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      Are Traditional Political Parties Dead in France?

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      Presidents, prime ministers, Parliament — France’s mainstream left and right-wing parties used to have it all. In the first round of April’s presidential elections, they got less than 7 percent of the vote.PARIS — Since the 1950s, France’s traditional left- and right-wing parties have provided three-quarters of the country’s presidents and nearly all of its prime ministers.Parliament has also swung from one to the other in alternating waves of pink, the color associated with the Socialist Party or its predecessors, and blue, which represents the main conservative party, known today as Les Républicains.But in this month’s presidential election, candidates for both parties cratered.In the first round of voting, Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist candidate, got only 1.75 percent of the vote. Valérie Pécresse, the Républicain candidate, got 4.78 percent, far less than the 2017 candidate for her party, François Fillon, who garnered 20.01 percent — even after a scandal involving a no-show job for his wife.Both Ms. Hidalgo and Ms. Pécresse were unceremoniously knocked out of the race.President Emmanuel Macron, whose centrist party was created just six years ago, then battled Marine Le Pen, of the far-right National Rally party, and won a second term.The stark collapse of the Socialists and Les Républicains capped a yearslong downward spiral for both parties, which have struggled to persuade voters that they could handle concerns including security, inequality and climate change, experts say.Supporters of Valérie Pécresse, the presidential candidate for Les Républicains, watching the results of the first round of the presidential election in Paris, on April 10.Adnan Farzat/EPA, via ShutterstockThe old left-right division has given way to a new landscape, split into three major blocs. Mr. Macron’s broad, pro-globalization center is now flanked by radical forces: on the right, Ms. Le Pen and her anti-immigrant nationalism; on the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a fiery politician who champions state-led policies against E.U. rules and the free market.Many now wonder what will remain of the former stalwart political parties.“Before, there was the left, the right — that was clearer,” said Jeanette Brimble, 80, speaking recently on a narrow cobblestone street in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence. For decades, she voted for mainstream conservatives. This time, pleased by Mr. Macron’s shift rightward, she cast a ballot for him.The downfall of the traditional parties, Ms. Brimble said, was “a bit disturbing for my generation.”In 2017, Mr. Macron’s first election landed an initial blow to the system, shattering the left. With the vote this month, the right is feeling the damage.Mr. Macron is set to be in office until 2027 — French law limits presidents to two consecutive terms. After that, it is unclear whether the traditional parties will be able to rebound.Dominique Reynié, a political analyst who heads the Foundation for Political Innovation, a research institute that focuses on European and economic policy, said a departure from politics by Mr. Macron “would give the traditional governing parties a chance to get back into the game.”But some expect volatility instead.“I don’t believe that traditional parties are going to be reborn on the ashes of La République en Marche,” said Martial Foucault, director of the CEVIPOF political research institute at Sciences Po in Paris, referring to Mr. Macron’s party. In France’s increasingly personality-driven politics, disillusioned voters could shift from one charismatic leader to another, regardless of party affiliation, he said.“Citizens want efficiency,” he added. “So they are prone to these electoral movements, effectively leaving the system in total turbulence.”Mr. Macron, whose policies have straddled the left and right, is scheduled to be in office until 2027.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesIn Aix-en-Provence, a city of 145,000 that has long leaned right, the collapse was striking. Five years ago, Mr. Fillon came in first there with 27.45 percent of the vote. This month, Ms. Pécresse came in sixth with 5.5 percent.Nationwide, the Elabe polling institute found that roughly a third of those who had voted for Mr. Fillon in 2017 chose Mr. Macron this time, versus only a quarter for Ms. Pécresse, Mr. Fillon’s successor as the candidate of Les Républicains. Even Nicolas Sarkozy, the party’s last French president, from 2007 to 2012, didn’t endorse her.In a particularly humiliating turn of events, Ms. Pécresse came in fourth behind Mr. Mélenchon in Versailles, the bourgeois Parisian suburb that she once represented in Parliament. Ms. Hidalgo, who has been mayor of Paris for over eight years, got only 2.17 percent of the capital’s vote.Financial concerns compound the embarrassment.Presidential candidates can get a state reimbursement of up to 8 million euros for funds that they personally contribute to their campaigns. But the amount is much lower — 800,000 euros, or about $865,000 — if they get less than 5 percent of the vote.Mainstream candidates long considered 5 percent a low bar, allowing them to take out loans with the assurance that a large chunk of their expenses would be reimbursed once they cleared the threshold. But Ms. Pécresse, now personally in debt for €5 million, has been forced to appeal for donations.“At stake is the survival of Les Républicains, and beyond that, the survival of the republican right,” she said. (So far she has collected €2 million.)A poster of Ms. Pécresse lying on a street in Marseille, southern France, on April 6.Daniel Cole/Associated PressBoth the Socialists and the Républicains failed to capitalize on anger against Mr. Macron, who wooed voters with sweeping promises of pragmatic centrism but whose first term was divisive. Mainstream parties have struggled to address issues like immigration, security, inequality or climate change, experts say, partly because Mr. Macron has cherry-picked from their platforms, especially on the right.Alix Fabre, who voted for Mr. Fillon in 2017 before turning to Mr. Macron, said in Aix-en-Provence that the president’s pro-business policies and those of the mainstream right felt similar.“Most people around me are from the right, and they’ve joined Macron,” she said.Experts also see a deeper disconnect, saying that both parties grew complacent in the belief that their turn in office would always come again. Fixated on internal quarrels and hemorrhaging dues-paying members, they lost touch with ordinary citizens, failing to harness movements like the Yellow Vest protests, experts said. They have also been unable to offer convincing alternatives to more radical forces like Ms. Le Pen.“It’s a constant, lasting failure to represent social conflict,” said Mr. Reynié, the analyst. For Mr. Foucault, of the CEVIPOF, “these parties haven’t understood what citizens are asking of them, in terms of renewing their platforms and their ideology.”Ms. Hidalgo, center, has been the mayor of Paris for more than eight years, yet only got 2.17 percent of the vote there in the presidential election.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesMr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen’s parties have issues too. Few see La République en Marche outlasting Mr. Macron’s political ambitions. The National Rally has been a Le Pen family affair for decades, marked by eight defeats in presidential elections.France’s traditional political forces still control many cities and other local or regional offices, where voters are more likely to trust familiar faces with day-to-day concerns.In 2021, Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen’s parties failed to win a single one of France’s 13 mainland regions, although Mr. Foucault said appearances were slightly misleading, because without American-style midterm elections, the French only have local elections to voice discontent with the government.Corinne Narassiguin, a top Socialist official, said that her party’s disastrous results at the national level marked “the end of a cycle” that started in 2017, after which the party was forced to sell its headquarters in an upscale Paris neighborhood and move to the suburbs.“Voters have made it clear that we’re no longer able to tell them why they should vote for the Socialists at the national level,” she said.The Socialists and the Républicains are now scrambling to shore up support ahead of the legislative elections in June, which will fill all seats in France’s lower house of Parliament. But both face serious challenges.The Socialists, whose strength in Parliament has already shrunk, could end up with even fewer lawmakers as Mr. Mélenchon’s party gains prominence. The Républicains are torn between those favoring an alliance with Mr. Macron’s party, those wanting to stay independent, and those leaning toward Éric Zemmour, an anti-immigrant pundit who also ran for president.Marine Le Pen, who battled Mr. Macron for the presidency, earlier this month in Paris.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesMarie Ronzevalle, 29, who works in event management in Aix-en-Provence, voted for Mr. Macron in 2017 — she liked his vow to “break with traditional codes” — but was disappointed by some of his policies and picked Ms. Hidalgo in the first round this year.She said that her family struggled to pick a candidate in this election — unlike her now-deceased grandmother and great-grandmother, loyal Socialists who worked for the party.One of her grandfathers, who always voted for the mainstream right but strongly hesitated this time, even briefly considered a blank ballot.“There is less of that feeling of belonging and automatically giving your vote to a party,” Ms. Ronzevalle said. “People are sick and tired of being asked to fit into a box.”“They want to see things change,” she added. “But maybe the old parties are no longer the solution.”Aurelien Breeden More

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      Court Tosses Out Maps That Favored Democrats

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      Primaries for Congress and the State Senate are likely to be delayed after New York’s highest court ruled that new districts were unconstitutional.Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at a decision that many people who follow politics in New York did not expect: The state’s top court threw out the new map for congressional and State Senate districts. We’ll also look at opposition to the city’s plans for homeless shelters in Chinatown.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesNew York’s top court said Democrats had violated the State Constitution when they took it upon themselves to draw new congressional and State Senate districts, which were widely seen as likely to favor Democratic candidates. The judges ordered a court-appointed expert to prepare new maps.The ruling is expected to delay the June 28 primaries for congressional and State Senate districts until August, to allow time for new maps to be readied and for candidates to collect petitions to qualify for the ballot in the districts on those maps.But there could still be primaries in June for governor and the State Assembly because those districts were not at issue. The high court left it to a trial court judge and the state Board of Elections to figure out the details with “all due haste.”My colleague Nicholas Fandos writes that Democratic leaders had counted on the Court of Appeals, with all seven judges appointed by Democratic governors, to overturn earlier decisions about the congressional and State Senate maps from a Republican judge in Steuben County and a bipartisan appeals court in Rochester. The high court instead issued a more damning verdict that is not subject to appeal.National Democrats had looked to New York to pick up as many as three new seats in the fall and offset redistricting gains by Republicans across the country. Now, with the ruling likely to eliminate the prospect of Democratic gains in New York, Republicans’ chances of retaking control of the House of Representatives appear to have increased.With Chief Judge Janet DiFiore writing the majority opinion, the court concluded that the Democrats — who control the Assembly and State Senate and adopted the maps at issue in February — had ignored a constitutional amendment approved by voters in 2014 that banned partisan gerrymandering. The judges said the Democrats had designed districts “with impermissible partisan purpose.”Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said she was reviewing the decision. Michael Murphy, a spokesman for Democrats in the State Senate, said they still “believe in the constitutionality” of their maps and will repeat that to the court-appointed expert assigned to draw ones.Republicans and several nonpartisan public interest groups applauded the ruling. “The will of the people prevailed over the Corrupt Albany Machine in a tremendous victory for democracy, fair elections & the Constitution!” Representative Nicole Malliotakis, an endangered Republican, wrote on Twitter. Her Staten Island-based district was among several that the Democrats’ congressional map would have made significantly bluer by adding liberal voters from Park Slope in Brooklyn.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Deepening Divides: As political mapmakers create lopsided new district lines, the already polarized parties are being pulled even farther apart.WeatherEnjoy a sunny day in the high 50s with breezes that will continue into a mostly clear evening, when temps will drop to the 40s.alternate-side parkingIn effect until Monday (Eid al-Fitr).The latest New York newsMayor Eric Adams has appointed several well-respected government professionals with no known red flags. But he has also surrounded himself with friends and allies with histories that led to protests and even arrests.A former Police Department officer accused of assaulting a Washington police officer during the Capitol riot is on trial.A newly released, partially redacted 2017 letter confirmed the Yankees’ illicit use of electronic devices to decipher and share opposing teams’ signs.Chinatown fights the city’s shelter planAndrew Seng for The New York TimesThe Chinatown neighborhood in Manhattan is about to get two new homeless shelters, one of which is proposing to allow drug use. Residents are fighting the city’s plans. I asked my colleague Andy Newman, who covers homelessness and related issues, to explain.The fight over the new shelters has elevated the usual not-in-my-backyard objections. What’s fueling residents’ heightened urgency?Hardly any neighborhood in the city welcomes homeless shelters. But anti-Asian hate crimes increased by over 300 percent from 2020 to 2021, and a lot of those attacks were linked to homeless people — and a lot of people in Chinatown feel that their very right to live is under attack. One man whose children go to school in Chinatown said at a community board hearing: “We do so much for this country and the city, and our human rights, my son and daughter’s human rights, are being taken away.”You mentioned the community board, which has just voted to oppose one of the new shelters. Will that vote make a difference, or will it just add to the pressure on Mayor Eric Adams?The community board’s vote is not binding — the city does not need the community board’s support to open that shelter, on Grand Street. But the community board resolution against it, which was introduced in response to complaints from the community, is a measure of the degree of opposition. The optics are tricky for Adams. He has thrown his weight behind opening more shelters as part of his plan to convince people who live in the streets and subways to come indoors. He has also been a strong supporter of the “harm reduction” approach to the opioid crisis that this planned shelter embraces.But he is also under pressure to stop hate crimes against Asian New Yorkers, and many residents of Chinatown believe that this shelter would lead to more such crimes — even though the shelter’s supporters, and city homeless services officials, argue that the shelter will actually make the neighborhood safer by taking in people who are already homeless in the neighborhood and connecting them to mental health and substance abuse services.Jacky Wong, founder of Concerned Citizens of East Broadway, which opposes another Chinatown shelter, questions the city’s approach of opening shelters in areas with a lot of street homelessness. “People may come here just to buy drugs, and so they would be considered ‘from’ this neighborhood,” he told me. “Why not give them housing in a neighborhood where they have more positive connections?”How has Chinatown coped with what residents say was a surge in random violence and thefts that accompanied the pandemic?Every Chinese-speaking person we interviewed has either witnessed or been a victim of some kind of episode of violence, crime or disorder that they attributed to a homeless person. Senior citizens are taking self-defense courses. Doctors said they send their staff home early so that they don’t have to deal with the streets and subways after dark.The city says the new shelters are partly a response to the killing of a homeless Asian man in 2019. But plans to name one of the shelters for him have drawn opposition. Why?Many people in Chinatown feel that the city is exploiting the 2019 murder of Chuen Kwok, an 83-year-old man from Hong Kong who slept in the street in Chinatown, as a justification for forcing a shelter on a community that doesn’t want it. These planned shelters are intended for people who are street-homeless, and there is a widely held belief in Chinatown that street homelessness is primarily a problem of the non-Chinese population, notwithstanding Kwok.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Democrats Lose Control of N.Y. Election Maps, as Top Court Rejects Appeal

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      The Court of Appeals said Democrats violated the State Constitution and ignored the will of the voters. The judges ordered a court-appointed expert to draw replacements.New York’s highest court ruled on Wednesday that Democratic leaders had violated the State Constitution when they took it upon themselves to draw new congressional and State Senate districts, and ordered that a court-appointed special master draft replacement lines for this year’s critical midterm elections.In a sweeping 32-page ruling, a divided New York State Court of Appeals chided Democrats for ignoring a constitutional amendment adopted by voters in 2014 to curb political influence in the redistricting process. The amendment also created a new outside commission to guide the process.The judges additionally found that the congressional districts designed by Democrats violated an explicit state ban on partisan gerrymandering, undercutting the party’s national campaign to brand itself as the champion of voting rights.Writing for the four-judge majority, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore said that Democratic lawmakers created congressional and State Senate maps in a way that was “procedurally unconstitutional,” and that the congressional map in particular was “drawn with impermissible partisan purpose.”The ruling, which is not subject to appeal, was expected to delay the June 28 party primaries for the congressional and State Senate districts until August, to allow time for new maps to be drawn and for candidates to collect petitions to qualify for the ballot.The verdict delivered a stinging defeat to Democrats in Albany and in Washington and cast this year’s election cycle into deep uncertainty.Party leaders had been hopeful that the Court of Appeals, with all seven judges appointed by Democratic governors, would overturn earlier decisions by a Republican judge in Steuben County and a bipartisan appeals court in Rochester.Instead, the high court issued an even more damning verdict that denied the Democrat-dominated State Legislature a chance to redraw the maps itself. That task, the judges said, should be handled by a politically neutral special master, who would be overseen by a trial court.National Democrats had been counting on the New York congressional maps adopted in February to deliver as many as three new seats this fall and offset redistricting gains by Republicans across the country. Now, with Democratic gains likely to be erased or minimized in New York, Republicans are on track to make modest gains nationally, easing their path to retaking control of the House of Representatives this fall.Democrats were likewise expecting the State Senate maps they adopted in February to help safeguard the party’s supermajority in Albany.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Deepening Divides: As political mapmakers create lopsided new district lines, the already polarized parties are being pulled even farther apart.Wednesday’s decision was a milestone in New York jurisprudence, the first time since the 1960s that the Court of Appeals has struck down district lines approved by lawmakers in their once-in-a-decade redistricting process.But the ruling is part of a growing trend across the nation in which state courts have taken up more active stances against partisan gerrymandering as federal courts have been removed from these battles by the Supreme Court.This year alone, state courts in Ohio, North Carolina, Kansas and Maryland have scrapped plans put in place by lawmakers because they ran afoul of state constitutional language outlawing partisan mapmaking, like that adopted by New York voters in 2014. The courts are widely expected to scrutinize new lines in Florida that overwhelmingly favor Republicans, as well.“States can be the laboratories of redistricting reforms,” said Samuel Wang, the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. “And this just goes to show that if a state court is willing to look carefully to its constitution and laws, it will find principals that can restrict the most extreme partisan acts.”Unlike New York, though, some of those courts have indicated they will allow 2022 elections to take place on tainted maps, potentially putting Democrats at a greater disadvantage nationally.The judges in New York were silent on whether to reschedule primary elections for other contested seats — including for governor, lieutenant governor and the State Assembly — leaving it to a trial court judge, Patrick F. McAllister, and the State Board of Elections to work out the details with “all due haste.” The board said Wednesday evening that it did “not foresee” moving those contests.But the judges appeared to bless the idea of separating them, pointing out that New York has a history of holding bifurcated primaries. They were more explicit in rejecting Democrats’ plea to allow this year’s elections to proceed on tainted lines and fix them later.“We reject this invitation to subject the people of this state to an election conducted pursuant to an unconstitutional reapportionment,” Judge DiFiore wrote in the majority opinion.Justice McAllister has already appointed Jonathan Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, as special master to draw the congressional and State Senate lines by late May.Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said Wednesday afternoon that she was reviewing the decision. Michael Murphy, a spokesman for Senate Democrats, said they still “believe in the constitutionality” of their maps and plan to argue their case to the special master.Republicans and several nonpartisan public interest groups lauded the decision.“The will of the people prevailed over the Corrupt Albany Machine in a tremendous victory for democracy, fair elections & the Constitution!” Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a New York City Republican, wrote on Twitter.Ms. Malliotakis’s Staten Island-based district was among several that the Democrats’ congressional map would have made more challenging for Republicans, in her case by adding liberal voters from Park Slope in Brooklyn. The map also created new Democratic pickup opportunities on the eastern end of Long Island and in Central New York, and shored up Democrat-held swing seats in the Hudson Valley, by cramming conservative voters into just a handful of districts.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      The Unsettling Warning in France’s Election

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      A record number of abstentions, and a strictly binary choice for voters — many of whom said they were picking the lesser of two evils — are trouble signs even within a mature democracy.You should know at least two crucial facts about the French presidential election, whose final round was held last Sunday.The first is that Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate known for her warm relationship with Vladimir Putin and her hostility toward the European Union and immigrants, lost the election — but with the best showing that her party has ever had, carrying 41.5 percent of the second-round vote.The second is that Emmanuel Macron, the incumbent president from the center-right En Marche party, won the election — but with the lowest share of registered voters of any candidate since 1969, because of historically low turnout and high numbers of votes that were cast blank or spoiled in a show of protest.Of those two facts, the first has garnered the most attention. But the second may be more important.Vote, or hostage negotiation?In the first round of the presidential election, Macron came in first, but with nowhere close to a majority. He got barely more than a quarter of the total votes, with 27.85 percent. Le Pen came next with 23.15 percent, and the leftist candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, got 21.95 percent. The rest of the votes were divided between smaller parties.That’s actually pretty common: Today, in many mature democracies, it’s uncommon for any party or ideological faction to get more than about a third of the votes. In the German federal election last year, the center-left party came first, but with only 25.7 percent of the vote — strikingly similar to the numbers for Macron in the first round. In multiparty parliamentary systems, that results in coalition governments in which two or more parties work together — take Germany, again, where a three-party coalition now governs.Ms. Le Pen had a strong showing in both rounds of the 2022 French presidential election.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut in direct presidential systems, the winner takes all. And for many voters, that means that elections are less a matter of who they want to support than of who they most want to oppose.So when Le Pen made the second round runoff of the French election, the contest took on the tenor of a hostage negotiation. Macron argued that Le Pen was an existential threat to France, and called for all other candidates’ supporters to unite behind him in order to prevent her from winning the presidency. Mélenchon, the leftist candidate, made a similar plea to his supporters. “We know who we will never vote for,” he said on April 10. “We must not give a single vote for Madame Le Pen.”In the end, enough voters aligned behind Macron to keep the far right out of the presidency. And it seems that many heeded the calls to hold their noses and vote for Macron, despite their aversion to him, in order to protect the country from the far right: According to one poll, about 45 percent of those who voted for him did so only to oppose Le Pen.But the same poll found that the opposite was also true: About 45 percent of Le Pen voters were more interested in opposing Macron than in supporting the far right. Other data bears that out: The overseas French territories Martinique and Guadeloupe supported Mélenchon in the first round, but then gave a majority to Le Pen in the second.Others withdrew entirely. Abstentions and blank ballots hit record highs in this election — a notable development in France, where turnout has historically been around 80 percent.A warning from historyExperts who study France’s history of revolutions and democratic collapse see signs of danger in a system that pushes a wide spectrum of voters into a binary choice between what some see as the lesser of two evils.So how do you tell the difference between normal political anger that can work itself out through a series of elections without leading to serious instability, and something dangerous enough to require structural change to the system itself?A woman voting at a polling station in Saint Denis, in the suburbs of Paris. The election saw a high level of voter abstentions.Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times“That’s the question of French history, right?” Terrence Peterson, a political historian at Florida International University, told me. “Historians have been asking that question about France for a long time, given its history of repeated revolutions.”He saw particular cause for concern in the rising levels of abstentions. “When voters express that they feel disenfranchised, if a majority of them do, then that’s a clear sign” of serious trouble, he said.Some in France have begun to call for an overhaul of the Constitution to make the system more representative. Mélenchon has called for a new Constitution to be drafted via a people’s constituent assembly. In an editorial last week in the French newspaper Le Monde, Frederic Sawicki, a political scientist at Pantheon-Sorbonne University, argued that the lack of proportional representation had brought the far right “to the gates of power” in France.Camille Robcis, a Columbia University historian who studies 20th-century French politics and institutions, said that she was not surprised to hear such calls. “You have a kind of disconnect between the representatives and the popular vote, the electorate,” she said. “The result is that these disenchanted, disenfranchised voters are moving to the extremes.”How am I doing?I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to interpreter@nytimes.com. You can also follow me on Twitter.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      French Lessons for the Biden Administration

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      You probably breathed a deep sigh of relief when you heard that Emmanuel Macron trounced Marine Le Pen by a 17-point margin in Sunday’s French presidential election. A Le Pen victory would have been a boon to Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Steve Bannon and a disaster for NATO, Europe and France.The center held, thank God — because Macron governed from the center. He was hated by the far left and the far right and never entirely pleased those closer to the center. But he also became the first president to be re-elected in France in 20 years.There’s a lesson in that for the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress, especially when it comes to immigration.It has become an article of progressive faith in recent years that efforts to control immigration are presumptively racist.A border wall is “a monument to white supremacy,” according to a piece published in Bloomberg. The “remain in Mexico” policy is “racist, cruel and inhumane,” according to the Justice Action Center. An essay published by the Brookings Institution calls U.S. immigration policy “a classic, unappreciated example of structural racism.”It wasn’t long ago that Bernie Sanders was an avowed restrictionist on the view that immigration depresses working-class wages. Did that position make him a racist? The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, where I once worked, used to make the case for open borders with Mexico. Were we left-wing progressives? People of good will should be able to take different and nuanced views on immigration — and change their minds about it — without being tagged as morally deficient.But that’s no longer how it works in progressive circles. The results are policy choices that are bad for the country and worse for Democrats and are an unbidden gift to the far right.The issue is now acute with the Biden administration simultaneously seeking to end the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy in a case before the Supreme Court while accepting a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to let the use of Title 42, which allowed border authorities to expel illegal immigrants as a public health measure, expire on May 23.There’s not much doubt as to what will happen if the administration gets its way: An already straining southern border will burst. In fiscal year 2020 there were 646,822 “enforcement actions” at the border. In 2021 the number was a little shy of two million. Without the authority of Title 42, under which 62 percent of expulsions took place in 2021, the number of migrants being released in the United States will increase drastically. You don’t have to be opposed to immigration as a general matter to have serious doubts about the administration’s course.Is there a practical and available legal alternative to regulating immigration through Title 42 enforcement? Where is the logic of ending Title 42 even as the administration seeks to extend mask mandates because the pandemic is far from over? Given housing shortages, how much capacity is there to absorb the next wave of migrants? Even if an overwhelming majority of migrants are merely seeking a better life, what system is there to find those with less honorable intentions?More to the point: What does the administration’s utter failure at effective control of the border say about its commitment to enforcing the rule of law?To raise such questions should be an invitation to propose balanced and practical immigration legislation and try to win over moderate Republicans. Instead it tends to invite cheap accusations of racism, along with policy paralysis in the White House. As Politico reported last week, some think the administration’s secret policy is to call for an end to Title 42 to satisfy progressives while crossing fingers that the courts continue it — which a federal judge did on Monday, at least temporarily.Leading from behind Trump-appointed judges is probably not what Americans elected Joe Biden to do.Which brings us back to the example of France. When Jean-Marie Le Pen made his first presidential bid on an anti-immigration platform in 1974, he took 0.75 percent of the ballot in the first round — fewer than 200,000 votes. When his daughter Marine ran on a similar platform this year, she took 41.5 percent in the second round, or more than 13 million. The Le Pens are thoroughgoing bigots.But decades of pretending that only bigots had worries about immigration only made their brand of politics stronger.As president, Macron tacked right on immigration — not to weaken France’s historic position as an open society, friendly to newcomers, but rather to save it. He has cracked down on some asylum seekers, demanded that immigrants learn French and get jobs and taken a hard line against Islamic separatism. But he’s also tried to make France a more welcoming place for legal immigration. The left thinks of him as Le Pen lite, the right as a feckless impostor. Maybe he’s both. Then again, he also saved France for the free world.Democrats could stand to brush up on their French.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      New York Democrats Make Last-Ditch Bid to Save New Congressional Maps

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      The state’s highest court heard arguments on Tuesday on whether to uphold earlier rulings that voided maps drawn by Democrats as illegal gerrymanders.New York Democrats made a last-ditch appeal to the state’s highest court on Tuesday to overturn a pair of lower-court rulings and salvage newly drawn congressional districts that overwhelmingly favor their party.In oral arguments before the New York State Court of Appeals, lawyers for the governor and top legislative leaders said that Republicans challenging the lines had fallen short of proving that the state’s new congressional map violated a state ban on gerrymandering.But the arguments turned tense at times, especially as several members of the seven-judge panel scrutinized the constitutionality of the mapmaking process itself.Voters created a new redistricting commission in 2014 to help wean politics from the mapmaking process, at the same time that they outlawed gerrymandering. But after the commission’s efforts broke down this winter, the Democratic-led Legislature quickly shunted aside the commission’s proposals in favor of more politically favorable maps.“Isn’t that evidence of a purpose to gerrymander?” Judge Michael Garcia asked lawyers for the Democrats.The court’s decision, expected as soon as Wednesday, could have far-reaching implications for New York and the rest of the country.A bare-knuckle political fight over representation and power lies beneath the complex legal arguments. National Democrats are relying on New York to help offset Republican redistricting gains in other states. Without it, their path to maintaining the House of Representatives in Washington could become considerably more difficult.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.The congressional map, approved by Democratic supermajorities in February, threatens to cut the state’s eight-member Republican House delegation in half and creates three new Democratic friendly seats on Long Island, Staten Island and in central New York. The map, which favors Democrats 22 to four, shores up several swing districts that Democrats hold now with more left-leaning voters.But an Appeals Court ruling could also determine the future of the 2014 reforms to the redistricting process, which takes place once a decade. If the court upholds the maps and the process behind them, its ruling could effectively neuter the redistricting commission after just one cycle of activity and would set a high bar to prove maps are partisan gerrymanders.“It’s a total disregard for the Constitution and what the voters chose in 2014 as a process to try to improve the way the lines were drawn,” Laura Ladd Bierman, executive director of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of New York State, said of the Legislature’s actions. “That’s what just makes me so frustrated: They just seem to have no regard for what the public wanted.”Ms. Bierman’s group has submitted an amicus brief in the case siding with Republicans to argue that the courts should strike down the maps and draw new ones using a special master.The Court of Appeals judges, all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors, appeared to be wrestling with how to balance the interests of the voters, the longstanding right of the Legislature to set district lines and more pragmatic questions about how and when this year’s critical midterm elections should proceed.The court has traditionally shown deference to state lawmakers to set boundaries that they feel are appropriate. But the questions this time were particularly thorny because the case — Harkenrider v. Hochul — is the first time that the courts have tested the 2014 constitutional changes.The challengers, New York voters backed by national Republicans, have argued that the mapmaking power should have gone directly to the courts, not the Legislature, when the commission collapsed this winter. Instead, they contend, Democrats hijacked the process and drew lines expertly devised to knock out Republicans.The commission violated the law, the Republican lawyer, Misha Tseytlin, said, “but then the Legislature attempted to take a step that it had no legal authority to take.”Democrats rejected both claims. They maintain that the commission was an advisory body whose maps required lawmakers’ approval to become law. And they defended their congressional map as a good-faith effort to balance competing requirements to preserve the cores of existing districts and communities of interest — which includes racial and ethnic groups — while achieving maximum compactness and adjusting for population shifts that generally benefit Democrats.“Maybe the petitioners would have drawn the map a little differently, maybe someone from a think tank or the editorial board of a newspaper would have drawn these maps differently, or somebody on Twitter,” said Craig R. Bucki, a lawyer for State Assembly Democrats. “But the fact is they are not the Legislature, and they are not elected by the people, and that’s why all these maps should be upheld.”How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Convincing Victory Disguises Challenges for France’s Macron

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      France’s runoff election was marked by a record level of abstention, and many cast a ballot only to keep the far right from power — a testament to a growing disillusionment.ROYE, France — There is no doubt that President Emmanuel Macron of France won a convincing re-election over Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, on Sunday. Mr. Macron scored a thumping 17 point margin of victory, becoming the first French leader to be re-elected to a second term in 20 years.In the view of many, the electoral system worked as it was intended to, with nearly 60 percent of those who voted joining together to defend against a xenophobic and nationalist far right widely regarded as a threat to French democracy.That is, perhaps, unless you are a supporter of Ms. Le Pen, who was blocked in the final round for a second consecutive time.“I think we’re heading into five more years of crisis, probably worse, because people are just fed up,” Sébastien Denneulin, 46, a Le Pen supporter, said on Monday morning in Roye, a northern far-right stronghold.Even as Ms. Le Pen has edged her party into the mainstream, ensconcing it firmly in the political establishment, her supporters say they are growing frustrated with a lack of representation in the political system.In the far-right stronghold of Roye, in northern France, two out of three voters backed Marine Le Pen in the runoff.James Hill for The New York TimesThe far right enjoyed its strongest ever showing at the ballot box on Sunday, as Ms. Le Pen widened her appeal with pocketbook issues important in parts of the country like this northern region, where in the past two generations voters have shifted to the far right from the political left along with deindustrialization.The challenge now for Mr. Macron will be how to lure back into the political fold the 41.5 percent of voters who cast ballots for Ms. Le Pen — and the roughly 28 percent who opted not to vote at all. Despite the president’s clear victory, the election results disguised myriad challenges that could make his next five years in office even more tumultuous than the last.As French news media organizations drew up maps of the nationwide breakdown of the runoff vote, they showed a widening and deepening fracture along the French equivalent of American blue and red states.In the reddest areas of France, there was frustration that Ms. Le Pen had been defeated once again and a strong sentiment that her supporters were continuing to be shut out of the political system.Supporters of Ms. Le Pen in Paris on Sunday. In the reddest areas of France, there is a strong feeling among them that they are being shut out of the political system.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesIn Roye, some people gathered at the QG brasserie voiced anger when they learned of the results on their smartphones on Sunday evening. One man set fire to his voter’s card.Tony Rochon, 39, a roofer, said he had voted for a Le Pen — either Marine or her father, Jean-Marie — all of his life. But each time, he said, other political parties had united to deny a Le Pen victory in the presidential race. Then the same thing had happened in legislative elections — also a two-round system — effectively marginalizing Ms. Le Pen’s influence in Parliament.In 2017, for instance, while Ms. Le Pen garnered 34 percent of the vote in the presidential election, her party secured only eight seats in Parliament — not even enough to form a parliamentary group.That year, Mr. Macron promised to introduce proportional representation in Parliament, which experts say would better reflect the population’s political beliefs. But he failed to fulfill his pledge.“That’s why the only option for us is to take to the streets,” said Mr. Rochon, who joined the Yellow Vest anti-government protests in Paris. “Macron has no legitimacy.”Tony Rochon, center right, holding his daughter, reached in frustration for his friend’s phone as news of Mr. Macron’s victory came in. He had voted for a Le Pen his whole life.James Hill for The New York TimesHe and his wife, Adelaide Rochon, 33, a dental assistant who has also always voted for Ms. Le Pen’s party, said they believed that the vote had been rigged.“We don’t know a single person around us who voted for Macron,” Ms. Rochon said. “It’s impossible that he won.”Not impossible, actually.In Roye, a town of 6,000 people, two out of three voters backed Ms. Le Pen in the runoff. But nationwide Mr. Macron drew many votes — 47 percent, according to one poll — not necessarily because people endorsed him, but because they joined the so-called Republican front against the far right, whose politics remain anathema to a majority of French despite Ms. Le Pen’s persistent efforts to remake and soften her image.For others, like Madeleine Rosier, a member of the leftist France Unbowed, a choice between Mr. Macron and what she deemed an unacceptable far-right candidate was no choice at all. She did not cast a ballot on Sunday after voting for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran leftist who came in third place in the first round.“I didn’t want to grant Emmanuel Macron legitimacy,” she said.The abstention rate — the highest in a runoff since 1969 — reflected the widespread disillusionment with the political system that sent protesters from towns like Roye to the Champs-Élysées in Paris as part of the anti-government Yellow Vest movement in 2018, the biggest political crisis of Mr. Macron’s first term.Madeleine Rosier, a member of France Unbowed, did not vote on Sunday because she “didn’t want to grant Emmanuel Macron legitimacy.”James Hill for The New York TimesThat anger persists in many pockets of the country. In another measure of political disillusionment, more than three million people cast blank or null-and-void ballots — and that does not include the 13.7 million who opted not to vote at all.Étienne Ollion, a sociologist and professor at the Polytechnique engineering school, said the importance of such voters and those who reluctantly backed Mr. Macron to keep Ms. Le Pen from power, as well as the level of abstention give Mr. Macron “a relatively limited legitimacy.”The election results underscored a growing sense of “democratic fatigue and democratic fracture” in France, Mr. Ollion said.Given Mr. Macron’s unfulfilled pledge to reform Parliament, Chloé Morin, a political scientist at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a Paris-based think tank, said there were doubts about Mr. Macron’s “capacity to take into account this extremely divided political landscape and opposition parties that will inevitably, in all logic, be little represented” in Parliament.Daniel Cohn-Bendit, an ally of Mr. Macron and a former Green member of the European Parliament, said in an interview that “an unfair French electoral system” had led to governing that ignores the political opposition and various actors of society.“To have a Parliament where someone who gets 42 percent of the votes only has about 20 lawmakers, that’s unacceptable,” he said, referring to Ms. Le Pen.Shortly after Mr. Macron was re-elected on Sunday, there were immediate signs that discontent surrounding French democracy would mark his second term.Demonstrators in Lyon, France, after Mr. Macron’s re-election on Sunday. The sign reads, “Down with Macron, the Robin of the bourgeoisie,” referring to Robin Hood.Laurent Cipriani/Associated PressHundreds of protesters gathered in Paris and other big cities to oppose Mr. Macron’s second term. The protests were marred by violent clashes with the police, who fired tear gas in Paris to disperse the crowd.Protesters in Paris converged from the city center to the large Place de la République, chanting a song originating from the Yellow Vest movement, “We are here, even if Macron doesn’t want it, we are here!”By midnight, the police had cleared the Place de la République of protesters. But they had scrawled, in red, a warning on the large statue of Marianne, an emblem of the French Republic, in the middle of the square: “Beware of revenge when all the poor people stand up.”Norimitsu Onishi More

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      Side by Side With (Bernie) Sanders

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      THE FIGHTING SOULOn the Road With Bernie SandersBy Ari Rabin-HavtSo much has happened to shape American politics since Bernie Sanders ended his second presidential campaign — the pandemic, Donald Trump’s election denial, the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, the war in Ukraine — it’s easy to overlook the Vermont senator’s place in political history.To a remarkable degree for a failed presidential candidate, Sanders has had an enduring impact on the Democratic Party. In the wake of his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Democrats have tacked sharply to the left on issues like college debt, health care and social welfare. Even in defeat, Sanders remains a progressive hero, with a new perch for influencing policy as the Senate Budget Committee chairman.For all that, Sanders is not well known on the granular level — his management style, tastes and quirks — in a way that is common for national politicians. Into that vacuum comes Ari Rabin-Havt’s engaging memoir of the 2020 Sanders campaign, “The Fighting Soul: On the Road With Bernie Sanders.”Rabin-Havt, a former deputy campaign manager, offers an insider’s view of the gruff, no-frills, democratic socialist — a politician who “hated the political part of political campaigns” like fund-raising and hobnobbing. He was so clueless about party pooh-bahs that he did not recognize the Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, a major Democratic donor.Rabin-Havt was with the senator when he had a campaign-trail heart attack in October 2019. Feisty even in an ambulance, Sanders quizzed E.M.T.s about their jobs and benefits. Asked to rate his pain on a 1-to-10 scale, he snapped with an expletive: “That is a (nonsense) question. I have no idea.”The heart attack was a watershed that looked like the end of the campaign. Then 78, Sanders already faced questions about whether he was too old to be president, and was losing ground to Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.Surprisingly, the health scare helped revive Sanders’s fortunes. While he was still in the hospital, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called to offer her coveted endorsement, which brought fresh momentum and was central to a “Bernie Is Back” campaign.He dominated early voting rounds as Biden floundered. After Biden’s South Carolina primary triumph, other Democratic contenders dropped out, leaving Sanders the last rival standing. Then, after quitting, Sanders became a reliable team player, working hard to elect the Democratic nominee.Rabin-Havt says his book’s principal goal is not to dwell on why the senator lost. Still, that question lingers over the narrative. Rabin-Havt’s explanation, common among Sanders loyalists, is that the party establishment, aided by the mainstream media, rallied behind Biden to keep Sanders from winning the nomination. “The Democratic Party is a disorganized institution,” he writes, “but it would organize against Bernie Sanders in a way they had not against any other candidate — Democratic or Republican.”He rejects suggestions from some Democrats — including former President Obama, in a 2018 meeting with Sanders here recounted in fresh detail — that he would have had a better shot if he’d reached beyond his base or moderated his message. But if he had followed that advice, Rabin-Havt writes, Sanders would have become a different politician and lost core backers. There’s the rub: The uncompromising consistency that thrilled supporters and put Sanders within reach of the nomination was an obstacle to building a broader coalition to win it.The book ends with a glimpse of how the iconoclastic outsider now appreciates the satisfactions of being a Senate insider. Sanders had a big hand in shaping President Biden’s first major accomplishment — a pandemic-relief bill brimming with progressive policies.“We got something done here, didn’t we?” he told Rabin-Havt after the bill passed. “This is fun.” More