Amb. Gérard Araud: In the French system parties are allowed to run for the second round, if the candidates are -- really allowed to run for the second round if they got more than 12.5% of the votes in the first round. Which means that usually in our second rounds we have three at the very maximum four candidates, but we usually three candidates - and in these cases on the basis of the first round you we could expect hundreds of what the French called triangulares which means really a second rounds with three candidates. A Centrist, a far right and a leftist and the basis of the - of the first round, the consequence was clearly that the far right was going to win a lot of constituencies and what happened was really, that a lot of actually of candidates - leftist or Centrist decided to step out uh from the race and to call their voters to vote for either the centrist or the leftist, to prevent uh the far right from winning the constituency. And it was really a a general movement, a very general movement so we went from with something like nearly 400 triangulare second rounds to uh more or less only more or less 95-100 and in these cases of this 100 actually uh the centrists and the leftists remained in the race most of the time, because there was no danger of a victory of the far right.
HOLY MOTHER OF JEBUS!
France is divided into 577 constituencies (circonscriptions) for the election of deputies to the lower legislative House
src: click
Thats effective election fixing in 53% of french election districts.
Fuck me…
Oh, and btw here is how this works in the US. So - at the democratic candidate selection, you as the donor class buy out the electoral campaigns of four or five, lesser viable candidates, making sure they all campaign like crazy (real percentage of campaign money invested) in the most looked at “indicator” state (Iowa), then if that doesnt grant you your actual horse in the race (the second most popular candidate - you actually prepped up as the one with a real chance) to win the trend deciding Iowa - which to your chagrin Bernie Sanders won, then - in the same week, while your other candidates still have media pull (everybody knows them due to the insane amount of campaign money spent around Iowa), but not much else is going on - you let three lesser viable candidates drop out from the race, coordinately, in exactly the same week and pledge their support to the designated candidate of the donor class.
Then you get probability distributions like these:
src: click
Back, when I actually realized how that works - I actually still opened debate threads with the title “So americas politics are fixed by letting candidates drop out at specific spots?”, but then was calmed down by the notion, that in Europe candidates are actually mostly “designated” into their number one position of their respective parties by a much less transparent decision process -- so I was willing to let it slide.
Now, in 2024 - the actual frech election got “fixed” this way…
Fun.
Again - compare and contrast:
Number of votes in the 2024 french elections:
1st round > 2nd roundNational Rally Alliance (RN): 33.3% > 37.1%
New Popular Front (NFP): 28.6% > 26.3%
Esemble (ENS): 20.9% > 24.7%
Other: 10.6% > 5.6%
Les Républiccains (LR): 6.6% > 6.2%
src: click
So you know, that the public vote wont play out in your favor, so you start the election fixing process.
And that process is so effective, that the second place candidate (based on votes) now “wins” the election, and the first place candidate comes in third. Simply because you fixed 53% of voting districts, by letting the “unlikely winners” drop out in a coordinated fashion.
Lets look at this more closesly why dont we. So this was the Project FiveThirtyEight (FiveThirtyEight, is an American website that focused on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging in the United States.[2] Founder Nate Silver left in April 2023. On September 18, 2023, the original website domain at fivethirtyeight.com was closed, and web traffic became redirected to ABC News pages.[2]) “Chances of winning a plurality of pledged delegates” forecast for the 2020 US primaries, on the day mid february - shortly after IOWA - when the three candidates with less hope to attain the necessary delegates dropped out of the race in the same week - coordinately - ALL OF THEM endorsing Biden:
This ladies and gentlemen is what you call election fixing.
