According to initial estimates, the Nouveau Front Populaire left-wing alliance is projected to win between 172 and 192 seats in France's Assemblée Nationale, ahead of Macron's coalition (between 150 and 170) and the far-right Rassemblement National (between 132 and 152).
My understanding is:
There were elections, no one paid any attention to them, the nazi party won a ton of seats and everyone went “WTF?”
Macron immediately called a snap election to give themselves a mulligan, did an all out media blitz to get people to pay attention, made a deal with the left wing where the centrists dropped out(they are unpopular), opening the door for the left wing to swoop in and save the day.
Kudos to him for a ballsy move to keep Nazis out of power.
The far-right won big in elections for the EU.
Macron called a snap election for the FRENCH legislature in the hopes of using “Far right is winning, SUPPORT THE NON-FAR-RIGHT” (implicitly, Macron’s centrists) to renew his mandate to rule.
However, the far-right won big in the first round of elections, sending everyone into a panic, since they were projected to get close to or an actual majority in the French legislature.
Macron and the Left then agreed that in races where both of their candidates were competitive, the weaker of the candidates in each of the races would drop out to bolster the other, because as much as they hate each other, they hate the far-right more.
similar thing happened in last elections in poland but with much, much more preparation. polish senate is elected in first past the post system. everyone that is not PiS (conservatives) and Konfederacja (crackpot-libertarian-nationalist-prorussian union) agreed to send only one candidate, so that collectively everyone voted against PiS. 66/100 seats in senate now belongs to them
I still can’t get over the fact that the polish Conservative Party is literally called pis fuck my life ain’t that sumthin huh whatabouthat eh, whaddaboutthat
no it’s not, but if you translate it word for word into english it’s “law and justice” which sounds like a name of a party that just staged a coup and now leads military junta in some broke subsaharan african country
and also catholic church went out of their way to use psalm 33 literal hour before lots of people vote (vote is on sunday and in smaller towns and villages lots of people go voting just after mass) half year away when it was supposed to because it has a line like “the lord loves law and justice”, yeah completely nothing political about it, please ignore all these sketchy real estate deals that catholic church benefited from
That’s an overall accurate analysis, but more leftists have dropped out than centrists. A number of centrists refused to drop out, leading to far right seats rather than leftists.