I write this as some Americans have already headed off to their polling places to vote, and quite honestly, the one thing I know I’m going to do this evening at bedtime is take a sleeping pill. I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and subject myself to the overwhelming temptation to see the results, which at this point make the odds of my getting back to sleep quite iffy. (Getting back to sleep is always iffy for me, but… you know what I mean.) I sent in my ballot to my Massachusetts voting home yesterday. For today, I will continue to hope that the Democrats will maintain their majorities in both houses. It’s certainly possible. But I want to talk about what happened here in France a few months ago.
I’ve been a French citizen since 2009 and have faithfully voted in every French election since — usually in person, but once in a while by procuration (where I have legally given my vote to someone to vote in my stead). French elections are two-round affairs — the first round may have any number of participating political parties, making it rare for any one candidate to win an outright majority during the first round; only the two (or very rarely, three) candidates with the most votes go into the second round.
This past April, France reelected the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron, for another 5-year term. France held its legislative elections in June. A friend of ours, our former GP, was first elected as a delegate to the National Assembly in 2017, and it came as a shock to us — to her, to all of her supporters — that she was defeated by a Le Pen acolyte in the second round.
A significant factor was the abstention rate. While the majority of those in my village who cast their ballots voted for our friend, nearly half of all registered voters in town didn’t bother to show up or arrange to vote by procuration. (When I first arrived in France some 20+ years ago, the abstention rate was around 30-35%; it’s now 45% or higher — an indication, perhaps, that the same kind of “[all] political parties are the same!” cynicism has found fertile ground here as it has in the States.)
But it wasn’t just the abstention rate that made a difference. Unlike the USA, donations to French candidates are limited and the official campaign period is blessedly very short. (And, too, I point out that delegates are elected for 5-year terms, which eliminates the non-stop campaigning required of members of the House of Representatives with their 2-year terms.) Before the first round, voters receive a packet containing information from each of the candidates about their platforms, their endorsements, their experience and qualifications, and so on. A similar (but far less weighty) packet arrives before the second round.
The Le Pen acolyte had clearly taken a leaf from MAGA Republicans: while his info sheet contained elements of the same odious white nationalist Front National (rebranded as the Rassemblement national — the National Rally) platform, the level of fear-mongering, exaggerations, mischaracterizations, and outright lies made my jaw drop. (Not quite on the order of “Democrats drink aborted babies’ blood,” but not too far away.)
More disquieting was hearing several villagers outside the polling place repeating some of those lies as though they were facts — and this despite the fact that at least some of them were personally acquainted with our friend. How could they believe such rank BS about her, about her values and goals?
It’s the same kind of lying and ignorance that makes the results of today’s U.S. election so uncertain and scary. So very much is on the line today. There’s a huge overlap between election deniers and climate change deniers, between those who applaud the demise of Roe v. Wade and who work to suppress voting, to name but a small handful of extremely important things among so many.
May the forces of evil be held at bay at least a little longer.