Sunday's pro-democracy election outcomes in France and Slovenia

Emmanuel Macron's re-election as French President this past Sunday was a relief to pro-democracy leaders and voters in Europe: A divided nation: Five takeaways from France's election France 24/AFP 04/25/2022.

Sunday's election in Slovenia also came out well, although the newly-elected President Robert Golob is relatively new to his role as a political leader. But he campaigned in favor of democracy on a left-leaning program against the Orbanist former premier Janez Jansa, who had taken a hard right turn the last couple of years. (Annette Gantner, Robert Golob: Sloweniens Shootingstar Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 26.04.2022) The national Interior Minister claims that a far-right Identitarian group, apparntely one called Patriots in Motion, was behind the attack, in which fortunately no one was injured. (Bericht an Staatsanwaltschaft nach rechtsextremer Störaktion übermittelt Standard 25.04.2022)

Macron's victory is important. But Frqance also had an unusually low turnout by French standards on Sunday. Also, "In an alarming signal for Macron, 8.6 percent of those who went to voting stations Sunday also took the trouble not to cast a vote for either candidate, with 6.35 percent of the votes blank and 2.25 percent spoilt."

One of Macron's problematic ideas was to propose during the campaign to raise the retirement age, which sounds like a classic corporate Democratic idea in the US. For any center-left party, the idea that voters have nowhere else to go is a risky play. Obviously a significant number of voters were upset enough that they took the trouble to vote but didn't vote for either candidate.

The conventional press narrative is that Macron's win is a good sign for "Europe," i.e., for EU leadership. A big indication of how serious he is about that is whether he immediately gets out in front on the refugee issue to create a narrative to counter the xenophobic one that's already in motion.

So far, the EU is largely whiffing on the issue in stereotypical EU fashion by each country hoping some other EU governments will do something so they won't have to. This weekend there was an attack on a refugee shelter in Vienna that housing some Ukrainian refugees among others, the first incident like that I've heard against Ukrainian refugees. (Rechtsextreme Aktion gegen Ute-Bock-Haus ORF 24.04.2022)

Boris Johnson, now head of a non-EU country, doesn't want no Ukrainian refugees there because some of them might be Russian spies, a variation on the ever-popular "criminal foreigners!!" theme. Another one getting some traction is, "How come so many Ukrainian refugees have cars?" (Translation: "Welfare loafers!").

Monday's UN count: 4.7 million Ukrainian refugees in the EU and Moldova since Feb. 24. Of the two EU countries most likely to try to ignite a panic over refugees, Poland has 2.9 million and Hungary 0.5. The refugee crisis year of 2015 that sent the Putinist parties and their xenophobic messaging soaring involved 1.1 million refugees for the entire year, most of which went to Germany.