Elections bring chaos to UK, unity to France

Elections bring chaos to UK, unity to France June 13, 2017

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Two European nations, the United Kingdom and France, held parliamentary elections, with radically different results.  The United Kingdom has a real political mess on its hands.  Whereas France has come together in a nearly unprecedented vote of national unity.

In the UK, the Conservative Party under the leadership of Prime Minister Theresa May was riding high in the polls.  So she called for a new election to increase her party’s majority as she negotiated the Brexit breakaway from the European Union.

But that was before England was attacked three times in three months by Islamic terrorists, and many voters wondered why the government had failed to stop them, especially since the perpetrators were known to authorities as potential terrorists.  Also May’s government put forward some unpopular proposals to save money, such as making the elderly and their families pay more for nursing home care, the so called “dementia tax.”

So in the new election that she called, May’s Tories were trounced, to the point of losing their majority, which is necessary to choose the prime minister!  They were 7 votes short, but a deal with the 10 delegates of Ian Paisley’s Northern Ireland party, the closest thing the UK has to a Christian right, keeps her in office.

But her party is furious with her and many Conservatives want a leadership change.  At her party’s insistence, May fired her two main advisors who came up with the bright idea of the dementia tax.  But she still may not last.

Meanwhile, France, which just elected the novice centrist Emmanuel Macron as president, voted for parliamentary representatives.  Macron didn’t run as a representative of any party, but he started a new one, the “Republic on the Move.”

It appears that his party, after the multiple rounds of voting are completed, may win as many as 400 of the 577 seats in Parliament!

Though he ran on a pro-European Union platform, Macron has appointed many conservatives to positions in his government.  And he has demolished the Left, long a fixture of French politics.  The Socialist Party of the recent President Hollande got only 10% of the vote, dropping its representation from 300 seats to 30.  Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant party, which some thought would defeat Macron just a few weeks ago, has dropped from 23% to 13%.

From BBC:

What was the result of the election?

There are 650 MPs in the House of Commons – so any party getting more than 325 MPs has “a majority” because they are presumed to be able to win votes on all the things they want to do. Theresa May’s Conservatives ended short of that total – getting 318 MPs (13 fewer than before the election), Labour got 262 MPs (up 30), the Scottish National Party 35 (down 21), the Liberal Democrats got 12 (up 4) and the Democratic Unionists 10 (up 2).

So how come Theresa May is still prime minister?

The Conservatives are still the biggest party in the House of Commons, and they have been talking to Northern Ireland party the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), about having its support in key votes. The Conservatives’ 318 MPs and the 10 DUP MPs together make up more than half the MPs in the House of Commons.

[Keep reading. . .]

From Eleanor Beardsley,  Another Stunning Election In France As Macron’s Party Sweeps, NPR :

The brand new party of brand new French President Emmanuel Macron is poised to sweep parliamentary elections after a first round of legislative voting yesterday.

Official tallies show his party could wind up with more than 400 seats in the 577-seat French parliament after next week’s final round. French news media are likening a party that barely existed a year ago to a tidal wave sweeping everything in its path.

Macron’s party — Republic on the Move — received 32 percent of the vote, followed by the mainstream conservatives with 21 percent. The Socialists, party of former President François Hollande, didn’t even make 10 percent. Its number of seats will drop from nearly 300 to around 30.

“The left is being wiped out,” says Christophe Barbier, a columnist with L’Express. “And the right is in a huge ideological crisis because Macron has taken some of their best people for his government.”

[Keep reading. . .]

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