1. Eurointelligence:
The wave has turned against Emmanuel Macron. He who came out of nowhere to be voted into office by an electorate that wanted change is facing the opposite side of voters’ discontent, and his party is now being shown the way out. Not all of this is due to Macron himself and his long speeches that fail to inspire or convince the electorate as they once did. France is experiencing a phenomenon similar to other countries in Europe, where far-right parties are doing well in elections, and even getting into power. They are no longer considered a threat.
The latest Ifop poll for Le Journal du Dimanche suggests that there are three main blocs: Rassemblement National gets 35% against 26% for the left alliance. RN dominates across the board for all socio-professional categories, including company directors, employees, the unemployed, and even pensioners. Bardella’s party is leading strongly amongst the young, with 44% over 30% for the popular front of the left.
Where is the centre? Macron’s alliance is only accorded 19% of the votes according to the Ifop poll. Of those who voted for Macron in 2022, only 61% have the intention to do so this time. His most loyal voters, the pensioners, seem to have abandoned him. Only 28% would vote for his alliance, Ensemble, while many pensioners now prefer to vote for Bardella’s Rassemblement. (Source: eurointelligence.com)
2. Eurointelligence:
The looming end of the Macron era in France is the result of a phenomenon that has been going on in European politics for more than 10 years, the centrist coalition. This is the era of the pushback. Macron’s built his empire on the ruins of two failed parties, the Socialists and the Gaullists. The mirror image in Brussels is the four-party coalition that supports Ursula von der Leyen. All the centrists are in government. And all the extremists are in opposition.
In Germany at least, the insider-outsider trend continues. Friedrich Merz has just announced that the CDU/CSU would under no circumstances form a coalition with the Wagenknecht party (BSW). This leaves both the AfD and the BSW outside the firewall. For Merz, this means he will have zero degrees of freedom after the next elections. His coalition will be determined by arithmetic only.
If you take a snapshot of Germany’s latest polls, we have the two Excommunicados – the AfD and the BSW – at a joint 24%. With the 5% threshold, and 12% of the votes going to parties below it, that would raise the joint share of MPs outside the firewall to 28%.
Right now, a coalition between CDU/CSU, FDP and Greens would get some 54% of the available seats. A grand coalition between CDU/CSU and SPD would get some 52% - too low to govern for four years.
It would take only a small shift back towards the AfD and BSW even for the first of these coalition options not to be viable. In that case you would need a coalition of all centrist parties. In Brussels, we are already at this stage. This is how democracies fail. (Source: eurointelligence.com)
3. The Tory Party’s campaign is going backwards:
Conservatives have lost up to a third of voters who planned to back the party just four months ago, according to an Ipsos poll for the Financial Times that points to high levels of volatility ahead of the UK election on July 4. The survey, conducted on the same cohort of almost 16,000 voters at the end of January and at the start of June, found that 32 per cent of people who initially said they would vote Conservative had since changed their minds. Rightwing party Reform UK attracted 8 per cent of the Tory voters polled, 6 per cent switched to Labour, 7 per cent said they were now undecided and 9 per cent said they were less likely to vote at all. (Source: ft.com)
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