Foreign News
What just happened in France’s shock election?
Nobody expected this. High drama, for sure, but this was a shock.
When the graphics flashed up on all the big French channels, it was not the far right of Marine Le Pen and her young prime minister-in-waiting Jordan Bardella who were on course for victory.
It was the left who had clinched it, and Emmanuel Macron’s centrists had staged an unexpected comeback, pushing the far-right National Rally (RN) into third.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran left-wing firebrand seen by his critics as an extremist, wasted no time in proclaiming victory. “The president must call on the New Popular Front to govern,” he told supporters in Stalingrad square, insisting Mr Macron had to recognise that he and his coalition had lost.
His alliance, drawn up in a hurry for President Macron’s surprise election, includes his own radical France Unbowed, along with Greens, Socialists and Communists and even Trotskyists. But their victory is nowhere big enough to govern.
France is going to have a hung parliament. None of the three blocs can form an outright majority by themselves of 289 seats in the 577-seat parliament.
As soon as he had spoken, Mr Mélenchon went off to a much bigger square, Place de la République, to celebrate his success with a crowd of 8,000 people, according to police numbers.
For National Rally’s supporters the champagne was fast turning flat at their celebration-gone-wrong in the Bois de Vincennes forest to the south-west of Paris.
Only a week ago all the talk had been of a possible absolute majority, and Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella were still talking up their chances a couple of days before the vote.
Marine Le Pen put a brave face on it. “Two years ago we had just seven MPs. Tonight RN is the first party in France in terms of MP numbers.” In the last parliament they had 88 MPs and now more than 140, so she was right. And no other party has more than 100 MPs, because the Macronists and the Popular Front are both coalitions.
Jordan Bardella complained that his party had been foiled by unnatural “alliances of dishonour”, forged by a “single party” made up of the Macron camp and the left. He wasn’t wrong about the unnatural alliance, but it is only a temporary one of convenience.
More than 200 candidates who saw themselves as part of a “republican front”, pulled out of the second round so that a better-placed rival could stop RN winning.
Not even Marine Le Pen’s younger sister, Marie-Caroline, was able to offer a glimmer of good news from her own election battle around Le Mans. Her bid to get into parliament failed by just 225 votes, defeated by Mr Mélenchon’s candidate, Elise Leboucher, after the Macron candidate dropped out.
Turnout, at 66.63%, was the highest in a parliamentary second round since 1997. Even if RN’s vote held up, this time it was having to contend with non-RN votes often being used tactically to create a “barrage” or block against them.
All over France, RN was losing run-offs it needed to win.
Some of their candidates were less than appealing.
There was the woman who promised to stop making racist jokes if she was elected in Puy-de-Dôme; and then there was the ill-equipped young man in Haute-Savoie in the south-east who took part in a TV debate with his centrist rival and made barely any sense on anything.
They both lost, but they reflected RN’s big advance in rural areas.
RN scored 32% of the vote – 37% with their right-wing allies – and for more than 10 million voters a taboo has been broken.
In Meaux, east of Paris, RN won but not by much.
After casting her vote, Claudine said people she knew tended not to admit to voting RN, unless they were with close friends.
Before the projected result at 8pm, there was fevered speculation about whether President Macron would come out and speak. Word spread that he had gone into a meeting 90 minutes earlier.
Gabriel Attal, his beleaguered prime minister, eventually appeared to give the government’s response.
Four weeks ago, he had sat stony-faced and arms folded opposite the president as Mr Macron revealed his election plan.
Now he announced he would be handing his boss his resignation in the morning, but he would stay on as long as duty called.
Mr Attal is supposed to fly off on Tuesday evening to a Nato meeting in Washington. It’s hard to imagine him being replaced just yet.
France has entered a period of political instability with no obvious way out. There had been talk of unrest on the streets, but only a handful of incidents were reported in Paris and cities including Nantes and Lyon,
All eyes are now on the president, who will have to navigate a way out of this deadlock.
The new National Assembly is due to convene in 10 days’ time, but the Paris Olympics starts on 26 July and France could do with a period of calm.
Left-leaning newspaper Libération summed up the whole night with the headline C’est Ouf.
“It’s crazy,” in colloquial French, but for them it’s also a relief that voters brought RN’s bid for power to a halt.
[BBC]
Argentina face the prospect of a Fifa fine after their players celebrated the World Cup semi-final win against England with a banner in support of their country’s claims to the Falkland Islands.
The defending world champions produced a dramatic late comeback in Atlanta, scoring twice to defeat Thomas Tuchel’s side 2-1 and book a showdown with Spain in Sunday’s final.
After the final whistle, Argentina players celebrated while holding a banner reading “Las Malvinas son Argentinas”, which translates as “The Falklands are Argentine”.
The Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory in the south-west Atlantic Ocean, remain the subject of a sovereignty dispute between Britain and Argentina.
The two nations went to war over the group of islands, situated 300 miles off Argentina’s east coast, from April to June 1982.
The 74-day conflict led to the deaths of 655 Argentine and 255 British servicemen. Three people from the islands also died.
In 2014, Fifa fined the Argentine Football Association 20,000 pounds after its players held up a banner with the same message before a friendly against Slovenia.
World football’s governing body said the gesture had breached rules on political action and team misconduct.
[BBC]
The death toll in a fire at a popular live music pub in Bangkok has risen to 32 after two more people died from their injuries, as Thai police continue to investigate possible negligence as a factor in the blaze.
The Erawan Emergency Medical Centre said on Wednesday that 30 people remained in hospitals in the city, with 15 of those being treated in intensive care units. It said 44 people had been discharged.
The fire, Thailand’s deadliest in 17 years, broke out at the Rong Beer Na Ladprao late on Sunday night. It took firefighters 30 minutes to put out the blaze.
Most of the victims died from smoke inhalation, while a few died from burn injuries, Wiroon Supasingsiripreecha, chief of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, told journalists on Wednesday.
Local police said that most of the people who were found dead were trapped in windowless bathrooms, where they may have tried to escape the blaze.
The cause of the fire has not been determined, and police are investigating the possibility of negligence at the venue, including whether emergency exits were obstructed.
Authorities say an electrical short circuit in a ceiling-mounted air conditioner may have sparked the fire. Some experts say that combustible acoustic materials around the stage may have ignited, producing extreme heat and smoke.
Some survivors and family members of victims arrived at the Phahonyothin Police Station on Wednesday to give statements, gather belongings and seek compensation.
Natthaphong Lakhorn, 26, told the Associated Press news agency that he was close to the stage when the fire started.
[Aljazeera]
Father Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the architect of Qatar’s remarkable transformation into an ultra-wealthy modern nation with global influence, has been laid to rest in Doha following his death at the age of 74.
Sheikh Hamad’s death was announced on Sunday morning, and his simple funeral ceremony was held after the daily evening prayer at sunset at the Imam Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab Mosque in the capital.
Mourners wearing traditional Qatari dress stood with their hands clasped in front of them during a funeral prayer, facing the shrouded body of Sheikh Hamad.
Afterwards, close family members, including his son and successor as emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, carried his body out of the mosque. Sheikh Hamad was laid to rest at the Lusail Cemetery north of Doha.
Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi said the ceremony was “a humble event” and Sheikh Hamad was “buried in a simple grave”.
“The simplicity really is in keeping with Islamic tradition but also emblematic of how the father emir carried himself in his life,” Basravi said. “He did not concern himself with the trappings of wealth but was focused on the welfare of his own people.”
During Sheikh Hamad’s reign from 1995 to 2013, Qatar’s gross domestic product rose more than 24-fold, largely because of his focus on developing the country’s massive gas resources. By 2006, the small nation had become the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
[Aljazeera]
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