"Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has announced that he is dissolving the national assembly, and calling for legislative elections on June 30 and July 7.
The French president said that he can’t pretend nothing has happened, that the outcome of the EU election is not good for his government and that the rise of nationalists is a danger for France and Europe."
I agree with you, and yet… It’s winning them elections. We can be upset about it all we want, but it’s increasingly clear that bigotry and xenophobia are winning arguments in this era. We’re fucked if we don’t adjust. I’m not proposing we abandon migrants, but the one thing myself and the person you replied to likely agree on is that the left is increasingly losing sight of home and the average citizen, not in terms of rhetoric but in effect. We’re about to lose the EU and possibly lose support for Ukraine, see even more immigration restrictions, and see an empowered global far-right. The voters are telling us they have different priorities, which we need to focus on in a more altruistic way than the right. We have to be introspective here if we ever want to accomplish our goals.
Yeah blame the left which is in power in…. Oh right, nowhere. Essentially the voter has tried out all (somewhat) reasonable right politicians and since nothing works they now decided to try the crazy right wingers.
… or don’t introspect, blame the voters, and lose forever. It could not matter less what is true, it’s only what the populace believes. That’s politics. If our ideology can’t stand up to this, it must adjust or it deserves to fail.
This is what frustrates me most about a lot of the left-leaning parties and voters I’ve encountered over the years. They think that “well obviously we should be winning, we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys. People who vote against our position are either ignorant or evil. So we shouldn’t change anything about it and we should ignore the people arguing against it.”
Whether that’s true or not isn’t the point. The point is that you’re not going to gain any more voters with that strategy. A lot of the people voting against the left have very real and tangible concerns, and you’re not going to get them to vote for you by either telling them they’re wrong to have those concerns or that they aren’t even real in the first place. The left needs to provide them with real solutions to those problems.
Completely agreed. It’s the difference between your political views being an excuse for you to feel morally validated or being a mechanism to improve lives. If it’s the latter, it’s time to get to work. We’re failing and thus losing our ability to do what we stated. If it’s people being idiots, educate them. If it’s people being lied to, reach them. Regardless, we live in a democracy and the entire point is that the people get to choose and the people are rejecting us. We cannot fail to heed those cries.
We must create an inspiring vision that resonates with voters and alleviates their concerns. The stats clearly show people are concerned about immigration and the economy. The right has a cruel, but effective approach in just stopping immigration entirely and many, many people think that is a good idea right now. What is our better answer? I’m no expert and I don’t know, but that is in and of itself a serious problem. Why do I not have a Meloni I can point to as the beacon of my ideology, that has at least some of the answers?
The French left has been a lot in power since the 80s.