The New Popular Front in France
Susan Ram
The French Left Unites to Build a Barrage against the Fascist Far Right
THE results of France’s recent legislative elections have come as a surprise not just to the French political establishment but also to much of the world. The consensus among polling organisations, political pundits and the mainstream media was that France’s major force on the fascist far right, the Rassemblement National ((National Rally: RN) led by Marine Le Pen, would win the largest number of seats. Instead, an alliance of the Left, the New Popular Front (Nouveau Front Populaire: NFP), has come from behind to claim the status of the biggest block in the new parliament (National Assembly).
Formed in the wake of President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to dissolve parliament and call snap elections, the NFP and its supercharged ascent constitute the big story of these elections. With a total of 186 seats in the 577-member National Assembly, the NFP is not only the clear victor but also the reason Le Pen’s fascists have been pushed back into ignominious third place, with 143 seats rather than the 300 that at one point seemed possible. Second position has gone to Macron’s extreme centre Ensemble (‘Together’) group, with 166 seats. A further 65 seats have gone to various centre right parties, the once prominent Republicans (Les Républicains: LR) among them.
These results have been achieved on the basis of an exceptionally high voter turn-out: 66 per cent – the highest for the second (run-off) round of French legislative elections since 1981.
WHY ELECTIONS NOW?
In France, presidential and parliamentary elections normally take place in close sequence, with the former held first. Once elected, presidents embark on a five-year mandate, supported (if things go to plan) by a working parliamentary majority out of which a government can be formed, headed by a prime minister with whom the president can readily work. When this fails to happen, as it has on several occasions in the past, a ‘co-habitation’, involving a president battling it out with a premier of a different political stripe, results.
Macron’s reign at the Élysée Palace has thus far followed the standard pattern. Following his victory in the 2017 presidential elections, Macron entrenched his hold on the country by gaining an overwhelming majority of seats in the legislative polls held soon afterwards. By the next elections, in 2022, he had squandered much of this political capital but was able to retain the presidency on the basis of a second round head-to-head with Marine Le Pen: one in which he banked on support from the Left to get him through. In the legislative elections held soon afterwards, Macron lost his overall majority, and found himself confronting an uncomfortable new political reality: a hung parliament, a minority government, an ominously large far right presence (up from 8 seats in 2017 to 89 in 2022), and a lively new block of Communist, radical left and green deputies united under the banner of NUPES (Nouvelle Union Populaire Ecologique et Sociale).
MACRON’S RECKLESS GAMBLE
Two years on, and it was time for elections to the European Parliament. By this point – early June 2024 – Macron’s role as facilitator-in-chief of the rise of the French far right had advanced to the point where the RN was able to emerge as winner, with 37 per cent of the vote and the largest number of representatives from France sitting at Strasbourg. Perceiving this as an upstart challenge to his authority, Macron opted to lay down the gauntlet: on June 9, he took to French television to deliver his bombshell.
By any reckoning, this was a high stakes gamble with an obvious (to most people) capacity for going badly wrong. Seen from the Left, the extreme danger posed by this reckless act could not have been starker. As the Left MP Clémence Guetté put it during an interview with the US publication Jacobin,
“The president’s decision to dissolve the National Assembly at this moment was the final confirmation that Macronism is a stepping stone for the Rassemblement National. The far right, legitimised by a compliant media and the extreme centre, has never been so close to seizing power as it is now.”
Macron apparently foresaw the campaign culminating in yet another grand stand-off between himself – the self-declared incarnation of French republican values, the very soul of France – and Marine Le Pen. From this, so he conjectured, he would emerge triumphant, reinvigorated and able to stride boldly forth into the remaining years of his second presidential term.
The assumption on which this entire scenario rested was that the French Left would be unable to get its act together, particularly given the tight election time frame. Here, Macron banked on the fractiousness and disagreements which had pulled apart the previous NUPES alliance.
THE LEFT’S RESPONSE
On the evening of the following day –Thursday June 13 – France’s four leading Left-wing forces dropped a bombshell of their own: they had come together to form a New Popular Front aimed at defeating Le Pen’s RN in the forthcoming elections. La France Insoumise (France Unbowed: LFI), the Parti Communiste (PCF), the Parti Socialiste (PS) and Les Écologistes-Les Verts (EELV) set out their plan to run a common bloc of candidates across France’s 577 constituencies in the first round vote, to be held on June 30.
On June 14, leaders of the four organisations met to thrash out the details of the alliance’s policy platform: a 150-measure “legislative contract” setting out an agenda for government and a three-phase policy enactment schedule. On forming a government, the NFP would immediately raise the minimum wage; repeal Macron’s deeply unpopular 2023 pension ‘reform’ (which pushed back the retirement age to 64), with a view to restoring retirement at 60 years; invest in public services; restore a wealth tax on large fortunes; and begin a shift towards “ecological planning”.
Also made clear was that the new formation was to be more than simply a pact between parties: it would also embrace social movements, trade unions and civil society in general. The June 14 meeting was addressed by a trade unionist belonging to the Confédération Générale du Travail, the largest and most combative of France’s five central union federations. The worker, recently made jobless following the shuttering of the Stellantis automobile factory in the Paris suburbs, pledged his full support to the new alliance, as did the director of Greenpeace France, who described the NFP’s programme as “rising to the challenge of transforming society.”
There can be no question that the driving force behind the raising, in remarkably short order, of this barrage against fascist advance has been La France Insoumise (LFI), the radical Left formation set up in 2016 by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, arguably the French left’s most feisty, combative and clear-sighted leader. In addition to being the biggest force within the NFP (it has 78 deputies in the new parliament), the LFI was the initiator of the front-building project and played a crucial role throughout, from hammering out a common programme to resolving the tricky issue of seat distribution. Here, for the purposes of unity, significant concessions were made to the Socialist Party (PS), politically the Front’s weakest and least reliable link. This made space for the resurfacing of a number of opportunistic and unpopular PS figures, among them former President François Hollande, who was quick to pick a plum constituency in which to run.
The LFI’s core role in the barrage building helps explain the ferocity of the attacks that have been rained down on it by political opponents and the mainstream media. Throughout the campaign, Mélenchon found himself a particular target, confronting character assassination and unhinged, evidence-free charges of anti-semitism on a daily basis in a replay of the methods used, across the Channel, to destroy Jeremy Corbyn’s run as leader of the Labour Party. The assaults intensified following the first round of voting on June 30, from which the NFP emerged in second place, with 28 per cent of the vote (against the RN’s 33 per cent).
It was at this point that the LFI made what can be seen as the biggest single contribution to the NFP’s second round victory. In France, all first round candidates who cross the threshold of 12.5 per cent of the vote are entitled to progress to the second round. Immediately after the first round results were out, Melenchon instructed all LFI candidates who had failed to take second place against the RN to stand down in favour of the strongest republican alternative: in most cases, a candidate from Macron’s Ensemble. In other words, there were to be no triangular contests involving third-placed LFI candidates. In addition, LFI members and supporters based in constituencies where Ensemble, rather than NFP candidates, had taken second place were instructed to peg their noses and vote for the unappetising but still anti-fascist alternative. As subsequent analysis by the polling organisation IPSOS has made clear, it was the disciplined response to this by tens of thousands of LFI-supporting voters that ensured the defeat of Le Pen – and propelled Macron and company into second position.
FIGHTING ON TWO FRONTS
In the wake of what everyone around the world recognises to be a seismic election outcome, the NFP now finds itself fighting on two distinct but interconnected fronts. The most prominent is its ongoing struggle to claim the fruits of its victory: an invitation from the president to form a government and propose a prime minister. The problem is that the Macron government and the country’s political establishment are in deep denial. As if ensconced in a parallel universe, they are proceeding as if nothing has changed, as if no one, least of all an upstart Leftist alliance, has won a victory, as if there’s no need to adapt to unfamiliar and tricky new political terrain. In line with this, Macron has brushed aside the pro forma resignation offered by his own prime minister, Gabriel Attal, on the grounds that the imminent opening of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games raises ‘security’ challenges that can only be met via stability and continuity at the highest level.
Meanwhile, efforts are on to prise apart the fledgling Popular Front by identifying weak links and striking deals with elements open to a spot of horse-trading. Media leaks have also drawn attention to a number of furtive meetings involving senior leaders of Ensemble and the right, including sections of it already primed for alliance with Le Pen.
The NFP’s second battle line is internal. To no one’s great surprise, the source of the trouble is the PS – whose generous haul of Assembly seats (65) derives entirely from the Front’s effective and united functioning. This unity is now being put to the test by the urgent need to agree on a candidate for prime minister. After much debate, a consensus candidate emerged in the shape of Huguette Bello, the serving president of the regional council of the French-ruled island of Réunion, located to the east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Previously a member of the Communist Party of Réunion, the politically experienced Bello is a combative anti-racist, feminist and supporter of Palestine, and the founder, in 2012, of the left wing For Réunion party. Now in her seventies, she commands considerable respect across the French left and into the centre. Despite this, the PS has gone out of its way to veto her appointment, and for this reason she has now declined the invitation.
Meanwhile, political deadlock prevails in France. A politically weakened president presides over a ruptured society whose parliament now comprises three well defined and distinctive blocks. With the Left in pole position but with no one block able to command a clear majority, the situation is one of a hung parliament with an exceptionally strong Left presence.
By holding the line and continuing to present the NFP programme as the only workable way forward, La France Insoumise is buttressing its status on the French Left as the country’s most principled, reliable and effective force for radical change. News that local-level committees to defend and build the Popular Front are already springing up (the first in the southern city of Marseilles) underline the urgency of the situation -- and people’s readiness to extend the battle lines and carry the struggle in fresh directions.
or reload the browser
