% and 5.1% of the vote, an unprecedented score for her training.

“It’s personal and collective frustration,” Valerie Peckress acknowledged, recalling her “commitment to extremism” and immediately announcing that she would vote for Emmanuel Macron “conscientiously” in the second round.

Ms. Pécresse failed to impose a clear dialogue between the radicalization of part of the LR and the decision that was inviolable to the extreme-right ideas of the Republican right.

“The problem with entitlement today is that a moderate voter with Macron will be torn apart, he will not find himself even in his authoritarian, xenophobic drift, and will be torn between aging voters tempted by too much conventional and outrageous speech.” Political scientist Remy Lefebvre explained.

In 2017, Macron and Radical Left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon were embroiled in a controversy over “what happened for the PS will be right”. “Now the macron on the right and the nutcracker on the right.”

“New Bipolarity”

Former ultra-radical activist Eric Zemmour has broken into the political arena and his ambition to erase the boundaries between the right and the far right has paid off. In the fall, Eric Siotti, one of the LR’s heavyweights, broke the already weak “immune cord” suggested by historic leaders on the right, including former President Jacques Chirac, and said he would vote for Mr Jemmoor rather than Mr Macron. , Who died in 2019.

Socialists and Republicans alike will focus on the June legislative elections, which will be an almost crucial issue.

The Socialist Party currently has 25 deputies out of 577. “It really raises questions of survival, because the public grants that finance most political parties in France are calculated based on the results of the legislative elections and the number of deputies. . If the poorest score in the presidential election is accompanied by a defeat (…) in the legislative elections, the question of the party’s survival in its current form will arise, ”said Frederick Saviki, a professor of political science. University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.

“We see the revival of French political life with the centrist and this new bipolarity on the right. And with the traditional ruling parties, the PS and the Republicans together have less than 10% of the vote. Told.