I’m glad they’re pulling ahead, but I can’t help thinking that any electoral system that’s capable of producing a surprising outcome is fundamentally broken, because it means that a handful of people have a huge impact on the final outcome.
It’s because projections from the first round did not take into account how much people hate the far right and would vote another party that passed the first round, even if they don’t agree with them, to prevent the far right from getting elected. In three-ways for the second round, the parties in third position that were either centrists or leftists called for their candidate to remove themselves from the vote to allow for a bigger coalition against the far right
I said nothing about conspiring. I was thinking of how a swing of a few percent of voters in many systems can be all it takes to swing the outcome between different extremes of policy and ideology. No system with that property can reliably represent the will of the people, because whatever the overall will is, the system will routinely fail to represent it. People elected to nationwide offices should be boring centrists pretty much 100% of the time because most countries have little ideological consistency in their populations and they should never have a national leader who antagonizes a large portion of the population.
I’m glad they’re pulling ahead, but I can’t help thinking that any electoral system that’s capable of producing a surprising outcome is fundamentally broken, because it means that a handful of people have a huge impact on the final outcome.
It’s because projections from the first round did not take into account how much people hate the far right and would vote another party that passed the first round, even if they don’t agree with them, to prevent the far right from getting elected. In three-ways for the second round, the parties in third position that were either centrists or leftists called for their candidate to remove themselves from the vote to allow for a bigger coalition against the far right
Or people could have heeded warnings of a looming fascist takeover en masse.
Or the predictions were simply erroneous.
Or it’s not surprising to everyone, just the ones in charge of the media.
There’s tons of possible explanations that don’t involve a few powerful people conspiring.
I said nothing about conspiring. I was thinking of how a swing of a few percent of voters in many systems can be all it takes to swing the outcome between different extremes of policy and ideology. No system with that property can reliably represent the will of the people, because whatever the overall will is, the system will routinely fail to represent it. People elected to nationwide offices should be boring centrists pretty much 100% of the time because most countries have little ideological consistency in their populations and they should never have a national leader who antagonizes a large portion of the population.
I disagree with pretty much everything, but THIS is absolute lunacy:
Have fun playing fascist roulette, then. That’s what’s happening whether we want it or not.