Tim Bale and Safia Dahani discuss the French and UK election results on The Conversation Weekly podcast.
A few days after Labour leader Keir Starmer was elected British prime minister on July 4 with a landslide victory, ending 14 years of Conservative-led rule, a coalition of left-wing parties came out on top in the French legislative elections. It was a good week for the left in this corner of Europe.
In the UK, much analysis on election night said it was more the case that the Conservative party lost the election, rather than that Labour won it. The Conservatives went from having 344 seats when parliament was dissolved in May, to 121 seats – its lowest number in history. Bale says this had two effects. First, it put off a lot of voters who would otherwise have voted Conservative, and second, it pushed voters towards the Reform UK party of Nigel Farage, which won 14% of the overall vote.
But for Safia Dahani, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in France who is an expert in the political sociology of the RN, the result is not really a failure for the RN and Marine Le Pen, its presidential candidate. The last election showed that it’s not like any others. It’s a far-right party with far-right candidates and also with people that don’t really know how to do professional politics.
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