Tiny Monday notes about the election

Here are a few things that I’ve read about since I wrote my generalized description of the regional elections in France last night:

• I wondered about the 53% rate of abstention (47% turnout) in comparison to previous elections. Turns out it’s pretty bad. The rate has been climbing over the past 25 years, though, 1998 saw a 42% rate slightly worse than the 39% rate in 2004. In 1992, 31% of the voters stayed home, and in 1986, it was 22%. Libération compares the turnouts of non regional elections, too. Though the abstention rate in the European elections edged toward 60%, no other election since 2004 (municipal, presidential, or legislative) has topped 40%.
• Rue89 interviewed three political experts on the successes of the FN and E-É as well as the failure of the NPA. The two success stories were not terribly interesting, but the taking to task of the NPA was. On the one hand, Olivier Besancenot no longer seems like a radical, which suppresses the interest of potential voters. On the other hand, the anti-pragmatism marginalizes the party, when actual votes do matter. They performed worse than in both the European elections last year and the last regional elections, leaving themselves, in the words of the commenter, a fringe party not unlike the Lutte Ouvrière.
• Le Figaro referred to the NPA campaign as a bet for autonomy (from the Front de Gauche) that they lost badly. Libération called the result a nice slap. “We maintain our independence from traditional parties,” Libé quotes Besancenot as saying, “and we pay a huge price for that.” (Le Monde didn’t seem to consider the NPA worth writing about.)
• MoDem’s failure is captured in a little graph in Libé that compares their withering support since the 2007 presidential elections with the surge in Verts/E-É support, which has its local high point in last year’s European elections. I wonder if it’s the case that E-É has been picking off votes from MoDem. From my understanding of political alignments, however, it seems that in the US, if a green party were to jump from ~7% to ~16%, a bulk of that new support would indeed come from straight up centrists.

Tags: Europe-Écologie, France, Front de Gauche, Front National, Le Figaro, Libération, Lutte Ouvrière, MoDem, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, Olivier Besancenot, Rue89