[ad_1]
As a result, voters have become increasingly unpredictable. Hayat, a political scientist, said: “Popular parties could have stabilized their voting results because they were institutions that defined important parts of life. It’s not just about what you did.” Now, he says, politics is “reduced to how many votes you put in the ballot box. Of course, sometimes people can vote left, and sometimes they can’t.” Hayat says even people who broadly identify as left-wing do not join political parties. This is largely because political identities are now formed and expressed on social media outside party organizations.
This organizational challenge does not apply equally to all parties. “If you want to stabilize the vote, you need an organization,” Hayat said. that is, a structured, consistent, and helpful presence in the community. In France, the left no longer has such a presence. The same is true of Italy, which once had one of Europe’s most powerful communist parties and now has a far-right government. And that was true in the United States, where the New Deal continued to draw white working-class voters closer to the Democratic Party through the 1970s and 1980s. In the absence of such structures, Hayat continues, “you need to be the only party that appeals to certain very strong emotions in the electorate, such as fear.” That, of course, is the strength of the far right.
“They take my word for it,” Roussel said of Marine Le Pen’s party. “Of course you don’t have to pay a rights fee.” But behind the scenes, Roussel said, their platform is still neoliberal. “The far right may talk about raising salaries, but they will also abolish the employer contributions that fund social security,” he said. “I often say to the workers I meet: Be careful at national meetings. When you put it in your mouth, it tastes like a very sweet candy. But when you bite into it, it’s very bitter. And it can make you sick. There is likely to be.”
The unemployment rate in Saint-Amand is currently 23.5 percent, according to some calculations. When Roussel took over the PCF five years ago, the party had just won about 1 percent of the vote in the second round of parliamentary elections. They succeeded in doubling this number in the 2022 presidential election, reaching 2.3% in the first round. Some 53% of those who came to vote in Saint-Amand voted for Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election. But they also voted for Mr. Roussel, his far-right opponent, in the parliamentary elections. Roussel won the seat by nine points. This is less about the specifics of his policies than about his multigenerational roots in the region (his father was a journalist for his PCF publications) and his personality and presence in the community. It might be evidence. “Marine Le Pen is against Mr. Macron, and I am against Mr. Macron,” Roussel told me. “In national elections, people vote for the far right because they’re tired of the left and the right, and it’s always the same thing. In local elections, they vote for people they know, who they like, who treat them well. I vote for people.”
as a traditional France’s party system is collapsing and “there is a cannibalization of personality politics,” as politicians circumvent the party system to succeed, says Martiny, a professor at the University of Nice. In that sense, the left reflects the populist style of the far right, where individuality trumps traditional party structures.
[ad_2]
Source link
