Europe’s dou­ble vision: Britain and France swing to the left — and the right

Two nations, both alike in indig­ni­ty, in trou­bled Europe where we lay our scene. In Britain and then France, an unpop­u­lar leader called snap elec­tions for rea­sons no one could quite under­stand. He then lost as every­one pre­dict­ed, though not in the way that every­one expect­ed. In Britain’s gen­er­al elec­tions on July 4, Rishi Sunak led his Con­ser­v­a­tives to an epochal col­lapse that grant­ed Keir Starmer’s Labour a land­slide. France’s two-stage par­lia­men­tary elec­tions, held on June 30 and July 7, were a three-way split that pro­duced a par­a­lyzed gov­ern­ment and made Pres­i­dent Emmanuel Macron the la …