French Pres thread -2022

A single vote would be a terrible system. In a crowded field you could have a candidate winning with less than a third of the vote. That is a sure fire way to end up with an extremist candidate eventually.

The second round acts as a way to moderate the electorate as people who voted for the eliminated candidates in the first round get to vote against extremist candidates.

Donald Trump was able to win the Republican nomination in 2016 due to those primaries not having this kind of system in place. It was a massively crowded field and the combination of his name recognition and his populist demagoguery was enough to win loads of states with less than 40% of the vote.

Bit of both (jam tomoz + ‘masqued FN tropes’), I think, aided and abetted by the sentiment expressed overleaf by swiwi_ in post #97.

And probably more complex still, e.g. there’s just as much disinformation peddled by ultras at both ends of the political spectrum in France, as in many other countries (US, UK, Poland, …), all lapped up by the same angry-at-everything mob and echoed in the MSM for ratings.

That’s the demand-creation side of LePen’s (and similar assorted others’) political market, and a fundamental issue -still- in modern day democracies, for the effect which it inevitably returns at ballot boxes.