Weeelll… to put some factual perspective on this: in the 2022 legislative elections, a mere two years ago, the Rassemblement National got 89 seats. Almost 4,250,000 people voted for them. This morning, the RN have increased that to 143 seats. One week ago, an estimated 10,000,000 French men and women voted for them. That did not change yesterday. Approximately the same number. They're not going away.
What changed was that the mutual standing-down agreement in three-cornered contests worked pretty well. According to national radio, an estimated 70% of left-wing voters voted for the centrist/centre-right candidate (when they chose to vote — I'm going out to buy the paper shortly, I'm very curious to see what the level of absention was everywhere); they played the game, by and large. 50% of centrist/centre-right voters voted for the left-wing candidate, so they played the game. Not as much as they could have, but honestly a fair bit more than I expected from them. Also — but again, I need to see the figures — a week ago approximately 34% of all voters enrolled on the register did not bother to go down to the polling station. In many parts of France (including the one I'm in) that was as high as 40%. I would imagine that a number of those people woke up.
The political pundits are saying, well , there's no overall majority (and concluding from it that France will be ungovernable). But that, for good or for ill, is what the French people wanted, and that's what they've chosen. France will be ungovernable if there's no sense of compromise. There's going to have to be a lot of sitting down around tables and thrashing things out, for weeks, possibly months.
Nobody should be playing the Billy-big-bollocks this morning. Unfortunately, some are. We'll see…