nimh wrote:None of this is new. Last time round, the UMP got 62% of the seats, after winning just 33% of the first-round vote. And in 1993, the last time that the right won as big as it has now, the Gaullist RPR and liberal UDF together won 472 seats, which amounted to a parliamentary majority of over 80% - even though their pooled first-round vote had been no more than 40,0%.
This makes the changes from election to election seem much larger than they actually are, in terms of voter preference.
This year's "blue wave" for Sarkozy and his allies is certainly impressive. But almost all of it has come at the expense of the Front National, which has done spectacularly badly, with less than 5% of the vote. That's the worst result it's gotten since 1981 - at every election since, the FN had received 10-15%.
Consider this: the pooled vote for the rightwing parties - using
the Wikipedia page now, which has more detailed info - is this time round 51,1%. That is not actually very impressive at all. Back in 1997, when the right
lost its parliamentary majority to Jospin's "pluralist left", the combined rightwing parties received 51,5%.
In fact, it is considerably less than what the rightwing parties received in previous "blue waves". In 1993, the right polled 56,6% of the vote. And last time round, in 2002, the right actually pooled 57,7%.
All this suggests that while Sarkozy's UMP may have benefited from the implosion of the National Front, the right overall hemmoraged votes to Bayrou's reinvented centrist force MoDem. MoDem must have pulled most all of its 8% from the right.
That leaves the support of the leftwing parties relatively stable - despite the howls of despair among Socialist partisans, who are already set to be at its each others throats over the defeat. The left's total of 39,8% in these elections is definitely very weak. But it's pretty much in line with the 41,3% of 2002 and the 39,9% of 1993. Only in 1997 did the left do noticeably better, with 47,0%.
