Petit Déjeuner

Bonjour mesdames et messieurs. Aujourd’hui on vote en le premier tour de l’élection présidentielle francaise. In other words, it’s polling day in the first round of the French Presidential election.

First, the polls. France does not permit the publication of last-minute polls, so these are the last poll results we will see until the exits later today. They all show roughly the same: centrist Emmanuel Macron a hair’s breadth ahead of National Front Deplorable Marine Le Pen by 24.5% to 24, right-wing Republican Francois Fillon neck-and-neck with far-left Jean-Luc Mlenchon on about 19%, and Benoît Hamon of the Parti Socialiste, the center-left party from whose left wing Hamon comes, on about 9%. As the graphics show, the only real movement in the polls over the last couple of months has been Hamon plunging as left-leaning PS voters switch to Mélenchon.

Since no-one is likely to achieve 50%, the top two when today’s votes are counted will advance to a second round run-off which is decided on popular vote totals: there is no electoral college-type arrangement which tries to reflect regional distribution of votes.

These polls are subject to a huge caveat now: there was a terrorist attack in the Champs Elysées in mid-week, and we have no way of knowing whether that has had a major effect, nor whether it would hurt or help any given candidate.

Second, a summary of where the candidates stand. There was supposed to be a final debate, but it was scheduled on the day of the attack, so it was cancelled, and instead the candidates took turns to be interviewed for 15 minutes. Libération has an account of the pronouncements therein from the five candidates previously mentioned plus Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who is running 6th in the polling.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the two leading candidates:

Emmanuel Macron left his fetish object in his box. He knows that the spirits of viewers who have not yet zapped on the news channels are disturbed by the earlier announcement of the attack on the Champs-Elysees. Then, the one who received on the same day a phone call from Obama and the support of Dominique de Villepin, donned the costume of the head of state. As in Nantes the day before, the tone is meant to be martial. “The first mission of a president of the Republic is to protect,” he asserts. Before conceding, realistically , that “this threat, it will be part of the daily life of the next years” .

…

Marine Le Pen

The debate, which took place before the attack on the Champs-Elysées, was to focus on the three pillars of her program: to limit immigration severely and even to interrupt it for a period at the beginning of her term of office; Terrorism – to combat at the cost of measures now impossible, such as the expulsion of foreign S files [I suspect that means the equivalent of “on the FBIs’ watchlist”] ; And finally the exit from the euro. A measure which, by the candidate’s own admission, underpins a large part of its program, but which nevertheless remains largely unpopular in public opinion. “The return to a national currency is the return to a currency that is in line with our economy […] thus being able to export, create jobs ,” she pleaded. Marine Le Pen denied any “regret” about the central place taken by the subject in her campaign, while some in the National Front … fear that it will lose many voters from their candidate.

Results will start coming in late afternoon EDT; by the evening it should be clear who will be advancing to the run-off, although the final final results won’t be ratified until sometime on Monday or Tuesday.

Next, the United Kingdom will be having a general election on June 8, which is something of a surprise. We weren’t supposed to have an election until 2020, but Parliament voted by a huge majority to dissolve and hold an election, which is permitted under the Fixed Term Parliament Act.

I will offer some punditry as the election unfolds, but I will mostly be offering my own partisan view as a Liberal Democrat. Such punditry as there has been consists almost exclusively of saying that the Tories would win a massive majority if the polls are accurate, but that the polls might not be accurate, so who knows?

Fortunately for TV viewers, British law prohibits political advertising on TV (and radio, for that matter). Even if it were allowed, there wouldn’t be any for individual candidates. Not only would it blow an immense hole in the restricted budget (you’re not allowed to spend more than about £40,000 for any one candidate), but our constituencies are so small that there isn’t a media market with less than a dozen constituencies in it.

With the election called at such short notice, the parties haven’t yet issued their manifestoes (party platforms), so what we have to go on is what the party leaders have been saying.

The Tories are saying Brexit at any cost, even if we have to put up taxes. The Lib Dems are saying Brexit is fucking stupid and we’ll do what we can to stop it. Labour are saying that we don’t think Brexit is all that great an idea, and there are some things we’d like to see in the Brexit deal but we aren’t going to do much about it if the deal isn’t what we like — on the other hand, we’ve got some economic policies which we want to talk about if anyone’s interested. UKIP are also wildly in favor of Brexit but can’t agree on anything else. The SNP are anti-Brexit and pro-indyref2, and would like to form a progressive alliance to fight the Tories. Plaid Cymru and the Greens are against Brexit.

The state of the national-level polls right now predicts a landslide victory for the Tories.

However, during the week before the election was called, some well-connected Conservative insiders were saying that they didn’t think she would try calling an election because their private polling suggests that they won’t get anything like a landslide and could even end up in a minority, although still the largest party.

Because this is going to be a single-issue election. In the last general election, the Conservatives took most of the seats the Lib Dems had held before 2015. A lot of those seats voted strongly for Remain in last year’s referendum. There are also a number of Labour-held seats in the North of England which voted Remain, and the Lib Dems will be hoping to exploit Labour’s ineffectual performance on the issue.

At this point, I have little idea how the Labour Party will perform. Corbyn is getting a fair amount of coverage, and he is insisting that this election isn’t about Brexit but about improving the economic prospects of working people and raising taxes on the rich. I’m sure he would prefer that the election be about that, but I doubt whether someone who looks and sounds very boring and who has no detectable sense of humor is going to be able to shift the narrative that drastically. From where they currently are, it would be a pretty stunning achievement if they held all the seats they have, and their chances of actually increasing their numbers in the House of Commons are less than 10%.

I don’t see UKIP figuring much. The Tories have nicked their raison d’etre, and their only media-friendly figure is Nigel Farage, who will not be standing for election but will “fight for Brexit”.

It’s just about impossible for the SNP to gain any seats: there are only three Scottish seats they don’t hold. Since they’re pushing hard for another independence referendum, they may well be vulnerable in a few seats which voted strongly against independence in the last one, but I don’t expect much change.

I live in a central London constituency which is rock-solid Tory, but which voted Remain around 70%. While I was out shopping yesterday, our local party had a stall at the street market, festooned with balloons with IN in big letters, which was buzzing with activity. A quick word with my successor as local party chair elicited the information that it was far busier than the same stall had been during the referendum, and that a lot of people were saying they wanted an effective opposition and that the local Leave MP didn’t represent them. We’re under no illusion that this gives us a serious chance of taking the seat, but if that kind of pattern is repeated across the country, one of the big stories on election night is going to be how the Lib Dems came roaring back.

As a local party, we will actually be encouraging our people to go to a neighboring constituency across the river currently held by a massively anti-EU Labour MP which our private intel suggests could be a surprise gain for us.

Those with capacious memories may recall that last year I was pretty lukewarm about Tim Farron, the Lib Dem Leader. In the intervening 12 months, he has more than grown into the job, and I’m enthusiastic about his performance. He’s sharp, outspoken, often funny and oozes passion. He’s always been a bit of a wonk, so it’s very difficult to trip him up on policy. This campaign is going to make him a substantial political figure, if nothing else.

The big problem he faces is how to deal with the coalition question, which the SNP’s call for a progressive alliance means is an issue. The Tories are already firing artillery at that, figuring that Corbyn is so toxic that the threat of a coalition with him as PM will be enough to keep Tory waverers in the fold. Since I think they’re quite correct in that, it’s a powerful message. Farron is saying that it’s extremely hard to see how we could go into coalition with the Labour Party. Whether that will be good enough remains to be seen.

My tuppence on the coalition question is that we couldn’t possibly go into coalition with the pro-Brexit Tories. If the arithmetic suggests that a Lab-LD-SNP-Plaid-Green coalition could have a stable majority, I’d be open to the idea but only if the PM would not be Corbyn. But only open to the idea: I’d have to see what was on offer. Previous experience of dealing with Labour has been very cautionary — their attitude has invariably been that coalition policy would be what the Labour Party wanted and that we would be given the privilege of voting for it, as well as some low-ranking ministerial posts in Departments such as Transport, the Environment and Justice. That is not how coalition works. Even in our bitter experience with the Tories, we had Cabinet ministers in important departments and we were able to veto several Conservative policies and they kept their word and supported a few of ours. (Our major mistake was not making it clear how little we liked some of the stuff we had to vote for when keeping our side of the bargain, and how we were only in the coalition to maintain a stable government, not because we agreed with the Conservatives.)

My other tuppence is that it’s very unlikely that it will even be a question. It is usual for the Lib Dems to improve their opinion poll rating on the day the election is announced by about 4-5% during the campaign, because we get much more coverage than we do in peacetime. But since we start at 12%, that only takes us to 16-17% at best, which could well be good enough for 25 seats compared to our present 9. But us winning 15 seats isn’t going to affect things very much given that the Tories look likely to take at least 70 seats off Labour. I doubt that we will come “roaring back” as I mentioned earlier, and even making 15 gains would be doing very well. The roaring back to having 50-60 seats needs a much bigger polling boost: if we can get to 20%, it does become possible, but that’s a huge mountain to climb.

One flimsy straw in the wind is the early fund-raising claims. The Tories have said nothing at all. But both Labour and the Lib Dems sought to make some hay with their takings in the 48 hours since the election was announced. Labour raised £200,000 and gained 2500 members. The Lib Dems raised £500,000 and added 8000 members. (In the first three months of the year, the LDs raised a couple of thousand more than Labour, the first time that has happened since the 1920s.) The donation figures are for donations by individuals: not many companies donate to political parties, and most of their donations go to the Tories anyway. What neither party has done is publicly reveal how many donors that represents — they will have to produce it for the quarterly figures in the end, but that won’t happen until after the election. I strongly suspect that the Lib Dem figure is, um, misleading: I will not be in the least surprised to find out that £300,000 came from one rich loony supporter. Even so, the other 200 grand is pretty impressive for us.

If you’re not asleep yet, well done. I expect to write a lot less in future weeks because I won’t repeat this introduction and I don’t think much is actually going to happen.

So, at last, we turn to the US and POTUS*.

Let’s begin with Robert Fisk in the Independent. Fisk is an odd bird who tends to write breathlessly about successes for whichever side he’s favoring in any given Asian conflict and has a record in predicting future events to rival Bill Kristol’s. That said, this piece is at least quite good fun:

The more dangerous America’s crackpot President becomes, the saner the world believes him to be. Just look back at the initial half of his first 100 days: the crazed tweeting, the lies, the fantasies and self-regard of this misogynist leader of the Western world appalled all of us. But the moment he went to war in Yemen, fired missiles at Syria and bombed Afghanistan, even the US media Trump had so ferociously condemned began to treat him with respect. And so did the rest of the world.

It’s one thing to have a lunatic in the White House who watches late night television and tweets all day. But when the same lunatic goes to war, it now emerges, he’s a safer bet for democracy, a strong President who stands up to tyrants (unless they happen to be Saudis, Turks or Egyptians) and who acts out of human emotion rather than cynicism.

How else can one account for the extraordinary report in The New York Times which recorded how Trump’s “anguish” at the film of dying Syrian babies had led him to abandon “isolationism”?

…

This is preposterous. A madman who goofs off at something he doesn’t like on CNN is just plain wacky. A man of unsound mind who attacks three Muslim countries – two of which were included in his seven Muslim nation refugee ban – is a danger to the world. Yet the moment he fires 59 missiles at Syria after more than 60 civilians die in an apparent chemical attack which he blames on Assad – but none after far more are massacred by a Syrian suicide bomber – even Angela Merkel takes leave of her senses and praises Trump, along with the Matron of Downing Street, Signora Mogherini and sundry other potentates. Hasn’t someone cottoned on to the fact that Trump is now taking America into a shooting war?

…

Now Trump is sending a naval battle group to threaten North Korea, a past master at childish threats itself. Ye gods! And this is a man who is now “flexible” and “pragmatic”? It’s instructive to note that after its first edition, The New York Times changed its headline about Trump’s Syrian “anguish” to “Trump Upends His Own Foreign Policy”, still gifting him with a “foreign policy” (which doesn’t exist) while cutting out the “anguish”. I am told the first original edition headline read: “On Syria Attack, Trump’s Heart Came First”. Intriguing. If that is correct, you can see how The New York Times slowly – far too slowly – realised it had itself started to fall in love with its shooting-from-the-hip President.

Now a couple of pieces sourced from the Irish Times. First, Martin Wolf (reprinted from the paywalled Financial Times):

How are trade partners to respond when US policymakers talk nonsense? That is the situation in which Europeans, Japanese and South Koreans now find themselves. The words of Wilbur Ross, US commerce secretary, and the man who Donald Trump trusts most on trade policy, show one can be a billionaire and yet not understand how the economy works, just as one can be an athlete and not understand physiology.

Objecting to warnings of protectionism from Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Ross told the Financial Times that “we are the least protectionist of the major areas. We are far less protectionist than Europe. We are far less protectionist than Japan. We are far less protectionist than China. ”

He added: “We also have trade deficits with all three of those places. So they talk free trade. But in fact what they practice is protectionism. And every time we do anything to defend ourselves, even against the puny obligations that they have, they call that protectionism. It’s rubbish.”

It is what Ross says that is rubbish. A trade deficit is not proof that a country is open to trade. It is proof that it is spending more than its income or investing more than it saves. This is not just a theoretical point. Solid evidence supports it.

…

Ross’s misunderstandings of the economics of trade are far from harmless follies. The administration’s fiscal policies seem sure to increase the US external deficit, for which foreigners will be blamed. Its trade policies will fail to reduce US trade deficits, for which foreigners will again be blamed.

The US will propose the ludicrous objective of bilateral trade balancing in a world in which commerce itself is multilateral. This too will fail, for which foreigners will be also blamed. In all, the administration could demolish the open trading system simply because it is clueless.

Next, IT’s own US correspondent Suzanna Lynch reported the GA-06 special election:

With thoughts already turning to next year’s mid-term elections, Congressional Republicans are beginning to worry about how the Trump brand will impact their chances.But this week’s election also raises questions for Democrats. The fact that a little-known candidate came so close to victory in a strongly Republican area has energised the party. Ossoff’s performance was the first electoral proof of the new-found purpose and motivation that many Democrats have reported in their constituencies since Trump’s election. But it did not come without a cost.

The party ploughed $8.3 million (€7.7 million) into his campaign, a huge financial commitment for a district that was not seen as natural Democratic terrain. Whether they will be able to repeat this for the run-off against a much more focused Republican campaign remains to be seen.

Ultimately, despite all the energy and hope generated by Ossoff, Democrats did not win either the Georgia or Kansas elections. Strategists worry about how long the energy and momentum that has invigorated many on the left since Trump’s victory will last, and whether the Georgia election was their best shot at victory.

As Newt Gingrich, the man who held the 6th congressional seat in Georgia for 20 years, said, in dismissing the Democrats’ efforts: “Almost doesn’t win elections.”

I’ll finish off with this piece by Oliver Georgi on the disaffection of the alt-right:

In the Alt-Right movement, a collection pool for white nationalists, libertarians and right-wingers, which is as close to Yiannopolous as Trumps Chief Counselor Steve Bannon , one could hear quite different tones after the election. “Heil Trump, Heilige unser Volk, Sieg Heil!”, The figurehead of the movement, Richard B. Spencer, scouted at the end of November at an event near the White House in Washington . Trumps victory is a “revival experience,” Spencer enthused, and his friends were also electrified by the surprising success. They still interpret the slogan “America First” above all racistly: as the America of the whites. Trumps’ announcement that they would turn their backs on the world’s crises and, in the future, primarily to care for their countrymen, also allowed the alt-right movement to hope for a new, nationally liberated age as its promise to drain the political “swamp” in hated Washington “.

However, after a hundred days of presidency, hardly anything remained of this euphoria. On the contrary: the extreme right in America is not only annoyed by Donald Trump, it is pissed off. With his abrupt reversals, especially in foreign policy, he has dashed hopes that his presidency will mainly be about the welfare of the angry white men in the American core country, within a few weeks. “Trump has now to explain a few things,” a reader remarked a few days ago under a text on Breitbart , who analyzed the Trumps surprise military strike in Syria. “That’s not why I chose him.” Another wrote, “It’s all evolving into another neoconservative government.”

We can but hope they’ll rebel too.