Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action.
I guess it's time for the class warfare to return to the EU. I wonder if this will catch on and spread to other countries as well.
Hopefully yeah, Polanski is amazing. The UK was in much bigger need of this because they didn't really have anyone at all before and after Corbyn, but even in countries where we still have people fighting the good fight it's helpful to see other societies revitalize.
This is also why watching Minneapolis as a foreigner is good, it's a reminder that even when a country's politics and media are captured by the right for 40 years, people still remain human.
So another trade deal starting to gain momentum, now with India. Seems India wanted better conditions for immigration into EU. Since I have two colleagues that are Indian I don't really see the issue.
It does seem that the Trump tariffs did something good at least.
I disagree with conservatives about virtually everything but I will always respect the patriotism of those who help their rivals to keep lunatics and pyschopaths out of power.
I disagree with conservatives about virtually everything but I will always respect the patriotism of those who help their rivals to keep lunatics and pyschopaths out of power.
Those are actual conservatives it sounds like, as opposed to reactionaries who use the word "conservative" because they're cowards. So, well, center right, liberals, stuff in that vein. It's not 1 to 1 because every country has their specific sauce but generally speaking this is Biden telling people to vote for Sanders so that Trump doesn't win.
Portugal seems like such a chill country full of logical and kind people, I was there only for a few days but I absolutely loved it, if I ever moved from Croatia I'd probably go there.
I can see that a lot of propaganda is being pushed about the India trade deal, as always, a LOT of racism sprinkled in, I've been seeing it in the IT community here, it's pretty depressing.
I hope that one day people start understanding that these kind of things are inevitable and if we want to be a competitive economy and a power that is taken seriously on the world stage, which is the only way for us not to be subjugated and taken advantage of is to have partners, and those come with give and take.
The problem with this, of course, is that a lot of EU populace is easily manipulated and predisposed towards racism, especially towards brown people, so the propagandists from all sides who wants EU to fail are chomping at the bit to foment this kind of shit.
Social media, starting with X, needs to be banned, that one is beyond repair and obviously used as a weapon against democracy, and perhaps even more importantly, a CP machine...
Then, move on to Facebook and make them label AI propaganda, make them remove the most toxic voices and make them actually moderate their content again if they want to stay active in EU, same with Instagram and especially same with TikTok.
Hungary is wild as we are approaching the elections.
There is a website which is basically counting down to publishing a sex tape between the leading opposition leader Madyar and his ex, the website currently consists of a screenshot from the camera they clearly planted in a room they knew they'd ed up after an event.
This is 1:1 Russian style kompromat, also, I really don't understand why would they think this makes the guy look bad, the woman is of age, they both said it was consensual, what does Orban think this will achieve?
On February 13 2026 05:41 Jankisa wrote: Hungary is wild as we are approaching the elections.
There is a website which is basically counting down to publishing a sex tape between the leading opposition leader Madyar and his ex, the website currently consists of a screenshot from the camera they clearly planted in a room they knew they'd ed up after an event.
This is 1:1 Russian style kompromat, also, I really don't understand why would they think this makes the guy look bad, the woman is of age, they both said it was consensual, what does Orban think this will achieve?
Might be aimed at his socio/religious conservative base. I genuinely have no idea how much of a hangup the Christian conservatives in Europe would have around non-marital sex, I wouldn't have thought all that much. But that would be my guess to the thinking process as to why this could be considered detrimental to Magyar?
From what I was able to see on Reddit it seems like the Madyar guy already per-empted the release by saying that there were drugs at the party in this apartment, but he didn't partake.
So at the very worse the camera might have caught him doing blow, which, you know, could hurt him with the boomers but I don't think the majority of people would give a fuck. He can also always say it was manipulated, who knows.
Then again, I am not Hungarian so I might be totally off about that.
Been a while since I've done an effort post, and I had the urge to do one on the french municipal elections, even though in the grand scale of things they aren't very important. I'm going to use some dude named Texas Paul on Bluesky as a starting point. He has a little audience he's not very important I'm sure I could have found similar posts by larger accounts, but his post is a good basis for the stuff I want to say, and also he's one of these guys who is only against genocide when the genocide is perpetrated by his political opponents, so, you know, fuck him. He declared: "Marine Le Pen's ultra-right wing National Rally Party got roflstomped in Today's elections in France. Despite strong first round appearances the left got it's shit together and quit splitting votes for the second round ending any hopes of a bigoted right wing French government."
Here are all the ways in which this is wrong:
1. It is very unimpressive to beat extremes in french municipal elections, because the system was designed with the intent of doing just that. At the time the communist party was quite strong, and that was scary, so we had to make sure that it would be very difficult for them to win. As a result of that fear, there are two rounds, the first round where you can vote for anyone, and the second round where you can only vote for people who qualified in the first round. This favors candidates in the middle mechanically, obviously, as every time you get two people in the second round where one is extreme and the other is not as much, the person who is closer to the center can form a much larger coalition of different voters. On top of that, it was decided that to qualify for the second round, you needed to have more than 10% of the vote in the first. The idea there being to address a specific scenario: if in a place a communist got 40% of the vote, a rightwinger got 45%, and a socialist got 15%, you don't want the socialist voters to have to pick between the rightwinger and the communist, as they might pick the communist. Instead the third guy can stay in and split the left vote to make sure the communist isn't elected. This is less relevant to rightwing extremism but I would be shocked if there are no cases of conservatives staying in and splitting the rightwing vote, surely that must have happened a few times.
It is also the case that both the RN and LFI don't have a ton of experience running municipal campaigns, it only became part of their focus more recently, so I'm sure part of the reason why the center left, center right and rightwing are able to win so many of these elections is simply because their opposition sucked at political campaigning. There's not much analysis that one can do about that but it would be dishonest of me to not mention it so I'll mention it as well.
2. It is absolutely not true that the RN got roflstomped, arguably it's not even true that LFI got roflstomped. I think the conclusion comes from just looking at the raw numbers, rightwing got 1261 municipalities, leftwing got 726, centrists got 536, and then the RN got 59 and LFI got 9. So yeah, if you compare that 59 to the entire amount of elections that were going on and your framework is the republican party in the US, it looks pretty bad; but in the context of France it's a continuation of the far right gaining ground, and also you have to account for the difficulty of winning explained in 1. Le Pen said she was very satisfied of these results and I don't think it was cope.
3. Even if the premise that the far right got roflstomped was correct, which it isn't, it wouldn't be because "the left got it's shit together and quit splitting votes". This is almost exactly the opposite of the correct conclusion. Not splitting votes and being all united behind a single group is precisely the wrong strategy to fight the far right, which maybe the best example of is simply the US, where the vote hasn't been split in decades and you keep losing to the far right all the time. What France did there is the exact opposite of not splitting the vote: a bunch of places elected a rightwinger, other places a centrist, other places a leftwinger. People from all parties ran in a "fair" (-ish) campaign, and then the person who is most popular in the specific place is the person chosen. So you have places where a leftwinger will vote for a centrist or a rightwinger to make sure the far right doesn't win, but you also have places where a centrist will vote for a leftwinger to make sure the far right doesn't win, and places where rightwingers... well I guess a lot of that vote went to the far right anyway but you know, I'm sure there are a few conservatives who hate the far right, I haven't met a ton of them but hey, let's say that they exist for the sake of the argument.
When you don't split the vote, you present the same type of candidate in all places, and a lot of those candidates will be ill-suited for the places they run in. A place like Marseilles voted in the first round 36% for the leftist and 35% for the far right candidate. What if we hadn't split the votes and we were all united behind a centrist? Well, the centrist in that election got 1,85% of the vote. Surely you see how the plurality allowed us to produce a much better candidate against the far right there, which is what ended up happening: if the only choice was a centrist because we're all united against the far right, that person may have gotten a bunch of votes from leftists and become competitive... but clearly their politics aren't popular in that place, so running them instead of a leftist would have been a large mistake, and a much bigger risk.
On top of producing better candidates, having a lot of options also creates conditions where more representative politics are possible. In a lot of places where a far left candidate and a leftwing candidate were running, you had a better shot of winning in the second round by making alliances. When the more centrist candidate needs you to win, they are incentivized to make concessions in order to get your support (your support being represented by dropping out of the race and telling the 10%+ of voters that you got to vote for the other guy). This sometimes allows some further left ideas to seep in even if the far left guy didn't win. And yeah that can happen with the far right as well, but honestly my feeling is that this is less often the case.
On March 24 2026 06:37 Nebuchad wrote: Been a while since I've done an effort post, and I had the urge to do one on the french municipal elections, even though in the grand scale of things they aren't very important. I'm going to use some dude named Texas Paul on Bluesky as a starting point. He has a little audience he's not very important I'm sure I could have found similar posts by larger accounts, but his post is a good basis for the stuff I want to say, and also he's one of these guys who is only against genocide when the genocide is perpetrated by his political opponents, so, you know, fuck him. He declared: "Marine Le Pen's ultra-right wing National Rally Party got roflstomped in Today's elections in France. Despite strong first round appearances the left got it's shit together and quit splitting votes for the second round ending any hopes of a bigoted right wing French government."
Here are all the ways in which this is wrong:
1. It is very unimpressive to beat extremes in french municipal elections, because the system was designed with the intent of doing just that. At the time the communist party was quite strong, and that was scary, so we had to make sure that it would be very difficult for them to win. As a result of that fear, there are two rounds, the first round where you can vote for anyone, and the second round where you can only vote for people who qualified in the first round. This favors candidates in the middle mechanically, obviously, as every time you get two people in the second round where one is extreme and the other is not as much, the person who is closer to the center can form a much larger coalition of different voters. On top of that, it was decided that to qualify for the second round, you needed to have more than 10% of the vote in the first. The idea there being to address a specific scenario: if in a place a communist got 40% of the vote, a rightwinger got 45%, and a socialist got 15%, you don't want the socialist voters to have to pick between the rightwinger and the communist, as they might pick the communist. Instead the third guy can stay in and split the left vote to make sure the communist isn't elected. This is less relevant to rightwing extremism but I would be shocked if there are no cases of conservatives staying in and splitting the rightwing vote, surely that must have happened a few times.
It is also the case that both the RN and LFI don't have a ton of experience running municipal campaigns, it only became part of their focus more recently, so I'm sure part of the reason why the center left, center right and rightwing are able to win so many of these elections is simply because their opposition sucked at political campaigning. There's not much analysis that one can do about that but it would be dishonest of me to not mention it so I'll mention it as well.
2. It is absolutely not true that the RN got roflstomped, arguably it's not even true that LFI got roflstomped. I think the conclusion comes from just looking at the raw numbers, rightwing got 1261 municipalities, leftwing got 726, centrists got 536, and then the RN got 59 and LFI got 9. So yeah, if you compare that 59 to the entire amount of elections that were going on and your framework is the republican party in the US, it looks pretty bad; but in the context of France it's a continuation of the far right gaining ground, and also you have to account for the difficulty of winning explained in 1. Le Pen said she was very satisfied of these results and I don't think it was cope.
3. Even if the premise that the far right got roflstomped was correct, which it isn't, it wouldn't be because "the left got it's shit together and quit splitting votes". This is almost exactly the opposite of the correct conclusion. Not splitting votes and being all united behind a single group is precisely the wrong strategy to fight the far right, which maybe the best example of is simply the US, where the vote hasn't been split in decades and you keep losing to the far right all the time. What France did there is the exact opposite of not splitting the vote: a bunch of places elected a rightwinger, other places a centrist, other places a leftwinger. People from all parties ran in a "fair" (-ish) campaign, and then the person who is most popular in the specific place is the person chosen. So you have places where a leftwinger will vote for a centrist or a rightwinger to make sure the far right doesn't win, but you also have places where a centrist will vote for a leftwinger to make sure the far right doesn't win, and places where rightwingers... well I guess a lot of that vote went to the far right anyway but you know, I'm sure there are a few conservatives who hate the far right, I haven't met a ton of them but hey, let's say that they exist for the sake of the argument.
When you don't split the vote, you present the same type of candidate in all places, and a lot of those candidates will be ill-suited for the places they run in. A place like Marseilles voted in the first round 36% for the leftist and 35% for the far right candidate. What if we hadn't split the votes and we were all united behind a centrist? Well, the centrist in that election got 1,85% of the vote. Surely you see how the plurality allowed us to produce a much better candidate against the far right there, which is what ended up happening: if the only choice was a centrist because we're all united against the far right, that person may have gotten a bunch of votes from leftists and become competitive... but clearly their politics aren't popular in that place, so running them instead of a leftist would have been a large mistake, and a much bigger risk.
On top of producing better candidates, having a lot of options also creates conditions where more representative politics are possible. In a lot of places where a far left candidate and a leftwing candidate were running, you had a better shot of winning in the second round by making alliances. When the more centrist candidate needs you to win, they are incentivized to make concessions in order to get your support (your support being represented by dropping out of the race and telling the 10%+ of voters that you got to vote for the other guy). This sometimes allows some further left ideas to seep in even if the far left guy didn't win. And yeah that can happen with the far right as well, but honestly my feeling is that this is less often the case.
Interesting post, thanks for the effort!
How are municipal elections treated over there? Do they tend to map on to other electoral trends.
Within the British context it feels they don’t necessarily map all that well to a general election, although they can serve as a barometer too. If local government is good, even if the party is unpopular in national governance, they can still carry the day. Turnouts also tend to be a good bit lower, so a concerted effort from fringe parties can bear some fruit in a way that they can’t so much with the extra turnout in a general from ‘casuals’
We used to see this in European elections as well to a degree, although obviously we don’t have those anymore.
On March 24 2026 06:37 Nebuchad wrote: Been a while since I've done an effort post, and I had the urge to do one on the french municipal elections, even though in the grand scale of things they aren't very important. I'm going to use some dude named Texas Paul on Bluesky as a starting point. He has a little audience he's not very important I'm sure I could have found similar posts by larger accounts, but his post is a good basis for the stuff I want to say, and also he's one of these guys who is only against genocide when the genocide is perpetrated by his political opponents, so, you know, fuck him. He declared: "Marine Le Pen's ultra-right wing National Rally Party got roflstomped in Today's elections in France. Despite strong first round appearances the left got it's shit together and quit splitting votes for the second round ending any hopes of a bigoted right wing French government."
Here are all the ways in which this is wrong:
1. It is very unimpressive to beat extremes in french municipal elections, because the system was designed with the intent of doing just that. At the time the communist party was quite strong, and that was scary, so we had to make sure that it would be very difficult for them to win. As a result of that fear, there are two rounds, the first round where you can vote for anyone, and the second round where you can only vote for people who qualified in the first round. This favors candidates in the middle mechanically, obviously, as every time you get two people in the second round where one is extreme and the other is not as much, the person who is closer to the center can form a much larger coalition of different voters. On top of that, it was decided that to qualify for the second round, you needed to have more than 10% of the vote in the first. The idea there being to address a specific scenario: if in a place a communist got 40% of the vote, a rightwinger got 45%, and a socialist got 15%, you don't want the socialist voters to have to pick between the rightwinger and the communist, as they might pick the communist. Instead the third guy can stay in and split the left vote to make sure the communist isn't elected. This is less relevant to rightwing extremism but I would be shocked if there are no cases of conservatives staying in and splitting the rightwing vote, surely that must have happened a few times.
It is also the case that both the RN and LFI don't have a ton of experience running municipal campaigns, it only became part of their focus more recently, so I'm sure part of the reason why the center left, center right and rightwing are able to win so many of these elections is simply because their opposition sucked at political campaigning. There's not much analysis that one can do about that but it would be dishonest of me to not mention it so I'll mention it as well.
2. It is absolutely not true that the RN got roflstomped, arguably it's not even true that LFI got roflstomped. I think the conclusion comes from just looking at the raw numbers, rightwing got 1261 municipalities, leftwing got 726, centrists got 536, and then the RN got 59 and LFI got 9. So yeah, if you compare that 59 to the entire amount of elections that were going on and your framework is the republican party in the US, it looks pretty bad; but in the context of France it's a continuation of the far right gaining ground, and also you have to account for the difficulty of winning explained in 1. Le Pen said she was very satisfied of these results and I don't think it was cope.
3. Even if the premise that the far right got roflstomped was correct, which it isn't, it wouldn't be because "the left got it's shit together and quit splitting votes". This is almost exactly the opposite of the correct conclusion. Not splitting votes and being all united behind a single group is precisely the wrong strategy to fight the far right, which maybe the best example of is simply the US, where the vote hasn't been split in decades and you keep losing to the far right all the time. What France did there is the exact opposite of not splitting the vote: a bunch of places elected a rightwinger, other places a centrist, other places a leftwinger. People from all parties ran in a "fair" (-ish) campaign, and then the person who is most popular in the specific place is the person chosen. So you have places where a leftwinger will vote for a centrist or a rightwinger to make sure the far right doesn't win, but you also have places where a centrist will vote for a leftwinger to make sure the far right doesn't win, and places where rightwingers... well I guess a lot of that vote went to the far right anyway but you know, I'm sure there are a few conservatives who hate the far right, I haven't met a ton of them but hey, let's say that they exist for the sake of the argument.
When you don't split the vote, you present the same type of candidate in all places, and a lot of those candidates will be ill-suited for the places they run in. A place like Marseilles voted in the first round 36% for the leftist and 35% for the far right candidate. What if we hadn't split the votes and we were all united behind a centrist? Well, the centrist in that election got 1,85% of the vote. Surely you see how the plurality allowed us to produce a much better candidate against the far right there, which is what ended up happening: if the only choice was a centrist because we're all united against the far right, that person may have gotten a bunch of votes from leftists and become competitive... but clearly their politics aren't popular in that place, so running them instead of a leftist would have been a large mistake, and a much bigger risk.
On top of producing better candidates, having a lot of options also creates conditions where more representative politics are possible. In a lot of places where a far left candidate and a leftwing candidate were running, you had a better shot of winning in the second round by making alliances. When the more centrist candidate needs you to win, they are incentivized to make concessions in order to get your support (your support being represented by dropping out of the race and telling the 10%+ of voters that you got to vote for the other guy). This sometimes allows some further left ideas to seep in even if the far left guy didn't win. And yeah that can happen with the far right as well, but honestly my feeling is that this is less often the case.
Interesting post, thanks for the effort!
How are municipal elections treated over there? Do they tend to map on to other electoral trends.
Within the British context it feels they don’t necessarily map all that well to a general election, although they can serve as a barometer too. If local government is good, even if the party is unpopular in national governance, they can still carry the day. Turnouts also tend to be a good bit lower, so a concerted effort from fringe parties can bear some fruit in a way that they can’t so much with the extra turnout in a general from ‘casuals’
We used to see this in European elections as well to a degree, although obviously we don’t have those anymore.
There are similarities and differences. A region like Provence, where the far right did quite well in this, will obviously also vote for the far right in larger numbers than the rest of France in the next election. And a place like Montpellier where the 2nd round had left vs far left and one centrist qualified for 11%, both the rightwing at 7,5% and far right at 7,26% disqualified by default, well clearly they'll also vote correctly in the national elections. So these kinds of trends you can follow and it'll map out similarly.
The campaigns are a bit different though, because the thematics can't match 1 to 1. It's difficult to run for mayor on most topics of the far right, it's not like you're going to be able to put immigrants in concentration camps as the mayor of Montmorency (I actually used a "random city in France generator" for this, which is a thing that exists apparently). This may be part of why the rightwing can keep winning a lot of these elections even though they get destroyed in presidential elections, there's not as much room to differentiate yourself on the right and people will trust the established party more if they don't see much of a difference in what is being said (that's just me talking I don't know how it goes really). Priorities will be more region specific and may not entirely map. And yeah turnout will be higher in the presidential elections because the stakes are higher, that's unavoidable, but I don't know that what you describe about extremes using that to take over has happened a lot. The strategy may sneak you into the second round but surely at that point you would be a large underdog to the more standard candidate that also qualified, and so it wouldn't be worth doing.
On March 24 2026 06:37 Nebuchad wrote: Been a while since I've done an effort post, and I had the urge to do one on the french municipal elections, even though in the grand scale of things they aren't very important. I'm going to use some dude named Texas Paul on Bluesky as a starting point. He has a little audience he's not very important I'm sure I could have found similar posts by larger accounts, but his post is a good basis for the stuff I want to say, and also he's one of these guys who is only against genocide when the genocide is perpetrated by his political opponents, so, you know, fuck him. He declared: "Marine Le Pen's ultra-right wing National Rally Party got roflstomped in Today's elections in France. Despite strong first round appearances the left got it's shit together and quit splitting votes for the second round ending any hopes of a bigoted right wing French government."
Here are all the ways in which this is wrong:
1. It is very unimpressive to beat extremes in french municipal elections, because the system was designed with the intent of doing just that. At the time the communist party was quite strong, and that was scary, so we had to make sure that it would be very difficult for them to win. As a result of that fear, there are two rounds, the first round where you can vote for anyone, and the second round where you can only vote for people who qualified in the first round. This favors candidates in the middle mechanically, obviously, as every time you get two people in the second round where one is extreme and the other is not as much, the person who is closer to the center can form a much larger coalition of different voters. On top of that, it was decided that to qualify for the second round, you needed to have more than 10% of the vote in the first. The idea there being to address a specific scenario: if in a place a communist got 40% of the vote, a rightwinger got 45%, and a socialist got 15%, you don't want the socialist voters to have to pick between the rightwinger and the communist, as they might pick the communist. Instead the third guy can stay in and split the left vote to make sure the communist isn't elected. This is less relevant to rightwing extremism but I would be shocked if there are no cases of conservatives staying in and splitting the rightwing vote, surely that must have happened a few times.
It is also the case that both the RN and LFI don't have a ton of experience running municipal campaigns, it only became part of their focus more recently, so I'm sure part of the reason why the center left, center right and rightwing are able to win so many of these elections is simply because their opposition sucked at political campaigning. There's not much analysis that one can do about that but it would be dishonest of me to not mention it so I'll mention it as well.
2. It is absolutely not true that the RN got roflstomped, arguably it's not even true that LFI got roflstomped. I think the conclusion comes from just looking at the raw numbers, rightwing got 1261 municipalities, leftwing got 726, centrists got 536, and then the RN got 59 and LFI got 9. So yeah, if you compare that 59 to the entire amount of elections that were going on and your framework is the republican party in the US, it looks pretty bad; but in the context of France it's a continuation of the far right gaining ground, and also you have to account for the difficulty of winning explained in 1. Le Pen said she was very satisfied of these results and I don't think it was cope.
3. Even if the premise that the far right got roflstomped was correct, which it isn't, it wouldn't be because "the left got it's shit together and quit splitting votes". This is almost exactly the opposite of the correct conclusion. Not splitting votes and being all united behind a single group is precisely the wrong strategy to fight the far right, which maybe the best example of is simply the US, where the vote hasn't been split in decades and you keep losing to the far right all the time. What France did there is the exact opposite of not splitting the vote: a bunch of places elected a rightwinger, other places a centrist, other places a leftwinger. People from all parties ran in a "fair" (-ish) campaign, and then the person who is most popular in the specific place is the person chosen. So you have places where a leftwinger will vote for a centrist or a rightwinger to make sure the far right doesn't win, but you also have places where a centrist will vote for a leftwinger to make sure the far right doesn't win, and places where rightwingers... well I guess a lot of that vote went to the far right anyway but you know, I'm sure there are a few conservatives who hate the far right, I haven't met a ton of them but hey, let's say that they exist for the sake of the argument.
When you don't split the vote, you present the same type of candidate in all places, and a lot of those candidates will be ill-suited for the places they run in. A place like Marseilles voted in the first round 36% for the leftist and 35% for the far right candidate. What if we hadn't split the votes and we were all united behind a centrist? Well, the centrist in that election got 1,85% of the vote. Surely you see how the plurality allowed us to produce a much better candidate against the far right there, which is what ended up happening: if the only choice was a centrist because we're all united against the far right, that person may have gotten a bunch of votes from leftists and become competitive... but clearly their politics aren't popular in that place, so running them instead of a leftist would have been a large mistake, and a much bigger risk.
On top of producing better candidates, having a lot of options also creates conditions where more representative politics are possible. In a lot of places where a far left candidate and a leftwing candidate were running, you had a better shot of winning in the second round by making alliances. When the more centrist candidate needs you to win, they are incentivized to make concessions in order to get your support (your support being represented by dropping out of the race and telling the 10%+ of voters that you got to vote for the other guy). This sometimes allows some further left ideas to seep in even if the far left guy didn't win. And yeah that can happen with the far right as well, but honestly my feeling is that this is less often the case.
Interesting post, thanks for the effort!
How are municipal elections treated over there? Do they tend to map on to other electoral trends.
Within the British context it feels they don’t necessarily map all that well to a general election, although they can serve as a barometer too. If local government is good, even if the party is unpopular in national governance, they can still carry the day. Turnouts also tend to be a good bit lower, so a concerted effort from fringe parties can bear some fruit in a way that they can’t so much with the extra turnout in a general from ‘casuals’
We used to see this in European elections as well to a degree, although obviously we don’t have those anymore.
There are similarities and differences. A region like Provence, where the far right did quite well in this, will obviously also vote for the far right in larger numbers than the rest of France in the next election. And a place like Montpellier where the 2nd round had left vs far left and one centrist qualified for 11%, both the rightwing at 7,5% and far right at 7,26% disqualified by default, well clearly they'll also vote correctly in the national elections. So these kinds of trends you can follow and it'll map out similarly.
The campaigns are a bit different though, because the thematics can't match 1 to 1. It's difficult to run for mayor on most topics of the far right, it's not like you're going to be able to put immigrants in concentration camps as the mayor of Montmorency (I actually used a "random city in France generator" for this, which is a thing that exists apparently). This may be part of why the rightwing can keep winning a lot of these elections even though they get destroyed in presidential elections, there's not as much room to differentiate yourself on the right and people will trust the established party more if they don't see much of a difference in what is being said (that's just me talking I don't know how it goes really). Priorities will be more region specific and may not entirely map. And yeah turnout will be higher in the presidential elections because the stakes are higher, that's unavoidable, but I don't know that what you describe about extremes using that to take over has happened a lot. The strategy may sneak you into the second round but surely at that point you would be a large underdog to the more standard candidate that also qualified, and so it wouldn't be worth doing.
I disagree with conservatives about virtually everything but I will always respect the patriotism of those who help their rivals to keep lunatics and pyschopaths out of power.
I know im late but i missed this one before.
Yes it was pretty given that however moved on from the first round, be that right or left, would win overall against the far right.
I'm a center right guy and i voted on a clearly left candidate on the second round because the alternative was empowering an idiot. He was not my preferred candidate on the first round but given the choice available he will do a much better job defending our country and our citizens than the other idiot from the far right, regardless if i dont agree with some of his moves when he was the center left leader a few years ago.
But to be fair, in Portugal despite recent increases of propaganda directed at pushing the far right, people still seem to be in agreement regarding major topics, regardless if they are left or right.
From my experience, excluding far right now gaining ground (same as 10y ago far left doing the same on the opposite side at the time) people differ on economic policy and order of focus of governments financial efforts but its not that one side or the other is jeopardizing basic rights.
Reading the US pol thread when coming from this reality is usually scary considering what goes on in there.
If they really get a 2/3 majority, not only is this a huge rebuke for the authoritarian right, it also means that Orban might be on the first flight to Moscow after he gets ousted because they could have the political power to prosecute him and his cronies for all the unfathomable corruption.
Speaking of corruption, and in the long standing tradition of right wingers projecting, Vance proclaimed that EU is meddling in Hungary's elections, he did this while he was, of course, on the campaign trail for a small EU country's presidents re-election.
Notably, none of the EU dignitaries or party leaders did the same for the opposition, so, you know, kind of hard to say who is actually doing the meddling here.
Great news all around, hopefully Slovakia is next and Czechia realizes how monumentally stupid of a choice they made and call for a special election.
I was kind of optimistic about the Hungarian elections but after reading some articles about the situation in that country I'm convinced the majority of Hungarians want another Orban, just a little less corrupt than their current leader.
On April 09 2026 01:35 Sent. wrote: I was kind of optimistic about the Hungarian elections but after reading some articles about the situation in that country I'm convinced the majority of Hungarians want another Orban, just a little less corrupt than their current leader.
They're usually conservative, but not too fervent about it. A sane brand.
On April 09 2026 01:35 Sent. wrote: I was kind of optimistic about the Hungarian elections but after reading some articles about the situation in that country I'm convinced the majority of Hungarians want another Orban, just a little less corrupt than their current leader.
They're usually conservative, but not too fervent about it.
Not sure how you can say that when Fidesz has been ruling since 2010... If Fidesz isn't "fervently conservative" I'm not sure what is, and they've maintained their power for 4 elections.
On April 09 2026 01:35 Sent. wrote: I was kind of optimistic about the Hungarian elections but after reading some articles about the situation in that country I'm convinced the majority of Hungarians want another Orban, just a little less corrupt than their current leader.
They're usually conservative, but not too fervent about it.
Not sure how you can say that when Fidesz has been ruling since 2010... If Fidesz isn't "fervently conservative" I'm not sure what is, and they've maintained their power for 4 elections.
It was rather based on Hungarians I interacted with. They've seemed pretty happy with how the country was run, on average.
EPT
