Five things North Americans can learn from the French and UK elections

“Voters in the UK and France chose the left over the far right!”

A variation on this theme has been tweeted countless times in the past 24h. Canadians and Americans alike have reacted to election results coming from France and the UK with a surge of optimism: do we finally have a roadmap for slaying our own far-right demons?

If only it could be so simple. There are important lessons for both the United States and Canada from these elections, and sure, one of those lessons might be how France reacted to a possible fascist government by choosing the left, but what were the contexts of each win, and what lessons can we learn from them?

Well, here you go: five of them.

1. In both elections, voters rejected the status quo

Regardless of who was in power, the French and the British both rejected the status quo. In the UK, that was a Conservative government that was past its prime. In France, it was a centrist government that couldn’t hold on. In both cases, the people were motivated by voting out the government they had. The Labour Party’s support was hardly enthusiastic: they received fewer total votes that in previous elections, and just 34% of the popular vote — one percentage higher than Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement nationale (RN). Despite this low level of support, Keir Stormer won the biggest majority of seats seen since 1997. People were voting against the Conservatives, not necessarily for Labour. The same can be said of Macron’s defeat — the rise of both RN and the Nouveau front populaire (NFP) demonstrate clearly that change was in the air.

The same feeling that change is in the air is what Pierre Poilievre and Donald Trump are banking on to push each man past the finish line in their next elections. There’s little doubt that people are making their decisions — to vote against or not to vote at all — based on how much they hate Justin Trudeau or how much they think that the Democrats are corrupt warmongers. Labour might be ideologically closer to Canada’s Liberals or the Democratic Party but there’s little solace in these results for either ruling party.

2. First-past-the-post needs to go

Strategic voting. Hold your nose and vote. Vote Trudeau to stop Harper. But her emails memes. Democrats and Liberals understand that within the first-past-the-post system, our choices are constricted, and there’s no incentive for any party to govern in coalition with any other party. Had France had the FPTP system, RN could be governing today.

Labour owes its fake majority to FPTP. Remember how they won with just 34% of the vote? Well, Trudeau’s government is underpinned by a popular vote of 32% — lower than the popular vote that Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives received (33%). Year after year after year of a system that systemically renders your vote useless creates widespread disenfranchisement and constricts decisions to voting for some lesser evil, every single time.

FPTP is especially useless in a country that has multiple viable parties. Quebecers regularly vote for the Bloc as a protest vote, knowing full-well that there is no hope in hell that this regional party could form any part of government. In the United States, you either vote for one of the two main parties, support an independent or don’t vote — when your choice is between death-pangs Kang and rapey Kodos, doing anything other than voting for one of the two is throwing away your vote. (I think it’s probably still worth not voting for either war monger…) It’s no wonder that people are turning to radical politics in this context.

Of course it’s necessary to remind you that Trudeau was elected on the promise to bring in a new electoral system. And of course, it’s also necessary to remind you that the NDP has propped up the Liberals but didn’t insist that they implement the findings of the electoral reform commission that we had a few years back, as a condition of their support. Apparently no one in Canada’s centre seems to care that the far right in particular has learned how to use the disenfranchisement sewn by this system to organize. And instead we all rub our hands and our temples and ask what is to be done?

3. Gaza is a winning issue

For years, the Labour Party has been on a tear to eliminate anything that could make the party look like it supports a free Palestine. And so, the victory of five independent candidates who are staunch supporters of Palestine demonstrate the power and popularity of supporting a free Palestine. While it should go without saying that anyone who supports Israel’s destruction of Gazan civil society, with the cost of upwards of 186,000 lives, is absolute trash, we all know how much political mileage some politicians get out of being staunch Zionists (indeed, it’s the only thing holding Marco Mendicino up from being tossed into history’s trash heap, though he will surely end up there someday). And yet, five independent candidates in the UK won, in part, due to their committment to justice and solidarity with Palestinian people: Jeremy Corbyn, Shockat Adam, Ayoub Khan, Perry Barr, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed.

For France’s leftwing alliance, solidarity with Palestine is a no-brainer. Yesterday, Jean Luc Melanchon who may very well be the person to lead France’s next government, said that one of the most important things France’s next government must do is recognize an independent Palestinian state.

A majority of Canadians and Americans support the creation of an independent Palestinian state. An even larger majority want Israel to stop it’s attacks on Gaza. It’s the issue that very well may hand the election win to Trump as a vote of defiance (not at all because Trump is better on the issue than Biden - the two are two warmongers in a pod) and similarly, it could also tip the scales towards Pierre Poilievre. It’s a bitter irony that two parties that are just as Zionist as one another may win as a result of frustration with the political priorities of the current ruling parties but, again, when people are voting against the status quo, who they vote for doesn’t always make the most rational sense.

4. Left-wing independents can win

Canada has no recent experience with independents breaking with the NDP to run an actual left-wing campaign. But in the UK, we have proof that it can work!

I haven’t mentioned the NDP at all (see point 5) because I don’t think that they are strong enough to be relevant in the next election. But for a party that routinely refuses progressive candiates to run because of their politics, and for a party that has propped up the Liberals while the Liberals put Canada’s military spending into overdrive, the next election must be a time where progressive people put their money where their mouth is, and actually run.

Running an election campaign is not easy: you need an excellent candidate, resources, supporters, organizers and a lot of skills. But progressive people cannot expect the NDP to rise to the occasion in the next election — a shit leopard can’t change it’s spots. Sarah Jama will surely be one hopeful, but we need others. And so, looking specifically at the UK, candidates running on an unabashedly leftwing platform is something Canadians desperately need. Sure, you might not win (see Point 2) but without any leftwing pressure placed on the Liberals and the NDP, the Conservatives will eat their breakfast.

5. When you prop up the centre, you get burned by the extremities

In 2022, Canadian corporations made more money in profit than ever before in Canada’s history. So far in 2024, we seem to be on-track to blow past that grim statistic. When we talk about an affordability crisis, what we mean is that there is a crisis of profits: profits are worked into every inch of every process in business that by the time we buy the house or the car or the bread, it’s impossible to know just how much of that price went to line rich people’s pockets. It isn’t by accident that houses in 1970 built through federal programs sold for what would be $200,000 today — our economy worships at the altar of profits, grifts off of every stage of building a home, and we’re told that actually, we’re experiencing an affordability crisis.

Average people are not that stupid but politicians really need us to be. This is part of what has turned Trudeau into someone everyone loves to hate. He’s trying to have it both ways: protect the little guy through minor reforms while also allowing out-of-control profits to climb even higher. People can see through the rhetoric.

The Nouveau front populaire’s platform contains 150 measures to help working people — things like creating a minimum wage of 2000 € per month, indexing all salaries to inflation and reducing the official workweek for overnight workers to be from 35 hours to 32 to give them more time to rest.

They are not fucking around. This coalition of leftwing parties understands that the social conditions that give rise to fascism need to be addressed, and that radical changes are necessary. While it will be interesting to see how they tango with the centrist party, what is abundantly clear is that in North America, the status quo valorizes the centre — a losing strategy if politicians wants to engage and actually help average, working people.

The Democrats will have an extremely difficult time walking a line between being the party of capital and trying to appeal to average people for whom life has become more expensive in the past decade. But not as difficult as the Liberals, who are even more constrained by their role of servant to the American empire and everything that comes with it (defense spending, free trade, low taxation policies etc.). And at the margin sits the NDP, a party that made a deal with the devil to avoid an election and who will pay dearly for it. By supporting the Liberals, the NDP has demonstrated that it doesn’t actually need to exist — that NDP members may be even more useful as Liberals, you know, push the party from the inside. Hitching one’s wagon to Trudeaumania may have worked in 2015 but we are in 2024. France shows us that people want a bold vision for a leftwing France; the same can be said of Canadians.