shots fired

30 comments
  1. It’s amazing how high levels of deindustrialization have led to a destabilized working middle class easily won over by vapid populist rhetoric because of their collapsing quality of life and chronic disinvestment from their communities.

    I’m assuming this is a map of the election, but especially annoying thing about this map is there’s no actual labels of anything.

  2. It kinda has a geographical reasoning. The north was part of the so called “blue banana”, a region which used to be highly valuable due to its industrialization. However, due to a shift in economic focus, this region lost a lot of its value in favour for trading and service hubs (see also Wallonia, another part of the blue banana).

    The people on the ground don’t care about ideology, at least not that much. People care about 3 things; money in the bank, food in the belly and shelter over the head. If the current government can’t provide that, wel…

    Then you get rebellion votes for anti-establishment parties like Le Pen.

    I still hope she loses. We don’t need another populist, Putin lover in Europe. Orban is bad enough by himself

  3. It’s actually a rather poor visual map. The actual voters density is lacking making countryside look much more important.

    You can see the urban regions close to Belgium are all not blue. Lille, Reims, Metz, and Nancy are all yellow.

  4. The Belgians directly on the other side of that border are (ultra)socialists though.. so I fail to see a correlation..

    also quite visible that even in this giant blue zone that the biggest cities are still Macron camps, and only the rural (probably poorer & hillbilly) “hinterland” is LePen-country.. a little like what the electoral map of the USA looked like last presidential elections..

  5. What they don’t know is that the southern french part of Belgium are very socialist. I don’t even think they have a right wing party. And if they have its quite small.
    I am Flemish btw.

  6. This has nothing to do with being near belgium. This has to do with “le nord” The despised neightbourhood of France. As in it’s more poorer then the rest of france.

  7. If I believed in simple correlations, I would almost agree. Another possible explanation is that Nord-Pas-de-Calais is much more confronted with poorly managed refugee flows. But that is of course no reason to prefer a Xenophobic person, I strongly doubt whether she handles such a situation better/humanely.

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