Joe points us to Sunday’s election results in France, where the Socialists won a majority in the Parliament, which will make it easy for President Francois Hollande to bring marriage equality to France:
France’s June 17 elections gave the Socialist Party of French President Francois Hollande a commanding parliamentary majority, which nearly assures France will become the next European nation to legalize gay marriage.
Hollande’s Socialist Party won 314 of Parliament’s 577 seats, giving the nascent president a free hand with which to enact his liberal reforms. The president can also rely on the support of 27 left-leaning candidates who also won legislative posts. Conservatives lost 111 seats in Sunday’s elections.
A Hollande administration backed by Socialist majorities means good news for supporters of France becoming the 12th nation to legalize gay nuptials.
As a candidate, Hollande pledged to pursue such legislation.
That’s great news, and not just on the gay rights front. Europe has been suffering under a number of nations’ newfound obsessions with austerity, which has just been exacerbating the worldwide economic crisis set off by Wall Street under Bush. One would think Americans might have looked across the pond and seen that austerity just doesn’t work in recessions/depressions, but the Americans who need convincing aren’t too keen on looking across the pond for any reason.
