French and British general elections a defeat for incumbents, not a victory for the left | Opinion

The international left rejoiced Sunday night after exit polls from France’s runoff election showed the country’s right-wing populist National Rally party received far fewer votes than expected. The party was widely expected to win a significant number of seats in the National Assembly, if not a majority. Just three days after the UK parliamentary elections in which the Conservative Party was soundly defeated by Labour after 14 years in power, left-wing cheerleaders thought they had detected a hopeful pattern of a left-wing victory over the right. They excitedly took to social media to claim that after London and Paris, Washington was on the way to defeating former President Donald J. Trump in November.

But this interpretation of the British and French elections is an illusion: while they may be part of the same pattern, the results of these two elections, and those of many other Western countries, strongly suggest that the pattern is anti-incumbent rather than anti-right.

Take the example of the UK. In its 14 years in power, the Conservatives have seen taxes soar to their highest level as a percentage of GDP in over 70 years, the national debt balloon, inflation reach record highs, unemployment go unchecked, illegal immigration soared, crime increased, a radical and costly environmental programme implemented, most state institutions seized with little resistance by the woke, and the UK military eviscerated. In the process, the party imposed one of the world’s strictest COVID-19 lockdown policies, which its leaders shamefully violated in a major national scandal, and voted to leave the European Union in a painful and deeply flawed way that the majority of party leaders opposed but the vast majority of the British public supported.

As expected, many British voters rejected the Conservative Party. It finished the election with the lowest vote share and number of seats in its 200-year history. The Conservatives’ massive defeat was clearly fuelled by the rise of Reform UK, a populist right-wing party born out of the Brexit campaign and entered the national elections this year as a rival party. According to one British study, the 4.1 million votes Reform UK won may have cost the Conservatives as many as 173 seats, 52 more than the Conservatives ultimately won. Adding to this division, the Labour Party, which won almost two-thirds of the seats, campaigned on Obama-esque notions of “hope” and “change” and a promise to work harder than the discredited incumbent, rather than on policies barely distinguishable from the Conservatives’.

Across the Channel, France’s election defeat was not to the Rally National, which had gained ground since the last election, but to the centre-right incumbents of President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-business, Paris-based Ensemble coalition, which has been in power for seven years and has plagued the country with high debt, high inflation, rising crime, a surge in illegal immigration and increasing impoverishment. The coalition lost 86 seats, dropping it to a numerically disadvantaged second place, down from the 245-seat majority it held in 2022 and the 350-seat majority Macron held when he was elected in 2017.

The left coalesced last month into the New Popular Front (NPF), a coalition of more than 50 parties and other organisations that won first place with 180 seats. A “tactical alliance” with Ensemble meant the Rally National failed to win overwhelming support, but the NPF is unlikely to govern on its own, having pledged not to work with Macron if it were to come to power. The party has a strong anti-government platform that specifically calls for the reversal of many of Macron’s economic reforms, including his signature tax cuts and hard-won increase in the pension age.

Macron’s right-wing National Rally, which also opposes much of Macronism, has more than doubled the number of votes it received in 2022, increasing its seats from 89 to 142 and making it the largest single party in the National Assembly and the largest party in the entire country by vote share. That’s quite a jump from the two seats it held before 2017, when it was an extremely polarizing party with a dark fascist past.

If the UK and France are ousting sitting presidents, the American left should hope that the US does not fall into the same pattern. President Joe Biden has only been in office for three and a half years, but the progressive ideas he represents have dominated the US state and society for much longer than that, and Americans are tired of them.

Like unpopular incumbent presidents in the UK and France, Biden is responsible for high inflation, rising taxes, rising national debt, relentless crime, and significant decline in our state and institutions. Trump, who believes he was betrayed by metropolitan elites and dishonest bureaucracies during his presidency and is campaigning as a deliberate outsider, has led Biden in nearly all recent national and battleground state polls, while overwhelming majorities of Americans and a growing number of Democrats believe Biden should withdraw from the race and support a non-incumbent candidate who has a better chance of winning.

But for now, Biden certainly seems set to be part of a pattern, though it may not be the one his supporters expect.

Paul du Quesnoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.