Political observers crave a narrative: the more global, the better. And as the US election descends into chaos, American liberals looking across the Atlantic for context will see alarm bells ringing. In France, a snap election to the National Assembly has delivered a harrowing first-round victory to Marine Le Pen, long the bête noire of European liberalism, and a humiliating defeat to President Emmanuel Macron, almost a caricature of the continental elite.
But in Britain, another surprise snap election on Thursday is likely to produce a very different result, complicating efforts to divine a single meaning for this “year of democracy” when more than half the world’s population will have gone to the polls by December.
For now, the British election looks set to give Labour the biggest landslide victory any party has achieved in a mature democracy for at least a generation. The latest forecasts suggest that a 3-1 parliamentary majority is not only possible but likely. Some suggest that a 4-1 margin is plausible, and the Conservatives’ efforts to warn voters of a coming left-wing supermajority appear to have backfired, making them much more likely to support Labour instead.
Keir Starmer, the presumptive prime minister, has run a strikingly anti-populist campaign — those assessing party manifestos have noted that Labour promises less spending than the Tories — meaning a Labour victory may still be more of an indictment of Britain’s Conservatives than an endorsement of its progressives. (And the party is expected to win only about 40% of the national vote in a low-turnout election.) But after 14 years of Tory rule, a 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 Labour parliament would still be a truly historic shift.
These seem like contradictory results, and a reminder that any country’s elections are complex, idiosyncratic and contingent. But together, the two elections also seem to affirm that the big meme of global politics right now is not exactly right or left, but something more like crude anti-incumbency.
For now, all eyes are on France. But those elections, the second round of which will be held this weekend, may not be a simple referendum on Le Pen’s 21st-century blood nationalism. It also says much about the strategic dysfunction embedded in French party politics and the weakness of the antiquated establishment, visible in many places beyond France.
Le Pen’s National Rally is in a stronger position than ever, but in previous elections its candidates have been outflanked in the second round after their opponents teamed up to defeat them. This time, friction between Macron’s third party and the progressive New Popular Front (which came second in the first round) has made it difficult to form an alliance – a worrying sign that the French establishment may now prefer a hard-right victory to an alliance with the left, and another mark of the marginal drift of the continent’s bourgeois centre-right.
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