> Why do you think it likely that the Left will win in the June
> legislative elections?
One, because they won more of the total vote. They only lost because they had more parties. Two, because these new left grouplets have shown they have more appeal than people thought and can become a new force. This is a sudden new energizing prospect in what was a boring election, a new option that wasn't previously on offer. Three, because the drive to defeat Le Pen will drive up turn-out and political involvement all across the left, while the mainstream right will be demoralized. The anti-le Pen forces already have 100s of thousands in the streets. The French right on the other hand has always fractured every time le Pen has done well. They always end up fighting and splitting over whether to coopt its voters or to draw a cordon sanitaire. The only reason they recoved at at all in the last few years was because the le Pen forces split. This will be a problem for them.
> Isn't it more likely that a demoralized left, wasting its energy on
> polemics against LO and LCR,
I don't think they will have such polemics because they are missing their underpining. The difference between the US and France is that in the US, the spoiler argument works on both the executive and parliamentary levels. But in France, it only happens at the executive level. If you vote for a third party for parliament, you don't hurt your second choice. You really do drag it farther to your wing.
The bottom line is that during this last cohabitation, its been the PM who mattered and the President who's been a pale shadow. And if it happens again, this will be even more true. So this mistake is fixable.
And if they're lucky, even more than fixable, since a second term of such cohabitation will throw the whole system into question. The whole reason for syncing the presidential and legislative elections in the first place was to fix the problem of cohabitation. After such a spectacular failure, I think they'll try something new. They've known for years that De Gaulle's system was really only meant for De Gaulle.
Lastly, I think it's clear this happened because of a surprising and one-time-only mistake. French people thought the threshold made it impossible for their system to screw up in an American way. Unfortunately, too many people taking that for granted screwed it up. So I think there will be a groundswell to fix it so it doesn't happen again. Because most people in the world think that when an election gives you the opposite of what you voted for, you should get it fixed.
Michael