Emmanuel Macron is re-elected French President, defeating Marine Le Pen | Hacker News Reader

Emmanuel Macron is re-elected French President, defeating Marine Le Pen

nytimes.com

54 pointsjbegley56 comments

Much narrower margin, even after Macron moved significantly to the right on cultural issues over the last 5 years: https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/emma...

https://www.newsweek.com/macron-france-reject-american-woke-...

France seems like it’s between a real rock and a hard place. On one hand they don’t have the cultural infrastructure to assimilate Muslim immigrants. On the other hand, they can’t keep their economy running without immigrants. Neither Macron nor Le Pen have a solution to that fundamental problem.

France does not need migrants to run its economy. This is no longer the 60s.

Systemic unemployment is high, unemployment among the young is very high. Economically there is no need for immigrants.

I don't think any European country has a solution (at least an 'acceptable' solution) to assimilate Muslim immigrants. Very bluntly, IMHO assimilation is not possible, only integration with society becoming multi-cultural.

>I don't think any European country has a solution (at least 'acceptable' solution) to assimilate Muslim immigrants. Very bluntly, IMHO assimilation is not possible, only integration with society becoming multi-cultural.

It doesn't help that worldwide media suppresses news coverage of the problems Muslim immigrants bring.

Over the past week there has been a series of Muslim riots in Sweden against a Dane's threat (not actually carried out, as I understand) to burn a Quran. When I heard about the rioting, I searched for news coverage on YouTube. Here are the first two I found:

* France 24: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey0XIy2rXBk>

* BBC <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C00R1gjsT6A>

Pay attention to both what is said and is not said.

What would someone who has watched the videos, and knows nothing else, conclude regarding who is rioting, and what are they upset about?

I then found

* Global News <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRtv33CLSOc>

* The Telegraph <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-k5qLi1MAM>

which also obfuscate. NBC News <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=325v8PPbWe0> was the first outlet that I found that actually attributed the rioting to Muslims. (All three sources use the same/similar footage from a press agency.)

At the same time, /r/worldnews had two posts on Islamic countries' condemnations of the Swedish government not banning Quran burnings. Such were the only mention of the riots; absolutely nothing on the riots themselves. Four days later, nothing has changed, except one article ... blaming the riots on Russia. <https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=subreddit%3Aworldnews+riot&...>

> It doesn't help that worldwide media suppresses news coverage of the problems Muslim immigrants bring.

Because when you report on minorities causing troubles, you need to be extremely careful. Parts of what you say will be quoted out of context, repeated by people you want nothing to do with and used against the people who have nothing to do with what happened. I don't blame journalists and news agencies they think twice before doing it. But I do agree they should do it instead of burying the head in the sand and forcing the reader to read between the lines.

Well I can only say that this observation on how the mainstream media likes to suppress news like this only tells you that you need to be skeptical on what is shown by them and look at other sources beyond the mainstream media.

The young people don't want the jobs that the immigrants are willing to take.

They want their cake and bread served to them on a silver platter, to which they can then pitch a hissy fit and knock the platter away as not being made out of gold.

We have a similar problem here in the US.

Marine Le Pen moved a lot more towards the center though.

Her "talk" might have moved towards center. If she was in power the talk would be forgotten -- Just like with other politicians pandering for votes. The tiger doesn't change its stripes.

> Neither Macron nor Le Pen have a solution to that fundamental problem.

They don't have it as it's a few decades too late. Bataclan didn't happen by accident. Whoever decides to do something about it, they will have to move with extreme care.

UK tried pretending everyone is white and plays cricket in the summer. This has stopped and reversed if anything, at least in the public sphere.

I don’t know how effective it is but at least there isn’t a chunk of population being continuously told “this is British and you aren’t it”.

Brexit of course threw a lot or confusion, who knows what the official line is now...

Saying they don't have the "cultural infrastructure" to assimilate immigrants sounds like it's letting them off the hook for a lot.

You can’t create a society welcoming to immigrants with sympathetic, cosmopolitan liberals brow beating everyone else into toleration. As someone from a Muslim country I’d never move to a place like that.

I'm not even sure what you mean, but as an American Muslim, I guess it's not my problem.

France is an ethnostate. It’s a country where the whole history and culture is intertwined with that of a single Germanic tribe. A Muslim immigrant to France will never be French in the same way a French immigrant to Bangladesh will never be Bangladeshi. Whatever welcome Muslim immigrants enjoy in France therefore depends on the sympathetic feelings of people who embrace immigration or multiculturalism for ideological reasons. That’s a thin shell on which to build a life.

wdym cultural infrastructure?

I know nothing about France fwiw

America has machinery within the culture that allows immigrants to assimilate. Americans treat them as American and they feel American. I don’t mean the sympathy liberals feel to immigrants—this is a cultural pattern that operates in South Georgia as much as it operates in New York City. I’d call it “legalistic pluralism.” You’re “an American” if you’re legally a citizen and can recite some platitudes about the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and apple pie.

In France, “Frenchness” is bound up in a millennium of shared culture and history, a thousand different kinds of cheese, etc. That’s what causes friction with Muslim immigrants. They don’t want to be French—in particular, embrace the deeply held value of secularism—and that drives French people nuts.

Yeah right. In the south, they are all about everyone being American as long as they can recite some platitudes about the Constitution.

France has a much fairer system for integration. Everything is based on how good you perform. Until you finish your studies, every major test is completely anonymous. You can become a doctor without ever having to pass in front of a Jury who may be biased by the way you look, what you believe in, or where you come from.

France has not suffered from the same deeply rooted racial discrimination the US still suffers from. During the 19th and 20th centuries, France was a refuge for oppressed minorities.

Should note of course it's the specific brand of "French secularism" that is a thorny issue. It's a type of secularism that provokes a negative reaction from most Americans as well (though IDK if there has been any polling on the issue).

Specifically, the French brand of secularism known as ‘Laïcité’.[0]

Another major difference in France's ‘cultural infrastructure’ is that they are constitutionally race-blind and don't record ethnic statistics.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism_in_France#Contrast_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_censuses...

It's essentially the same margin as Reagan's landslide against Mondale.

> On the other hand, they can’t keep their economy running without immigrants.

Can't they? Have they tried? Many countries manage to do so, and their populations aren't crying out for more immigration - China, Japan, pretty much all of eastern Europe...

There is a dire shortage of skilled and blue collar workers (nursing, construction, sanitation etc.) in Japan. So much so that a country like Japan is considering indefinite residence for these workers [1].

China is a very populous country now and is in its demographic golden age. It can do fine without any inward immigration. But with rapidly cratering birth rates it will be interesting to see what China does in next few decades to solve the problem.

[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/11/18/japan-mulls-ind...

Japan might let the 2.5% of its workforce that is foreign stay indefinitely? That doesn't sound very dire to me.

Of course it's very popular to conflate "economy will collapse without immigration" with "GDP growth will be 0-2% instead of 2-4%". Then say the economy is "stagnating" instead of "stable", and you're done.

China has their own internal immigrants that they worry about, and they need to kill a few million more Uighur Muslims before they're likely to need to worry about troublesome non-Han Chinese immigrating to the country and causing cultural problems.

Poland in recent years has been one of the most immigration-receiving countries, just in the quiet. A lot of people coming from the Subcontinent and also from Ukraine (well before the war too).

On the one hand lots of shouting about evil migrants stealing our honest bread, at the same time giving them all visas and work permits. Go figure.

I wonder how many times we can dodge the bullet before it goes wrong eventually.

One person can't manage everything. In a democratic country you need a lot of people to mobilize from a different direction.

That's eg. Why the damage of trump has been relatively low.

The former guy fundamentally changed the nature of the judiciary.

That's going to have tremendous effects throughout the country for decades.

Not to mention the negative impact that's going to have on the world over the same timeframe.

Are you sure? https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/09/02/biden-is-ap...

thus far.

Some simple arithmetic: five years ago Macron got 66%, this time he got 8 less with 58%, so all things being equal in five years it's a coin toss at 50.

Actually, it's his last term... so we won't know ;-)

He can comeback in 2032, he will be 54yo.

In nature there are no guarantees. Eventually you're going to trip and fall. Point is not to trip and fall all the time and recover quickly. That is just how it is. People will eventually pick their French Trump, then get sober, then revert back to someone normal (but hopefully not ancient years old and with the balls to fix problem directly).

Pick another Hitler, and the kind of fall it will take to fix that problem will be World War III.

There won't be a World War IV. There won't be a world left.

Stalin was pretty Hitler-y. He also had nukes. Shit didn't go down.

Not saying we're in sunshine and lollipops land, free of total annihilation, but things have to get really, really extreme for this happen. Sure, Putin may be clinically retarded enough to believe in his fantasies, but do you really think his buddies will walk the walk to the end with him?

I think they are more afraid of him than anything else.

If Putin goes to push the button, they'll be too scared to try to stop him.

Being afforded a close call like this is at least better than the Trump election where the unthinkable happened and the populist won narrowly in an upset no one believed would happen. Now at least Macron gets a chance to adjust policy for 5 years to not lose next time.

Reading her auto-translated program (https://mlafrance.fr/programme), this point caught my eye:

11 Introduce the Citizens' Initiative Referendum and introduce proportional representation.

Does France currently have a first-past-the-post style system, the kind that usually devolves into only two viable parties? What is Macron's stance on this?

France doesn't have a two party system. Presidents are directly elected by a sinple majority, in most cases this requires a run off between the two leading candidates.

"Citizens Referendums" are a commen trope in Europes far right, as long as they are not part of government that is. Basically, it's populism through the back door.

For Parliamentary elections there's a two round system that works this way:

First round candidates who got more that a certain threshold (percentage of registered voters) go through to second round unless a candidate gets more than 50% of the vote and is then elected. Usually that means 2 candidates, sometimes 3.

Second round is first past the post.

Le Pen has been campaigning for decades to change the system to a more proportional representation because although they get something like 20-30% of the votes overall they get very few MPs, approx 0 to 5 out of 577 because they don't reach majorities in constituencies.

This is standard in electoral systems based on constituencies vs. systems based on share of national vote ( for instance, Israel?)

> although they get something like 20-30% of the votes overall they get very few MPs, approx 0 to 5 out of 577 because they don't reach majorities in constituencies.

Sounds like the current system is very undemocratic. Concerns about gerrymandering in the US seem utterly trivial in comparison.

It's the same in the US. The difference is that since the US are pretty much strictly bi-partite it does not really impact representativity, whereas France hasa number of different parties.

The reason the US is bi-partite is the voting system, so you can't say it doesn't impact representativity.

There are dozens of countries if not more that have a FPTP system but have multiple viable parties.

Are there?

UK notionally comes up as an example, but it really isn’t. There are 5-10 parties in the House of Commons, but only two that count for anything in terms of seat count.

Which is quite damning to the idea of the “Union” btw, the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland have their own parties that get a large proportion of available seats, and they are still nonexistent on national politics.

And that is the sole reason Le Pen want's to change it. Her RN, ex FN, doesn't get the seats and powerbase she wants.

Not strictly first past the post but a similar two round system, which devolves into the same thing as people have to tactically vote or risk wasting them. And even worse is that the legislative has the same system with single members being elected to the legislative through local two-round elections as well, which meant that in 2017 En Marche, Macron's party ended up with a large majority of seats but basically 25% of popular support.

France generally produces the most disproportionate election results in any Western democracy.

Did anyone do polls based on a theoretical h2h between Macron and the other candidates like Melanchon?

Google "Presidentielle 2022 Sobdages", plenty were done. Le Pen actually performed best of all potential runner ups.

Off-topic. [0]

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

From the same link:

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Also considering the world situation, this might not be off-topic

So is that why it was flagged then?

It is off-topic. Unless the 'guidelines' are wrong?

You pasted the guidelines yourself. It includes the wording "most" and "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." In other words, it is not so straightforward. It is left for the judgment of moderator.

In this case, election had global consequences which goes beyond many things in the recent history. We can see posts about war regularly on here, which are not flagged. And the war is only about politics by definition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com