https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/victory-deferred?pc=1616
Serge Halimi
12 July 2024Politics

Minutes after the first exit polls in France last Sunday, Jean-Luc Mélenchon told a large crowd of supporters that the Nouveau Front populaire (NFP) had received a mandate to implement ‘its entire programme’. It was a stirring moment; the speech concluded with the opening bars of Jean Ferrat’s Ma France, one of the most beautiful left-wing songs in the national repertoire. Yet the spectacle risked raising hopes that will soon be dashed. For the left did not really win: the newly elected National Assembly numbers some 200 MPs affiliated with the NFP or likely to vote for the coalition – among them the Socialist François Hollande, whose disastrous presidency is still a fresh memory – against 350 right-wing MPs, from Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance to Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement national (RN). The left may have defied predictions of a victory for the far-right – no small achievement – but it did not triumph.

As for the ‘New Popular Front’, it is ‘new’ in the sense that isn’t as populaire as its predecessor of 1936. Among those who did not abstain, 57% of manual labourers and 44% of service-sector employees voted for the RN. It was in the big cities, where the population is disproportionately bourgeois and highly educated, that the NFP won the majority of its seats. This was especially true of the Socialist Party (PS) and the Greens. Mélenchon’s attempt to appeal to the popular sectors succeeded on one level: the mobilization of the banlieues, where large numbers of immigrants allowed La France insoumise (LFI) to achieve impressive results, often without going to ballotage. All the same, even a casual observer of French politics must have smiled on reading the headline in Libération, the daily newspaper of the progressive urban petty bourgeoisie, the day after the first round of the legislative elections: ‘Paris, capitale du Nouveau Front populaire’. Paris, the most expensive city in France, where apartments frequently go for over €10,000 per square metre, indeed elected twelve NFP MPs out of a total of eighteen, eight of them in the first round. By contrast, in working-class constituencies that for almost a century were citadels of the left, often of the Communist Party (PCF), the results were disastrous. Picardy returned thirteen far-right MPs out of seventeen; in the Pas-de-Calais, longtime fiefdom of Maurice Thorez – head of the PCF for more than thirty years – the RN claimed ten out of twelve seats, six in the first round. In the Gard, the party won every constituency.

One can therefore see why the Secretary General of the CGT did not mince her words:

The arrival in power of the far-right has only been delayed . . . Working-class bastions in the Bouches-du-Rhône, the East, the North and the Seine-Maritime have fallen to the far-right. This is not merely a protest vote against Emmanuel Macron. A large number of working people voted for the far-right out of conviction. In duels with the left, wage-earners cast their ballots for the RN candidate. The casualization of employment and collapse of organized labour have accelerated the progression of the RN . . . The left that governed the country under François Hollande abdicated in the face of finance and oversaw increasing inequality within the workforce, pitting middle-managers against workers . . . Some formations abandoned the struggle for the collective improvement of working conditions in favour of welfare measures, while renouncing any confrontation with capital. The left must once more become the party of workers.

No doubt this problem is not confined to France. It suffices to replace ‘François Hollande’ with ‘Bill Clinton’, Paris with New York, ‘la France périphérique’ with ‘flyover country’ and Maastricht with NAFTA to paint a similar sociological and political portrait of the United States, and plenty of other countries as well. Even if the advent of LFI resuscitated the genuine left in France, many voters – in Picardy, in Lorraine, in the North, in the East – have not forgotten that on crucial political-economic questions, especially when it came to the EU, an entity responsible for destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs, the Socialists linked arms with the liberal right; to the point that in 2005, Hollande and Sarkozy posed side-by-side on the cover of a celebrity magazine to call for a ‘yes’ vote in the European Constitutional Referendum and then, likewise united, ignored the opposition of 55% of the population to impose the treaty they had rejected. The two men then went head-to-head in the next presidential election, one ostensibly representing the left, the other the right, before succeeding one another at the Élysée, and adopting more or less the same supply-side economic policies, as stipulated by Brussels. In these conditions, it is hardly surprising that upwards of 10 million voters would henceforth seek a political alternative, looking to ‘those who have never governed’ – that is to say, the far-right.

But one can always hope that lessons are at last being learned. On the morrow of the elections, in the absence of a majority, all the parties of the NFP affirmed that they intend to govern together, and that they would not enter into a coalition with the centre or the right which would oblige them to renounce the better part of their economic and social commitments. They seem to understand that any new government which does not enact urgent social measures – annulment of Macron’s pensions reform, a minimum wage hike, increased taxes on the very rich – will almost inevitably hand the far-right an even higher score in the next election. Although the RN thrives on xenophobic fears and rancour, it also benefits from working-class people’s sense that nothing ever changes politically while their own lives get harder and harder, which makes them want to overturn the status quo, ‘just to give it a shot’. Like in the US, where Trump’s victory – that is to say, first and foremost, Clinton’s defeat – led the Democrats to propose Keynesian policies that broke (somewhat) with free-trade orthodoxy, the rapid advance of the RN plus pressure from LFI have at least had the advantage of preventing the French centre-left, in particular the Socialists, from continuing to defend neoliberal policies on the grounds that ‘there is no alternative’ to globalization and no salvation beyond the ‘cercle de la raison’.

In the wake of the ballot, the ascendancy of the far-right in France has only been postponed. The electoral ‘barrage’ meant that the RN came in third place, with around 140 seats in the National Assembly against some 160 for Macron’s Ensemble and 180 for the NFP (of which LFI took 74). But it won considerably more votes: 37% in the second round, as opposed to 26% for the NFP and just under 25% for Ensemble. What’s more, caught off-guard by Macron’s decision to dissolve parliament, the RN ran whatever candidates it had to hand, including dozens with no political experience, who were swiftly revealed by their social media profiles to be openly racist, antisemitic, homophobic or simply incompetent.

Bardella has already acknowledged these ‘mistakes’: ‘There is still work to be done in terms of the professionalization of our local representatives, and perhaps also the choice of a certain number of candidates. To be honest, in a few constituencies the choices we made were not good.’ The RN can henceforth count on considerably more public funds, allowing it to better prepare its cadres. And it will almost certainly claim additional mayoralties in the upcoming municipal elections (at the moment it has very few), which will enable it to further ‘professionalize’ its operation and expand its territorial grip. As if that weren’t enough, the RN will have another advantage over the coming months: while its rivals’ coalitions are fragile and have already begun to fray and vacillate, its own is solid. It isn’t an alliance of parties that detest each other, as with the PS and LFI. The RN already knows who its candidate will be in the next presidential election, which could be called at any moment: namely Marine Le Pen. Neither the left, with a host of contenders still in the ring, nor Renaissance can say the same. Macron cannot stand again, and four or five of his lieutenants are already vying to succeed him.

Nor can the President call new legislative elections for the next year. In the meantime, France is likely to be ungovernable. The RN will not join any coalition, as all of the other parties are in league against it. The NFP cannot command a majority unless it allies with Ensemble, but the presidential coalition is already in the process of disintegrating. One fraction would like to join forces with the NFP on the condition that it banish LFI (which, in turn, has warned that ‘no subterfuge, scheme or arrangement would be acceptable’, a position echoed by most of the Socialists). The other fraction would prefer to unite with forty or fifty right-wing MPs, but the feeling does not appear to be mutual. Were such an alliance forged, Ensemble itself would be shattered.

Having wrought the current chaos, the President departed for the Washington NATO summit, leaving behind a letter which demanded that the parties arrive at a solution that excludes both the RN and LFI. None has been found. By dissolving the National Assembly, the enfant roi at the Élysée has broken his toys and called on others to fix them. Over the coming months, his impulsiveness and egocentrism will make him more dangerous and unpredictable, to the point that even the once worshipful Economist has begun to worry: ‘Far from settling France’s political divisions, Emmanuel Macron’s surprise decision to call a snap election looks likely to usher in a period of deadlock, apprehension, and instability.’

Macron’s election in 2017 enabled the French bourgeoisie to bring together elements of both the left and right around a programme of neoliberal reform and ‘the construction of Europe’. Politically, this ‘bourgeois bloc’ has now imploded. Its left wing has turned its back on a largely discredited neoliberalism and a despised President who seems to have botched everything. Even so, enthusiasm for Europe continues to serve as ideological bedrock for this onetime alliance. To this one must add attachment to the Ukrainian cause and obsessive Russophobia, especially pronounced among the educated middle classes. Hammered home fanatically by the media, these Atlanticist passions are nonetheless insufficient to reconstitute the erstwhile bourgeois bloc, as Macron would like. Not in peacetime, at any rate.

Neither Europe nor Ukraine are sufficiently popular causes to cement a new coalition that would keep out LFI and the RN alike, on the model of the ‘Third Force’ that from 1947 to 1948 regrouped the pro-American parties in opposition to the Communists and the Gaullists. Yet François Bayrou, an intimate of Macron’s who was responsible for his victory in 2017, still hopes to accomplish something similar, leveraging the ultra-Atlanticist turn of French diplomacy following the President’s discussion of sending troops to Ukraine. Bayrou has set out the parameters of this potential alliance against ‘the extremes’:

There are people who are all in agreement that we should pursue the construction of Europe. They all agree that we should continue supplying aid to Ukraine, at a moment when Putin has come out publicly in support of the Rassemblement national. So there are people who share what I consider to be the fundamental values. There you have an arc républicain, you have common values. I don’t exclude anyone. But I don’t think that LFI corresponds to those values.

It is doubtful whether anyone could form a government in France solely on the basis of such ‘common values’, especially given the composition of the current parliament. Paris is not Brussels, where socialists, conservatives and liberals get along well enough to govern. But nor is there any parliamentary majority to enact the programme of the left that came first in the legislative elections. This impasse, instigated by Macron, can only bolster the far-right, even after a plurality of French citizens rallied to prevent it from taking power. The President remains its best campaign official.

Translated by Grey Anderson.