The lack of even the most basic understanding of parliamentary politics flying around in this thread is appalling, but certainly illustrates the reason why there are so many wild takes flying around on Lemmy.
To summarize:
- The right got a 2/3rds majority in parliament. The united left had the most votes of any individual group, but that’s only around 1/3 total.
- The reason the left proclaimed they “won” is they came “first” and thought the center-right party would ally with them rather than the “hard right” (welp)
- That, in isolation (!), isn’t antidemoratic. A majority of French representatives (presumably) approve of the government. Simple maths. A government can only govern with the approval of parliament, it literally can’t work otherwise.
- However the French voting system very strongly relies on strategic voting, and the far-right came very close to having a parliamentary majority. Therefore the center-right party only got the seats they did because everybody left of the far-right made electoral agreements to pull out their candidates so only the candidate with the most chances to win against the far right would be running. This heavily benefited the center-right party who then allied with the hard right, which is being perceived as treason (for lots of reasons that I’m not going to get into). Strategic voting is a democratic failures and leads to suboptimal choices for representatives (thought that is still miles better than whatever the fuck the CCP is doing, since apparently that needs saying on here). Furthermore this whole shift to the right certainly isn’t going to help with the socio-economic issues and is going to end up benefiting the far-right.
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The left won a plurality, the right is in charge.
This is the counterargument to those who want multiparty democracy.
If I had £1 for every time the right had a mysterious unfair advantage in a democratic system, I’d buy myself a politician
Nah nothing to do with multiparty, the problem is with the fith republic of France giving too much power to the president.
Technically the left didn’t win the majority of seat in the parliament. They have a relative majority as in they are the biggest group in parliament by a small margin but they don’t have the majority needed to make a stable government.
A majority vote from the parliament can oust the PM and his government.
If you take all the right wing parties, they hold the majority of seats (2/3rd). A left leaning government would last 48 hours, so in spite of french leftists telling everyone they “won”, they didn’t.
Our electoral system is very flawed though and the current make up of the parliament is not representative of what people want, there are much better voting system for plurality based political system that could be implemented.
That’s my point. In a multiparty system, it’s rare for a party to win a majority. So someone can win even though the majority prefers a different person.
For example, suppose there are three candidates A,B, and C. It’s possible for 60% to prefer A over B, 60% to prefer B over C, and 60% to prefer C over A. No matter who wins, a majority agrees that they are worse than another candidate.
There are other voting system than first past the post like Condorcet, coda, etc… nothing is a absolutely perfect but some system will be closer.
None of those can avoid the situation I described above where a majority oppose the winner.
