How Marine le Pen lost the 2024 elections [OC]

7 comments

1. When I was following the news of the elections in France, I was surprised by the big discrepancy between the results of the first and second round of voting.

   In the first round the party of Marine le Pen and their allies came in first place in 296 out of the 577 constituencies, which would give them an absolute majority in the National Assembly.

   Yet, after the second round they only managed to secure 142 seats, which is less than half. So, what happened here? It turns out that over 200 candidates of the other parties strategically withdrew their candidacy inbetween the first and second round. In many places where the vote was split roughly between three parties, so when two of those three formed a block they prevented the Rassemblement National from gaining a majority. It seems this strategy has been extremely effective.

   I was curious to see this effect in more detail, which I attempted to do with this visualization. Each circle represents a constituency where RN had a majority in the first round. The first round results are shown in the outer circle, with the arrow indicating the party that withdrew their candidate between the first and second round.

   The inner circle shows the voting of the second round, while the center point shows the actual winner of the seat.

   Remember, that this figure only shows the constituencies where RN gained a majority in the first round. So without interference, most of the circles should have remained blue. Also, this means that roughly half of the total 577 seats are not represented in this diagram.

   Data is sourced from [data.gouv.fr](http://data.gouv.fr)

2. Could we ask questions about the democratic aspect of this move ?

3. Although I really like the visualization, it seems wrong. NFP was the winner of the elections, but in the graph most winners still look Blue (Rn), with macrons yellow coming second and NFP coming last. What’s up with that?

4. Mass propaganda from everyone is how you attain it. Soon it won’t work anymore media 🙂

5. Kind of hard to read.

   Anyhow, this seems to assume the strategic withdrawal was the only explanation. As far as I understood, she had a bad campaign between the rounds, and she also stressed how much she loved Putin- in case people had forgotten that part. Not clever.

6. This kind of close call makes a very good argument for enacting something like list proportional elections with large constituencies for the next election. I don’t think either the left or the Macronites would object any more now.

   Over in Switzerland there have been rumours of French politicians reaching out to study how we do it.

   Of course, we also distribute executive power among the parties, which works exceedingly well, but will be hard for people used to the in-power/opposition dynamic.

7. The real losers are the French people, but hey, let them eat cake, until they run out of flour.