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Literally France right now
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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Lefty Memes
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Wait, so are you trying to clown on the fact that France managed to stop their neofascist party from gaining any real hold on power?
They didn't stop them - the fascists were already powerful enough to be an election away from the top spot, see? So no... so-called "liberal democracy" has never stopped fascism and never will.
Welcome to a two party system. It gets worse from here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the fascists lost, but this is literally how you end up with two parties. Every election from now on, you'll have two giant camps and eventually they'll just coalesce in to two monolithic parties. Then you get tribalism. And as much as I love the French for their propensity to fuck shit up when the government does something stupid, that might actually cause problems going forward.
I wish them the best, and maybe I'm wrong. I sure hope I am for their sake. But this looks an awful lot like the beginnings of a two party system.
This is not America dude WTF are you talking about two party?
The US used to have between 4 and 6 parties, depending on how you counted. That gradually worked it's way down to 2. The election of 1860 had one Republican running against 4 different Democrats, all with their own little micro party. What Republican and Democrat mean in this context doesn't mean what it means today, and that's really not the point. What the point is is, that was the last time.
That election saw the Republican take more than 50 percent. We had some "issues" for a few years, and so elections prior to 1877 won't really have much to draw a comparison here, and the election of 1880 we had two parties and no more. No little factions trying to gain power, no off shoots quarreling and splitting the vote. Two massive parties of people that mostly agreed with each other.
Prior to that we had a number of elections which were arguably two party, more than one where out of spite everyone ran under the same party regardless. But none since have had a reasonable showing of any significant third party. With two major exceptions, so major they each get their own blurb in the text books as unique elections. When Theodore Roosevelt decided he didn't like who replaced him, lost the nomination and started his own party knowing full well it would give the office to the Democrats, and 1992, when Ross Perot decided he didn't like Bush that much and ran against him as an independent, splitting off just enough votes to give the office to the Democrats and causing both parties to literally change the rules on who could conceivably run without their blessing.
You don't have two parties now.
What you have is a coalition, effectively a party, and I'm response, because apart they lost, another coalition.
This is how you get two parties.
Europe is not homogenous in political landscapes, and "coalition government" means very different things depending on where you are.
There are countries like France where most elections are first past the post, with a very strong culture of "a single party must have an absolute majority in order to govern" and a system that leads to 2-3 heavily dominant parties. Coalitions like NFP are therefore devised before the elections, so they basically function as a single party with diverging internal ideologies.
There are also a lot of counties where most elections are some kind of proportional representation, where a single party almost never gets an absolute majority. Coalitions are negotiated after the elections, often made of parties with widely diverging ideologies but still trying to work together. I believe that it's a more democratic system as there is better representation, governing parties keep each other in check and consensus culture helps taming the most radical elements despite its inherent instability.
As we are, we are in a Northern European situation with no majority despite ou electoral system, but we would need a massive shift in political culture in order to get there. Our tankies (LFI mostly) and neolibs (Ens) spent so much time in the last years shitting on each other that they refuse to work together despite it being the only way to get an absolute majority and actually get shit done and make the fascists irrelevant.
Coalitions are literally the primary way the rest of the world avoids devolving into the US’s corrupt two-party system. It’s proven quite effective.
If that could be combined with RCV in more countries (or US states), then it could far more strongly prevent the consolidation of political parties and return more power to the people themselves.
France doesn't have a two-party system. There are five major party coalitions spread across dozens of niche socio-economic and regional party blocks.
French politics is far more complex than that, on account of their democratic system having much smaller districts and more ethnically diverse regions than their American peers.
Fuck, dude, don’t remind me :(
I'm clowning on thee idea that you thinks anything was "stopped"
We know that fighting fascism requires constant vigilance. But you don’t have to be an asshole about it. Nor do you have to shit on a country’s electorate for, you know, doing the right thing and voting against fascism.
You can't vote against fascism. The French fascists are still there, gaining power - the voting didn't weaken them in any way whatsoever. And they'll keep on gaining strength until they figure out how to get into power despite so-called "liberal democracy."
All the voting in the world isn't going to change that.
Fascism is a weed and power is a vacuum. It’s always going to crop back up and we stop it with any means necessary.
Unfortunately for the US, we’re kinda fucked and being pushed towards the more extreme removal methods.
At some point one has to wonder why that weed finds such fertile ground to grow instead of spending all their time weeding.
Wouldn't them losing the election handedly in this case imply the ground is less fertile than polling numbers and online content would have you believe?
The US ruling class always collectively benefits from being right-wing. It’s why we no longer have a true leftist party in the US and instead are stuck with hard-right and center-right. I always ask people to give me a valid reason as to why the ruling class would willingly divide itself when they all benefit from the same things and are ultimately from the same realm. It’s why you see things like AOC marching with pro-Palestine marches, followed up by candid photo ops with Joe Biden—the current figurehead pushing the genocide. It’s all theatrics.
It’s like George Carlin always said:
Not that it was stopped by waging an actual war against them and toppling their governments. It's a never ending thing, no matter what you do.