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FRANCE’S NEW POPULAR FRONT HAS A PLAN TO GOVERN  
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Harrison Stetler
June 15, 2024
Jacobin
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_ France’s snap elections are widely seen as an opportunity for
Marine Le Pen’s far right. But the left-wing parties’ Nouveau
Front Populaire has a real possibility of stopping her — and it’s
laid out a radical program to rebuild France’s democracy. _

Leaders of France's left-wing coalition for the upcoming election
applaud as they pose for a group photo after a June 14 press
conference., Associated Press

 

The Nouveau Front Populaire has officially been born. On Thursday
evening, France’s four leading left-wing forces finalized a
wide-ranging alliance aimed at defeating Marine Le Pen’s
Rassemblement National in the upcoming snap elections and laying the
groundwork for a different kind of government.

France Insoumise, the Parti Socialiste, the Parti Communiste, and Les
Écologistes will be running a common bloc of candidates across
France’s 577 constituencies for the first-round vote, to be held on
June 30. Lingering left-wing divisions kept such a deal out of reach
in the June 9 European elections, which Jordan Bardella’s
Rassemblement National list won with a double-digit lead over any of
its rivals. The far right’s historic victory pushed President
Emmanuel Macron to announce the surprise dissolution of the National
Assembly on Sunday evening.

On June 14, left-wing party leaders met at a conference center near
the National Assembly to lay out in greater detail the 150-measure
“legislative contract” that makes up the alliance’s policy
platform. “We’re going to govern to change people’s lives,”
said Écologistes president Marine Tondelier, as she and rest of the
left-wing alliance’s leadership exchanged the microphone. They laid
out the major axes of a governing program that includes an increase in
the minimum wage, investments in public services, a repeal of
Macron’s 2023 retirement reform, a restoration of taxes on the
wealthiest fortunes, and a move toward “ecological planning.”

With the imminent possibility of a far-right government, the Nouveau
Front Populaire is more than just a survival pact between parties. Its
leaders are promising to work closely with social movements and
associations to build a durable coalition against the far right. After
the statements from party top brass, a Confédération Générale du
Travail (CGT) trade unionist from a recently shuttered Stellantis
automobile factory in the Paris suburbs took to the podium to offer
his “full support” of the alliance. He was followed by the
director of Greenpeace France, who praised the Popular Front’s
program as “rising to the challenge of transforming society” —
and pledged to hold it to account.

After NUPES

France’s often fractious left-wing parties had to overcome many
obstacles to pull off this agreement. The Nouveau Front Populaire is
largely a revival of the Nouveau Union Populaire Écologique et
Sociale (NUPES) alliance formed in the lead-up to the June 2022
legislative elections, which denied Macron an absolute majority in the
National Assembly. But this ever-unstable pact definitively fractured
after the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 and the Israeli invasion of
the Gaza Strip. That these forces were able to reunite in under one
week after they ran against each other in the European elections has
caught many by surprise — likely even Macron, whose call for snap
elections was timed to exploit a fractured French left.

Sunday’s European Union (EU) elections threatened to further inflame
the confrontation between the center-left Parti Socialiste and France
Insoumise, which was the dominant party in the NUPES alliance and the
largest left-wing force in the outgoing parliament. A reenergized
Parti Socialiste looked forward to pointing to its relative success in
last Sunday’s vote (rising from 6 to 14 percent) as justification
for marginalizing France Insoumise (which scored 10 percent — down
from 2022, albeit up from the previous European election vote from
2019). There was a new “balance of power,” said Raphaël
Glucksmann, the Parti Socialiste’s lead candidate in the European
elections, in a hotheaded television interview on Monday evening, just
as left-wing leaderships were meeting to hash out the initial
framework for a pact.

Alliance negotiations were briefly suspended Thursday morning,
primarily over the division of parliamentary constituencies but also
over disputes about the substantive elements of the alliance program.
In the first-round vote on June 30, France Insoumise candidates will
run in 229 seats, followed by 175 candidacies for the Parti
Socialiste, 92 for the Écologistes and 50 for the Parti Communiste.
This distribution reflects a slight shift away from France Insoumise,
mainly in favor of the Parti Socialiste.

Other points of tension included the platform’s reference to Hamas
as a “terrorist” organization and the war in Ukraine. France
Insoumise’s response to October 7, which the party refused to term a
terrorist attack, was the immediate trigger for the Parti
Socialiste’s abandonment of the NUPES alliance last fall.

But these divisions merely papered over an obvious fact: without
unity, France’s left-wing parties would stand no chance in these
snap elections, in all likelihood increasing the odds of a victory for
the Rassemblement National. In Paris and other cities, thousands of
people have held rallies over several evenings this week demanding
left-wing unity. On Saturday, June 15, hundreds of thousands of people
are expected to again take to the streets for the first day of
national action against the Rassemblement National. And they now have
a political program to rally behind.

First Days

Although it contains some changes from the 2022 NUPES platform, the
“legislative contract” proposed by the Nouveau Front Populaire
lays out a wide program of democratic reforms. The Left’s plan is
divided into three phases. The first fifteen days of left-wing
government are meant to see a slate of “emergency” measures,
including an immediate increase in after-tax minimum wage to €1600
per month, price freezes on necessities and as energy bills,
investment in social housing, and a rejection of EU deficit spending
rules — albeit without reasserting France Insoumise’s previous
mantra of “disobeying” the EU treaties.

Next, the first one hundred days would lay the groundwork for proposed
“changes of course” through five legislative packages covering
purchasing power, education, the health care system, “ecological
planning” and the “abolition of billionaire privileges.” The
months beyond — titled “transformations” — are to see the
sustainable reinforcement of public services, the “right to
housing,” green reindustrialization, reforms to policing and the
criminal justice system, and constitutional changes leading to the
founding of a “Sixth Republic” to replace the current
quasi-monarchical presidency.

The Left’s “legislative contract” would mark a clean break from
the leitmotif of the Macron years: attacks on welfare state
protections and the erosion of public services in favor of a transfer
of economic power to the wealthiest. A new left-wing government would
cancel Macron’s tightening of the unemployment insurance system, the
latest edition of which is scheduled to come into effect this summer.
The plan calls for wage increases for public sector workers and free
school cafeteria lunches from this coming September. In the first
fifteen days, Macron’s 2022 increase of the retirement age from
sixty-two to sixty-four years would be abrogated. However, the program
seems to have walked back France Insoumise’s promise to return the
retirement age to sixty.

Unwinding Macron-era handouts for the wealthy and big capital, the
Left’s plan offers to restore several former fiscal regimes. The
alliance is calling for the revival of a wealth tax on large fortunes,
which was replaced early in Macron’s presidency with a smaller, less
progressive tax on real estate wealth. Likewise, it seeks the
restoration of a canceled “exit tax” on the withdrawal of wealth
from the country, as well as the tightening of a new flat tax on
capital gains. With corporations like French oil major Total raking in
windfall profits since the post-pandemic energy crunch, the alliance
is also calling for a new tax on “superprofits.”

If elected, the Popular Front would enact the biggest policy shift by
a Western power on the Israel-Palestine conflict since October 7. The
deal calls for an immediate cease-fire in Israel’s war in Gaza,
alongside the liberation of all Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip and
Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails. To put pressure
on Israel, it calls for an arms embargo and the suspension of the
EU’s association agreement with the Israeli state. While defining
the Hamas’s October 7 attacks as “terrorist,” a left-alliance
government would seek sanctions against Benjamin Netanyahu’s
government and work to enforce potential International Criminal Court
warrants against Israeli officials, including Israel’s current head
of government. Working within the framework of a two-state solution to
the Israel-Palestine conflict, the left-wing alliance calls for
“immediate recognition” of Palestinian statehood.

Also on international policy, the alliance’s agreement says it
“unconditionally supports the sovereignty and liberty of the
Ukrainian people as well as the integrity of their borders.” It will
pursue further arms deliveries, the cancellation of Ukrainian foreign
debt, and the seizure of assets in France owned by Russian oligarchs.

Horror Stories

In the coming weeks, the Nouveau Front Populaire and its
“legislative contract” will surely be the target of innumerable
smears. Macron’s allies and pundits will tell horror stories of a de
facto French exit from the European Union or an impending financial
crisis. On the Israel-Palestine conflict, others will allege that
antisemitism is on the cusp of becoming official state policy.
Centrists will bemoan a left-wing alliance still under the yoke of
France Insoumise, and construct elaborate moral arguments about why a
vote for it is as dangerous as a vote for Le Pen.

In fact, it’s far from inconceivable that the Popular Front could
emerge as the main competitor to the Rassemblement National. Polls
suggest this is plausible or even likely. But more than just a
response to Le Pen, it is running with a detailed and far-reaching
plan for a different kind of government.

_Harrison Stetler is a freelance journalist and teacher based in
Paris._

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