Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2024 5:14 am
I mean, it's a very risky bet, and his ego has played no small part in the decision, that's a certainty. But he probably would have run into trouble later this year -- it's likely the budget vote would have let to a political impact so the decision to hold the inevitable elections at a convenient time makes a bit of sense.
Though as you say, the likely result is either a divided assembly as we have now or an outright RN victory.
Given the fact Macron hasn't had a cooperative majority in the National Assembly starting from... uh, the last parliamentary election, not to mention the difficulty they've had in enacting their program, I've seen that speculation of a snap election was rife; turned out that the EU parliamentary election was the trigger. The last time a snap election was called in France (in 1997) also backfired spectacularly, but that was with a somewhat different motivation (apparently, Chirac wanted to catch the opposition off-guard by calling the election a year early). In that sense, it's probably ego, but not hubris like Chirac.
That said, there's a completely different electoral system at play in the parliamentary election, like you said: EU parliamentary elections are purely proportional, while the National Assembly elections use a two-round system in single-member constituencies, and turnout at national elections often tends to be higher (as is the case in the Netherlands). We saw the effect of this in 2022, where NUPÉS and Renaissance had close to the same fraction of the popular vote, but Renaissance ended up with almost double the number of seats. Whether or not RN can overcome a united resistance is hard to tell... but that resistance has to be there.
Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2024 2:03 am
The story is similar in many European countries. I think it came a bit earlier in France, and fairly later on in Germany (though we've been hearing about the AfD for about a decade.)
Same here in the Netherlands: in 2002, there was the LPF (
Lijst Pim Fortuyn), and since 2006, there's been the PVV (
Partij voor Vrijheid) with a spate of other far-right parties popping up (FVD, BVNL, JA21, BBB...), so PVV's success both in the EU election and in the national election last November really aren't surprising. But the proportional system in play in Tulipland generally means that no party ends up with an overwhelming share of seats in the House of Representatives, and that's not quite the case in France.
Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2024 12:25 am
Yes. The Assembly is elected for five years, so in theory, the next legislative elections will be in 2029.
In practice, in 2027, if the newly-elected President doesn't have a majority in the Assembly, their first decision will be to dissolve it and call for new legislative elections.
If it seems terribly unfair that the President can dissolve the Assembly but can't be removed by it... well, that's because it is.
Very true. It might also be worth noting that the President of France has a very limited veto power, unlike the US president, so the power to dissolve the National Assembly possibly is the "check" here. (It's maybe comparable to the Australian system, where the Senate has an unlimited power to block legislation... so, to get past the Senate, there's the power to dissolve both houses of Parliament simultaneously for a snap election.)
There also apparently is an impeachment procedure in France (Article 68 of the Constitution), but I have no idea if it's ever been considered or what the conditions are.
Results in the Nether Regions: PVV made gains in terms of EU parliamentary seats (now on 6 out of the 31 seats, up from 1), but the top party remains the Green–Labor alliance (8 seats, a loss of 1 seat). Both parties are spinning this as a win, unsurprisingly. They're also finalizing the coalition agreement, coincidentally, which took almost eight months after the last election: it's a PVV-VVD (party of the outgoing Prime Minister)-NSC-BBB government, but NSC insisted that they would only join an extra-parliamentary cabinet, so it's made the negotiations a bit strange. Though this at least means there won't be a Prime Minister Wilders...
