Originally published at: Macron's centrists lose control of French parliament | Boing Boing
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Le Pen’s National Rally took 89 seats, up from just 9
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“Centrists” in a nutshell, there.
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I’ll guess we’ll see if it’s the right or the left that the centrists work with.
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I would hope that Macron knows about the history of centrists working with the far-right. He should know about how many revolutions there have been in France already.
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Same stupidity we had here with Hillary. sigh
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If he’s like other centrists, he does not. 
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Somewhere on a French BBS right now, some self-declared “centrist” is wringing their hands about the country being torn apart by the equally extremist right and left.
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So is this just more data suggesting that no matter where you go, racist, fascist, xenophobic misogynists make up 30-40% of the population?
That’s depressing. I thought better of humanity than that.
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It’s closer to the Crazification Factor of 20-30% (see also the Keyes Constant and the Know-Nothing 27%). Still depressing.
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It seems like there’s a vocal minority of about 25% who aren’t ashamed to be seen as racists in public. But when elections roll around, another 10-20% of people will quietly support them.
I hope that those people remember that historians have a special word describing those people who quietly supported the nazis for “economic reasons”. They call them “nazis”.
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Macron ? Centrist ? What a joke.
He is anything from hard right to far right.
In fact, he doesn’t even care. Whatever makes him or his friends more money is good.
That’s just a coincidence that those thing are in this range.
He has enrolled centrists, yes. But those centrists are rightists in disguise, and the same goes for many from the Socialist Party. Remember François Hollande during the 2012 campain : “the finance is my ennemy”. Once elected, he bring gifts by billions to the richs and put Macron on rails to be president in 2017.
Oh, yes, be careful, Macron is always lying. It shows, look at his face, his strange smile.
May be he knows that we know. But he doesn’t care at all.
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Yes, that’s how far the overton window has moved since the end of the cold war. He is indeed NOW a centrist.
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That doesn’t sound inconsistent with him being a centrist.
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The current Zentrumspartei seems to be supported by former AfD supporters. Maybe Engels was right about history repeating.
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Somebody said that the difference between a moderate and a centrist is that a moderate has principles but a centrist simply wants to be in the centre and will move as the centre moves.
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The centre doesn’t move though. The fulcrum moves, and right now politics is badly balanced because the far right put it in the wrong place.
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It’ll be the right, unfortunately. He actually is right of center, he just didn’t want to wait his turn in LR.
He also convinced himself that the French really, really wanted him when he won the presidency in 2017. When in fact, only about 25% of the voters voted for him. The rest that voted for him in the second round were all “anyone but LePen”, but he was nonetheless convinced that they were votes FOR him, rather than AGAINST LePen.
I’m glad to see that the left was able to hold together long enough to get a real presence in the legislature. It’ll be interesting; this is the first time in the 5th Republic that the president has NOT held a legislature majority.
It’s also proof that he is not anywhere near as popular as he thinks he is. In the first round in 2017, he, LePen, and Melenchon (the left of center candidate) were all neck-and-neck, and only the intricacies of the way the French elections are run threw Melenchon out that year. If Melenchon had only gotten the votes from the Greens/Socialist party that year (or even this year!) it might have been president Melenchon instead of Macron.
This should put a huge spoke in Macron’s neoliberal agenda. And a good thing for us in France that is!
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The wiki suggests that this has happened before:
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You are, of course, correct. My mistake. I had thought that the president’s term being 5 years and the legislative election being immediately after the presidential one (this setup tends to, in general, avoid cohabitation), was part and parcel of the design of the 5th Republic itself. I see from the article that this was, in fact, started in 2000, rather than in 1958. Mea culpa!
The issue is really one of the way that the elections are run. I’m rather amazed that France uses such a silly method, given that the French INVENTED better election algorithms (Borda, Condorcet). 
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