Category: French politics

Will Boris Johnson be ousted as UK Prime Minister soon?

Speculation last week that Johnson would face a full Conservative confidence vote has so far come to nought. Also: US redistricting, French, Portuguese and Chile elections.

Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is an honorary associate at the University of Melbourne. His work on electoral matters for The Conversation can be found here, and his own website is here.

For a UK Conservative leader to be ousted, the first step is for 15% of the party’s MPs to send letters expressing no confidence to the chair of the 1922 Committee, Graham Brady. As there are currently 359 Conservatives in the House of Commons, 54 letters expressing no confidence in Boris Johnson are required.

If this first threshold is met, there is a secret ballot of all Conservative MPs. If the leader wins this confidence vote, they cannot be challenged for another year, although this rule could be amended. If the leader loses, they would be expected to be a caretaker PM until the next leader is elected.

Last week there was speculation that an announcement that Brady had received the 54 letters was imminent, but it did not occur. Johnson’s danger is due to the parties that were held while the UK was in COVID lockdown at Downing Street. This caused a slump for the Conservatives in the polls in December. The Conservatives regained some ground in early January, only for even more party revelations to crash their vote again. Some Conservatives may be waiting for Sue Gray’s report into the parties, expected next week, before moving against Johnson.

It was bad timing for Johnson that these party revelations came when the UK was suffering another COVID wave due to Omicron. This made people’s memories of past lockdowns more vivid, and so the parties resonated more than they would otherwise. In good news for Johnson, the Omicron wave is subsiding, with cases way down from their peak and hospitalisations also starting to fall.

I am dubious that ousting Johnson would be in the Conservatives’ electoral interests. While Johnson is very unpopular now, voters tend to move past non-recurring issues. The parties occurred in the last two years, and are unlikely to cause voters additional pain in the future. As the UK COVID situation improves, voters are likely to move past the parties.

Another argument against removing Johnson is that he “got Brexit done”. At the 2019 election, non-uni whites swung strongly to the Conservatives over Johnson’s promise to “get Brexit done” – see my Conversation article last May. Will these voters remain Conservative under another Conservative PM?

Democrats gain in US redistricting, but Biden’s ratings remain poor

A US Census is held every ten years, with the boundaries of Congressional Districts set for ten years by that Census. Most states have completed redistricting of their CDs from the 2020 Census. The FiveThirtyEight tracker says that there are 129 Democratic-leaning seats, 124 Republican-leaning seats and 21 highly competitive seats in the new maps so far. The changes from the old maps are Democrats up seven, Republicans up one and competitive down six.

While some states use nonpartisan commissions to draw their maps, in most states redistricting is up to politicians. If one party holds the governor and both chambers of the legislature in a state, that party can gerrymander. Republican-controlled Florida (28 CDs) and Democratic New York (26) are the two biggest states still to complete redistricting. A Republican gerrymander in Ohio was rejected by the state courts, and this could also occur in North Carolina.

Biden’s ratings in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate are currently 53.5% disapprove, 41.9% approve (net -11.6). They have worsened recently owing to the recent COVID surge. There has been no recent progress with the Democratic legislative agenda. Inflation over the full 2021 year was 7.0%, the highest since 1982. A recent CBS YouGov poll indicates voters think Biden is not focussed enough on combatting inflation.

French, Portuguese and Chile developments

The first round of the French presidential election is on April 10, with a runoff between the top two on April 24. Conservative Valérie Pécresse has slipped behind the far-right Marine Le Pen in the race for second with incumbent Emmanuel Macron well ahead in first. Macron easily beats Le Pen, but it’s closer against Pécresse.

A Portuguese election will be held on January 30, with 230 seats elected by proportional representation. Polls indicate a close contest between the overall left and overall right. Portugal currently has a left government.

At the December 19 Chilean presidential runoff election, left-wing Boric defeated the far-right Kast by 55.9-44.1.

UK North Shropshire by-election minus two days

Conservatives slumping in polls over sleaze scandals. Also: coverage of developments in the US, France, Germany and New Zealand.

Live Commentary

3:55pm The Lib Dems have GAINED North Shropshire by more than a 15% margin over the Conservatives. This will be very bad for Johnson’s standing among Conservative MPs, but it was hardly a good result for Labour; their vote was down over 12% from 2019.

1:28pm Friday: Turnout in North Shropshire is 46.3%, down 21.6% on the 2019 general election. A Lib Dem source is claiming they will win by at least 1,000 votes.

Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is an honorary associate at the University of Melbourne. His work on electoral matters for The Conversation can be found here, and his own website is here.

A UK parliamentary by-election will occur in Conservative-held North Shropshire, with polls closing at 9am AEDT Friday. This seat has voted Conservative at every election since the 1830s, and voted Leave at the 2016 Brexit referendum by 60-40. In 2019, the Conservatives won by 63-22 over Labour with 10% for the Liberal Democrats. Despite finishing third, the Lib Dems are seen as bigger threats in the by-election.

Local MP Owen Paterson resigned in early November after it was found he breached paid advocacy rules by working for two companies. The Conservative government initially protected him by overruling the independent commission, but was forced into a u-turn by a public backlash. The initial protection was a blunder as it drew attention to other shady practices by Conservative MPs.

The 2020 Downing Street Christmas party, held during lockdown, has further damaged the Conservatives. Even normally pro-Conservative newspapers savaged Boris Johnson. An Opinium poll had Johnson’s net approval crashing 14 points to -35, from what was already a record low approval in late November, and 57% said he should resign.

From January, the Conservatives held a significant lead, but fell into a tie with Labour after the Paterson fiasco. The Christmas party scandal has given Labour a high single-digit lead, with ten polls in the last week having Labour ahead by 4-9 points. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is up to 7% in two polls owing to opposition to vaccine mandates.

A by-election was held in Old Bexley last fortnight, with the Conservatives retaining by a 51.5-30.9 margin over Labour, down from 64.5-23.5 in 2019. 99 Conservative MPs rebelled against vaccine mandates for entry to large venues in a Commons vote Tuesday, and it was only carried with Labour support. Left-wing Labour MPs and the Lib Dems were also opposed.

US: Democrats make legislative progress, but Biden’s ratings still poor

Shortly after Democrats’ dire performance in the November 2 Virginia and New Jersey elections, the US House passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill (BIB) by 228-206, with 13 Republicans supporting while six left-wing Democrats were opposed owing to decoupling from the Democratic infrastructure bill (DIB). The BIB had already passed the Senate, so it became law with Joe Biden’s signature.

Later in November, the House passed the DIB, and this can pass the Senate with a simple majority using “reconciliation”. While Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are concerns for their party in a 50-50 Senate, it’s likely the DIB will pass by early next year. Congress has also averted an early December government shutdown and a mid-December debt limit default.

Biden’s ratings in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate have improved slightly in the last fortnight to 50.7% disapprove, 43.3% approve (net -7.4). His ratings are poor owing to US inflation, which was up 0.8% in November for a 12-month rate of 6.8%, the highest since 1982. As a result, real wages were down 1.9% over the last 12 months.

French, German and New Zealand developments

The first round of the French presidential election will be held April 10 with a runoff between the top two candidates on April 24 in the likely event nobody wins a first round majority. After winning the nomination for the conservative Les Republicains on December 4, Valérie Pécresse has surged in the polls to be just ahead of the far-right’s Marine Le Pen, behind incumbent Emmanuel Macron. In runoff match-ups, Macron easily leads Le Pen, but is barely ahead of Pécresse.

On December 8, more than two months after the September 26 German election, a new government was formed. The government will be a coalition of the centre-left SPD, the Greens and the pro-business FDP, and will have a combined 416 of the 736 parliamentary seats. The conservative CDU/CSU had been a party of government for the previous 16 years under former chancellor Angela Merkel.

A New Zealand Morgan poll, conducted during November, had Labour and the Greens trailing National, ACT and Maori by a combined 47-46.5, the first time Labour plus Greens have trailed since before COVID hit. The right-wing ACT won just 0.5% of the party vote at the 2017 election, but surged to 7.6% in 2020, and was up to a record 17.5% in this poll.

I see England, I see France: part deux

The results of looming elections in France and Britain are looking less in doubt than ever.

Update

4.00am. The sampled count result is in: Macron 65.1%, Le Pen 34.9%.

3.15am. Actually, what will be published at 4am will be the sampled early count of actual voting, which proved pinpoint accurate last time. Exit polls are coming out now, and have Macron at around 63%.

2.15am. I’m giving this a bump in case anyone’s about who wishes to discuss tonight’s results from France. Exit polls will be out at 4am.

Earlier:

We’re now two days away from the run-off election for the French presidency, and a bit under five weeks away from the general election in Britain. A ban on polling in the final days of French election kicks in around about now, and they suggest that centrist contender Emmanuel Macron’s 60-40 lead over far right candidate Marine Le Pen as of a week ago has widened a little as the big day approaches. The polls were eye-wateringly consistent and accurate ahead of the first round election, and have remained so on the former count at least.

Britain had a dry run with yesterday’s council elections, the results of which poured cold water on any notion that the polls might be as badly astray this time as they were in 2015. In other words, they delivered unprecedented victories for the Conservatives and unmitigated disaster for Labour, as well as reinforcing the impression of a mass exodus from Ukip to the Tories. The poll aggregate below, conducted without any clever-dickery in relation to weighting and bias adjustment, records the Conservatives at 44.8% (compared with 36.9% in 2015), Labour at 28.3% (30.4%), the Liberal Democrats at 10.5% (7.9%) and Ukip at 6.8% (12.6%).

The first chart goes back to the last election, the second to the beginning of March. Among the things the latter makes clearer is that a spike to the Conservatives after the election was announced has in fact levelled off, and that some vaguely encouraging results for Labour a week or so ago haven’t been maintained.

I see England, I see France

An overview and thread for discussion of looming national elections in the United Kingdom and France.

UPDATE: Exit polls from France will be published 4am EST (i.e. early Monday morning), and the actual result should be clear about three hours after that, unless it’s particularly close.

There’s a lot of big election news going down right now at the other side of the globe, starting with the first round of France’s presidential elections on Sunday, to be followed a fortnight later by a run-off between the two leading candidates.

Recent polling indicates the two leading candidates are Marine Le Pen of the far right National Front and Emmanuel Macron, a former Socialist running under his own banner. However, polling hasn’t had a great record in Europe lately, and Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has pointed to a suspiciously narrow range of recent French presidential results, which has been known to signify that pollsters are “herding” each other off the end of a cliff. This leaves at least some hope for François Fillon of the centre-right Republicans, whose initially promising campaign has been hobbled by personal scandals. A hard left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has gained a head of steam over the past month, although his recorded support has recently tapered off at a level below where he needs to be. Head-to-head polling suggests Le Pen would be heavily defeated in the run-off, particularly if facing Macron.

It also emerged on Tuesday that Britain will go to the polls on June 8, for an election that looms as an historic disaster for Labour. The Conservatives’ unexpected majority victory at the May 2015 election was achieved from 36.9% of the national vote, which netted them 330 seats out of 650, compared with 30.4% and 232 seats for Labour. Recent polling has mostly had it in the low forties, but two polls conducted in the immediate wake of the election announcement had them at 46% (an ICM poll for the Guardian) and 48% (YouGov for The Times). Labour’s recent poll ratings have been anywhere between 23% and 29%, with the most recent results being 24% from YouGov and 26% from ICM. This suggests the Conservatives are in a position to match Labour’s historic landslides under Tony Blair, who won 418 seats in 1997 and 413 in 2001.

Both major parties were up slightly on the primary vote in 2015, but the Conservatives emerged the principal beneficiary of the collapse of the Liberal Democrats. By contrast, Labour was devastated north of the border by the triumph of the Scottish National Party, which won all but three of Scotland’s 59 seats, gaining 40 from Labour and 10 from the Liberal Democrats. The seats remaining to Labour are concentrated in London; Merseyside and Manchester; Leeds and its industrial surrounds; Birmingham; Newcastle and Durham; and south Wales. The rest of England’s electoral map is a sea of blue, punctuated by occasional small islands of red, and still more occasional ones of orange (traditionally associated with the Liberal Democrats).

Each of Labour’s stronghold regions consists of a safe core and a less safe periphery, and it’s the latter areas that are looming as the main battlegrounds of a losing election. To isolate one example, Labour holds 45 seats in the area of Greater London, compared with 27 for the Conservatives and one for the Liberal Democrats. It will continue to dominate the city’s inner east even under worst case scenarios, but will come under pressure in as many as ten seats in the west and on the fringe of the Greater London region.

The polls have generally had the Liberal Democrats at around 11%, representing a modest recovery from the disaster of 2015, when they dropped from 57 seats and 23.1% of the vote to eight seats and 7.9%.
However, opportunities for further gains are limited, and the Conservative tide could even cause the party trouble in the few seats it continues to hold. Ukip yielded only the seat of Clacton from its 12.6% share of the national vote in 2015, and lost that a month ago when Douglas Carswell, a former Conservative MP, quit to sit as an independent. Polls suggest the party has shed support to the Conservatives, so its pickings in the House of Commons look likely to remain slim or non-existent.

The polls I’ve looked at for Scotland suggest the Scottish National Party will retain most if not all of its 50.0% support from 2015, so the party will presumably continue to dominate Scotland’s 59 seats, of which it holds all but three. Any talk of a defeat for the government is being framed in terms of its majority being lost to a “progressive alliance” of Labour, the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats, but at this stage it seems very unlikely it will come to that.

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