There's a statue in my hometown of Vancouver, Canada that has left an impression on me from the time I was a child. Called the "Miracle Mile," it commemorates a legendary race held in 1954 at Vancouver's Empire Stadium between the two men at the time known for breaking the four-minute mile: England's Roger Bannister and Australia's John Landy. At the very end of the race, Landy, who was in the lead, looked over one shoulder for his opponent, who proceeded to blow past him on the other and win. "Always run your own race, right to the end," my late, sports specialist father told me as we stared at the monument. "Because that's the only thing that you can really control." Too bad that Macron didn't learn the same lesson.
Instead, having failed to seduce French voters in the first round of voting on platform and record alone, with a third place finish for Team Macron's establishment "Together" party, he stopped running his own race and started looking around.
Macron and his Prime Minister Gabriel Attal decided that the anti-establishment, right-wing National Rally party - which dominated the popular vote in the first round - had to be denied a majority in the second round at all costs. So they figured that, by pulling candidates in districts where a split with the anti-establishment left would lead to a seat for the National Rally, they could block its parliamentary leader, Marine Le Pen. And the anti-establishment, left-wing New Popular Front coalition and its de facto leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, agreed to do the same.
They'd band together in a coalition of losers to beat the frontrunner. Paris is hosting the Olympic Games later this month. It would be like if all the losers in the women's gymnastics event were allowed to decide that they'd pick one single loser among them to go up against Simone Biles - and then give all their loser point scores to that individual to defeat her.
But what ended up actually happening is that, as a result of this strategy, there were more districts left with just a choice between the two anti-establishment candidates - on the left and the right - than there were districts that left voters with a choice between Team Macron and Team Le Pen.
The result? A hung parliament with no single party having anywhere near a majority of 289 seats....<<<Read More>>>...
