The French election has been framed as a significant defeat for Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party. The BBC’s Paul Kirby in an article titled ‘What just happened in France’s shock election?‘ explained:
Nobody expected this. High drama, for sure, but this was a shock.
When the graphics flashed up on all the big French channels, it was not the far Right of Marine Le Pen and her young Prime Minister-in-waiting Jordan Bardella who were on course for victory.
It was the Left who had clinched it, and Emmanuel Macron’s centrists – the Ensemble alliance – had staged an unexpected comeback, pushing the far-Right National Rally (RN) into third.
Of course, the BBC wasn’t alone in proclaiming the second round an unexpected victory for the far-Left, Left and centrists over the forces of the “Right”, sorry, the “far Right”, as I must get used to calling any party without an open borders policy.
Likewise, the Telegraph described how:
National Rally had been beaten by a ragtag alliance called the New Popular Front – comprising Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-Left France Unbowed, Communists, Greens and Socialists.
But even more humiliatingly Le Pen’s party appeared to have been beaten by Mr. Macron’s centrist Together alliance, which polls had predicted would founder in third place.
However, for anyone with even a passing familiarity with French politics this was exactly the outcome we’d expected. It wasn’t a shock. The Leftist alliance didn’t stage an unexpected comeback. And Le Pen’s party wasn’t beaten into third place by Macron’s centrist Together alliance. To understand the consequences in terms of Parliamentary seats Robert Kogon’s recent Daily Sceptic article explains the vagaries of the outcome very succinctly. However, I thought a look at how and why the election is misreported would be of interest.
Of course, regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will be familiar with this tactic of the mainstream media (MSM). Set up a false position. See the false position not come about. Declare a disaster for the person or party you wish to smear. In this case, the MSM set up the position that Le Pen would win the second round of the French elections. An outcome that, once it was clear that Macron had done a deal with Mélenchon – and it was always inevitable that he would do a deal – then Le Pen couldn’t win.
Let’s look at the actual data rather than rely on the BBC’s in-house analysis.
Somewhat surprisingly, Le Pen’s RN Party saw the largest second-round percentage increase in its vote share of any of the political parties or groupings.
Mélenchon’s Left Alliance lost 2.4% in vote share while RN’s share increased by 3.8%, not an outcome you would have guessed from the BBC.
In terms of total votes cast, all the parties and groupings saw fewer votes cast in their favour in round two in comparison to round one. In fact almost 4.8 million Frenchmen who had voted in the first round didn’t vote in the second round. So much for Macron mobilising the forces of democracy!
As can be seen in Figure 2, the Left Alliance lost over two million voters between rounds one and two. This was not a victory for any thing other than the voting system designed to do what it did: prevent (Right-wing) populists getting near the levers of power.
Self-evidently, this wasn’t a rout of the Right. So why is it presented as such? Well, we all know the answer to that one: the ‘Establishment’ wants to frame the “far Right” as a threat. A threat that can only be defeated by the plucky voters of France coming together to see them off. The wish is to show the Right suffering a defeat. It’s exactly the same tactic as we saw the BBC adopt in choosing a Question Time audience devoid of Reform supporters. Or Channel 4 in its use of highly questionable tactics to smear Reform. Take your pick: Andrew Tate, Russell Brand, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Nigel Farage, each framed as a threat to “good order”.
One of the things that we plebs learnt from the Covid pantomime is to never accept any news story at face value. It’s often relatively easy to find the data that allow you to answer that nagging question that comes to mind after any BBC news item: “Am I being taken for a fool?”
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