The first two maps tell the story. The remaining maps show where the two candidates must assemble their winning margin.
Yes, francophones will get more out of this, but the maps communicate a lot of information.
Use the comments for translation or paraphrase of any significant text in the article.
I just had a look at the results from Sunday’s vote in Clermont-Ferrand, the provincial capital where I spent four months several years ago. (Clermont-Ferrand is the town that features in the film Le chagrin et la pitie, known in English as The Sorrow and the Pity–the classic documentary about the varied French response to German occupation during WW2.) The Michelin Corp. is based in Clermont-Ferrand; the town has a history of labor radicalism and was once a stronghold of the French Communist Party. (There’s a road called l’avenue de l’Union Sovietique.) Hollande won by a landslide there in 2012. Anyway:
Macron 29.6%
Melenchon 25.6%
Fillon 15.1%
LePen 12.5%
Hamon 9.9%
The Macron and Le pen maps look suspiciously like the geography-based vs. population density-based maps that told the story of the recent U.S. election. The rural French white working class is pissed off and they are going to pour into the polls. The middle class is going to believe the centrist press that continues to pick Macron.
Macron is a banker, fer chrissakes!!!
Le Pen by a nose.
Maybe even more.
Watch.
AG
Le Pen needs a majority.
Fillon has endorsed Macron and Sarkozy/UMP/LR voters will not have forgotten that Le Pen’s un vote blanc was the margin of difference in Sarkozy’s loss.
Could be.
We shall see.
Every time another nutcase kills someone in the name of Allah, thousands of votes move right in the NATO countries.
U.S. included.
AG
There is this little fact about those voters. The nutcase kills people in cities. The scared voters are in out-of-the-way rural areas where these incidents rarely happen.
Strange, isn’t it, how humans evaluate risk.
Not so strange, maybe…
They’re out there because they are frightened of the cities, even in so-called “normal” conditions. It has been proven to them over long periods of time that no matter how strange the doings of city folk, a hundred miles or more between them and the urbanites is enough to keep things fairly normal as far as they are concerned
But when the cities start to become really nutso-sounding to them???
When they see their children going down on opioids?
Their bank accounts and businesses failing?
24/7 images of terror and despair logged into their brains by the media?
They tend to get a little…nervous.
Who could blame them?
And then they lash out against the people that they blame for these problems.
You can’t blame them, really…they’re not geniuses or even exceptionally gifted people, most of them. Thats why they’re still in the sticks.
Jes’ folks.
Working people.
The smart-asses already left.
And they are…justifiably…on the defensive.
Then some authority figurehead appears and takes them right off into NeverNeverLand.
Hitler.
Nixon.
Reagan.
Trump.
The list is endless.
So it goes.
If the so-called “good people” hadn’t copped out in the first place, none of this would be happening.
But it is happening.
I dunno if that’s in the bible. But it should be.
So it goes.
Later…
AG
” The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Dante? Maybe?
Dunno who said it first, but my Murphy/Gilroy grandmother said it to me.
A number of times.
And…she wasn’t talking about any sort of “metaphorical” hell, either.
She was a true believer.
Diss her at your own peril.
Could be we are deep in it already.
AG
And the Demons have taken over DC!
Indeed they have.
Since the early ’60s if not before.
AG
Per Wikipedia, it’s an approximate translation from medieval French, from one Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.
Something about a sense of control. In the country you think you can control the risk, your life has some certainty.
In the city you have a sense of how random life can be, a better sense that you can never control everything.
I often thing that is what lurks behind the fundamentalist belief systems. All of life reduced to a series of bright line decisions with no ambiguity.
A paint by number belief system to beat back the uncertainty of life.
Once, long ago, I read that country people feared their children going to the big wicked city, while city folks feared their children going into the wild countryside without telephones (pre-cellphone era) and cops on corners (way long ago).
Fear of the unknown.
When I first went to spend summer with my Aunt in rural Michigan, I couldn’t sleep with all those strange noises from birds and who knows what. Many years later after moving back to Illinois after decades in the suburbs, I stayed briefly with my sister-in-law in Chicago. I couldn’t sleep with those sirens periodically on the streets all night. When I was a kid, sirens and screeching tires were normal sounds.
I moved from Vermont to Boston, and then lived for over a decade in Manhattan. When I moved from there to suburban Florida I had to have an electric fan on, even when the AC was on.
I could not sleep without noise.
And when I moved back to the city and the background noise was heaven.
This isn’t the US.
The poll on where the Melenchon vote goes is 50% to Macron, 15% to Le Pen and the rest won’t vote.
The lower income swing voter from Obama to Trump does not exist to nearly the same extent in France.
I’m not sure that’s correct. However, there are no “Obama” voters in France to swing to “Trump.
It’s another “new kid” v. “old guard” open seat election. 1968: it was the New Nixon (but in 1960 he’d been “old guard”). The “old guard” has only prevailed in one of those elections.
French voters rejected the traditional old guard in both the primaries and general election, but FN and Le Pen isn’t new on the French national political scene. Been around longer than the Clintons.
It’s really the Old Guard dressed up as the New Kid in the one person of Macron.
The French will be getting a continuation of the status quo only with a younger, more energetic elitist technocrat who can be expected to do Brussels’ bidding.
Maybe I should have used ‘face’ instead of ‘guard.” And by ‘old,’ I didn’t mean that to be the older candidate but the one with a longer and therefore knowable, political paper trail or record.
Political parties are, of course, the guards, but sometimes they fail in advancing the person most in tune with and of them. When it does happen, they can choose to bolt (as Democrats did in ’72), grudgingly accept the nominee (Democrats ’76 and Republicans 2016), or keep their powder dry and accept a loss (GOP ’64).
What happened in France in this election cycle would be near impossible to replicate in the US. Primarily because the left, center, and right wings are embedded in the two political parties and there is only one general election.
Yes, exactly what drove Hollande’s approval rating down to single digits has become what French voters want more of. More weird because they put it in the hands of a neophyte.
Look what I wrote above about Clermont-Ferrand. The white working class didn’t turn out for LePen there, it would seem. Ms. LePen has been trying to detox the National Front, but plenty of French people know about fascism from 20th century history. I do believe you’re drawing a false analogy between France and places that never experienced fascism and occupation.
Robert M Persig author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, perhaps the best mid-late 20th century novel, has died.
Persig quotes. A few:
Rephrased a little, these are the tenets of any serious artist.
We do to do, not to “get somewhere.”
We’re already here.
We just want to go deeper.
AG
Don’t know much about Zen, but working on an engine you feel a part of it. The blend of man and machine. Writing a computer program is like giving birth. Their once was a book, “The soul of a new machine”. That’s what it’s like firing up a new embedded program on new design hardware.
Now all you middle class people can laugh at the stupid prole.
I actually know the difference between their, they’re and there. But the spellchecker doesn’t and I was too quick to accept its result.
I write code to solve scientific, computational problems (in FORTRAN, go ahead and laugh). When it finally works, when known examples with exact solutions can be reproduced, man is that satisfying. Definitely not to be laughed at. If you do something similar, you’re a skilled programmer.
Thank you and not laughing at FORTRAN. I started myself with FORTRAN IV and punched cards. In grad school I used FORTRAN to analyze the data for my paper.
In scientific computing FORTRAN has some advantages over C. I did lots of FORTRAN simulations at International Harvester. It was my first professional computing job.
Mostly I’ve done embedded work with C and 8051 Assembler and once PowerPC Assembler. PowerPC was supposed to be RISC. What kind of RISC machine has a SQRT machine instruction? Some GUI applications on Linux with C++. I could also mention 8080 and 8048 assembly language but that would really date me.
Young’un: Grandpa what were punch cards?
Grandpa: Unforgiving.
Youn’un: What???
Grandpa: [starts muttering about commas and semicolons and deck runs and fouled up job cards]
True story, circa 1980. At IH, a young PhD I worked with kept his FORTRAN program on four boxes of punched cards instead of the drum drive. Didn’t trust magnetic media. Not a backup on cards, the ONLY copy. On day when going down the staircase from the second floor he tripped. Cards flew everywhere.
Highly recommend that you see the movie “Hidden Figures.” FORTRAN and punch cards have a minor role in it. But otherwise it’s a thoroughly enjoyable movie.
Thanks.
You’re not fooling me … worked on peripheral equipment for the EL X-8 Electrologica NV computer used for scientific aplications at Universities.
UNIVAC 1108 most powerful computer in Illinois. Owned by Uncle Sam, of course.
Re-read that recently after 30 some years. I could appreciate the first quote you gave, Marie3, because I’d become proficient with bicycle maintenance and repair. Thing is, I’ve also become a Zen student in the last decade, and the book hasn’t got anything to do with that spiritual practice. Whence the title? Don’t know. Pirsig also displays some very dubious logic in places, kind of weird for a philosopher.
It would be interesting to see if there were any patterns between the percentage of immigrants from Moslem countries (Turkey, Algeria, Morocco) and the Le Pen vote. Based on just eyeballing http://www.letelegramme.fr/dataspot/immigration-le-centre-bretagne-a-contresens-20-04-2016-11037935.
php there dont seem to any obvious patterns. I was expecting to see a strong LePen vote in places with some but not lots of Moslem immigrants.
More likely a strong Le Pen vote from areas that are somehow seriously threatened by immigration problems.
Hardly anyone one wants to take action against a group that does not…with adequate reason or not on both sides…somehow threaten them.
AG