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BANLIEUE VOTE PIVOTAL IN FRENCH LEFT’S UPSET  
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Amba Guerguerian
July 19, 2024
The Indypendent
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_ Voters from Paris’s marginalized immigrant communities turned out
in large numbers to vote for leftist coalition that championed wealth
redistribution and Palestinian statehood. _

Jean-Luc Melénchon and other members of the New Popular Front at
Stalingrad Square after NFP victory in the July 7 legislative
elections., Lionel Guericolas

 

In the spring of 2023 a protest movement against French President
Emmanuel Macron’s drive to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64
flooded the country’s streets. “Emmanuel Macron, oh dumbass,
we’re coming to your house to get you!” chanted crowds of
strikers; from sanitation to railway, to office workers; during weeks
of strikes. Nevertheless, Macron prevailed, using a constitutional
provision to bypass a vote in the National Assembly. 

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These same demonstrators rejoiced just over a year later on Sunday,
July 7, when the leftist coalition beat Marine Le Pen’s far-right
and Macron’s centrist coalitions in France’s snap parliamentary
elections. 

“Fifty-two percent of the votes for the Popular Front came from the
low-income neighborhoods!”

Macron shocked many in early June when he dissolved the French
legislature and called new elections. He hoped to strengthen his
party’s advantage over the far-right National Rally party and was
counting on left parties to remain divided which, in France’s
two-stage voting process, would push their supporters to vote for
centrist candidates in the second round of voting. 

Instead, the left quickly united into a four-party alliance, the New
Popular Front, and finished a strong second in the first round of the
election — trailing the openly fascist National Rally but well ahead
of Macron’s centrist coalition. In the days that followed, the left
and center formed an uneasy alliance with 200 parliamentary candidates
from their ranks withdrawing from races in which they had finished in
third place in the opening round. This was in order to prevent the far
right from gaining a parliamentary majority that would allow them to
govern France for the first time since the early 1940s when it
collaborated with the Nazi occupation. 

The strategy worked spectacularly with the New Popular Front winning
the most deputies (182) in the 577-seat parliament followed by
Macron’s coalition (168 seats) with National Rally lagging in third
(143 seats) after many thought they would win a decisive majority.
Compared to the previous 2022 parliamentary elections, the left gained
49 seats, the center lost 82 and the far right gained 54. France
Insoumise, the most militant of the four parties in the NPF, also won
the most seats of any party in their coalition. 

Tens of thousands of New Popular Front supporters who gathered in
public squares to watch the election results were stunned by their
victory and burst into anti-fascist chants. The New Popular Front drew
its inspiration from the Popular Front government of the mid-1930s, a
coalition of several socialist parties that passed sweeping social and
economic reforms before collapsing in the run-up to World War II. 

For the present-day French left, this marked the first time it had won
a political battle against Macron since he took office in 2017.

“When we heard the coalition won, I cried. You can’t know the joy
that there was in Paris. All of Paris shouted. We thought [the
far-right] was going to win,_” _Farida Belabbas, cofounder of a
radical queer community space in Paris called La Fleche d’O_r_,
told _The Indypendent._ 

“Fifty-two percent of the votes for the Popular Front came from the
low-income neighborhoods!” boasted a young Arab-French organizer at
the Fleche d’Or_ _as she spoke to a roaring crowd just after the
election results were announced. 

“All the leftists at the Fleche d’Or jumped on their bikes and
rushed to Place de la République. There were fireworks. It was great.
There was joy! You could see it on everyone’s faces. This is
history. The people won. We retook the streets. We are reclaiming our
power,” says Belabbas, who is the daughter of an Algerian
revolutionary who fought in that country’s war of independence
against France. 

The New Popular Front’s platform includes lowering the retirement
age back down to 60 (where it was before Republican President Nicolas
Sarkozy initially raised it in 2010), scrapping Macron’s pension
reforms, raising the minimum wage by 14%, and freezing the price of
basic necessities such as food and fuel. It aims to cover the costs of
children’s education (including meals, transportation and
extracurricular activities). This would all be funded by increasing
taxes on the rich. 

The front has also promised to recognize Palestine as a state and to
push for an arms embargo against Israel. 

The New Popular Front — which in addition to the main left-wing and
green parties also included the support of several trade-union and
anti-racist groups — agreed to a single joint slate of candidates
going into the first round of the elections, making the French left
the strongest and main challenger to the fascists.

It’s as if a new people of France has been born with the second
round of the legislative elections, and they all know it.

The ability of the left-green coalition to prevail in the second round
was largely due to the fact that the _banlieue_ — the impoverished
neighborhoods dotted with large housing blocks on the periphery of
Paris — came out to vote in their favor. They did so despite the
fact that the _banlieue_ is more separated than ever from Paris:
“It is now quite difficult to cross the highways and enter or exit
the _banlieue_,” said Belabbas. Yet, “it’s the first time the
youth of the _banlieue_ voted! And it was decisive.”

It is these mostly non-white people from Paris’ low-income
neighborhoods that are worst discriminated against by the far-right
and that have been worst affected my Macron’s neoliberal, often
anti-democratic reforms: During his presidency, Macron has implemented
a little-before-used loophole in the French constitution called 49.3
that enables him to pass through laws without an assembly vote. He
used it to push through the retirement reform, to make class sizes
bigger in the French education system, to change the law so that only
French citizens don’t have to pay for health care, to conservatively
reform unemployment benefits and to cut taxes on the wealthy. 

“We won all of these rights through political struggles, and now
he’s throwing them away,” said Belabbas. “The seven years of
Macron has profoundly broken France. We’re seeing a destruction of
the social-welfare state.”

• • •

Ahead of the French elections, the New Popular Front was strengthened
as its parties and supporters hosted demonstrations in the streets
attended by masses — worker, student, pro-immigrant, anti-racist and
anti-imperialist groups, and anyone else that wanted to defeat the
fascists and centrists — as well as by community assemblies and
canvassing events.

In the seven days between the first and second round of the elections,
not only did people begin to demonstrate every day, but the various
leftist factions, including those from the _banlieue_, made an extra
effort to organize and speak to the Black, Arab, immigrant and
low-income people of the _banlieue_.  

This was not the first time that those marginalized people were facing
an election against the far-right, but it was the first time that they
came out to vote in such high numbers. 

“You cannot underestimate the role Palestine played in the
elections,” says Belabbas. “The Israeli far-right has power in the
politics of France. And [Palestine] is an issue that hits straight to
the heart for the people in this country coming from the post-colonial
world. There are many Algerian descendents in France, and for us
Algeriens, Palestine, it’s the same fight we fought against
France.” 

The only French party that has spoken against Israel is France
Insoumise, and it won, pointed out Belabbas. 

Before Macron’s June 10 announcement that he would dissolve the
French Parliament, triggering snap elections, weekly pro-Palestine
protests had already been taking to the streets in cities around the
country. After the announcement, those weekly protests grew into
pro-NFP protests.

“We wish for a France that is more accepting and more open,” said
Osama Afaneh, a Palestinian refugee living in France. He wore a red
kuffiyeh draped over his shoulders (technically illegal to wear at a
political demonstration in France), at a mass protest in Paris on June
15. “This is coming together after weeks and weeks of protest for
Palestine. Every Saturday since October we’ve been protesting.”

“I hope we see a more left-wing government in France that does
recognize the state of Palestine with the borders from ‘67,”
continued Afaneh. “Today is the first time actually that all the
unions are coming together, and a lot of organizations that we have
not seen protesting for Palestine in the past weeks are seeing
themselves as a part of the leftist movement.”

That day hundreds of thousands of protesters demonstrated around the
country — 250,000 according to the French police and 640,000
according to the General Confederation of Labor. In Paris, calls for
justice in Palestine remained loud among the protesters’ demands,
and from many parts of the demonstration erupted chants demanding the
retirement age be lowered back to 60. 

“Retirement! At 60! We fought to win it and we’ll fight to keep
it!” shouted the Parisians.

“It’s a very important moment for democracy in France, because
it’s very dangerous for a lot of us foreigners coming to live in
France feeling less safe. I am very hopeful — just seeing today,
thousands of people coming together,” said Afaneh.  

After the march ended in Place de la Nation, a protest faction led by
Urgence Palestine, a prominent leftist pro-Palestine organization,
continued to demonstrate even though the protest was no longer
permitted. People gathered around the group’s co-founder, Omar
Talsoumi, as his voice thundered into the microphone.

“Is the question we ask ourselves today whether this extraordinary
crowd is here because we are sick of our France, sick because we are
scared of what France might become?” posed Talsoumi. “Or are we
here because already, now, right now, the biggest demand, the most
indispensable right and the most sacred duty is to rise up against
this system?” The crowd cheered. 

“We are going to exploit all the necessary means against
colonialism, against racism, against facism. And facism isn’t just
something that is threatening to emerge tomorrow. Facism, racism and
colonialism are already here! They’re already in power!” 

Talsoumi ended his speech by chanting, “From Gaza to Paris!” and
the crowd cried back, “Resistance! Resistance!”

_See footage from the June 15 protest in Paris._

Ahead of the elections, leftist organizers around France also hurried
to put together people’s assemblies and other forms of community
gatherings where speakers from leftist political parties and groups
encouraged attendees not only to vote in the upcoming elections, but
to continue to push for their demands through all various means of
protest. 

At an assembly in Paris on June 13, where even the overflow room was
so packed that people waited outside to be let in, a speaker from the
far-left organization Revolution Permanente encouraged participants to
do more than just vote. 

“I live in the _banlieue_, and life is hard,” she explained,
listing hurdles such as the difficulty of finding a good education for
her children. 

“The minimum thing we can do is vote,” she said, “but we also
need to form our own parties and have our own demands, and not just
demand for reform from politicians. … We need to organize wherever
we are — at school, at work, in the neighborhood, on the
streets.” 

Amid the flurry of organizing coming out of the banlieue in recent
months, a group of young media makers from there (often the children
of immigrants/refugees) has begun to print its own anti-imperialist,
independent  publication, _nous. _(_us.). _It is a project
connected to Paroles d’Honneur
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group founded in 2017 out of the _banlieue_ dedicated to a “new
perspective on current events by making the voices of post-colonial
immigrant neighborhoods heard.”

At the protest on July 15, youth sold the second issue of the new
120-page magazine for 10 euros. “_Terroriste: C’est celui qui dit
qui est!_” (_Terrorist: Those who say it are it!_) was printed on
the cover below a photo of a young Arab person wearing
a _kuffiyeh_ with bombs raining down behind them. 

• • •

With France’s parliament deeply divided, it remains to be seen how a
new government will take shape. The New Popular Front holds the most
seats but is well short of a majority. Jean-Luc Melénchon, as the
leader of the largest party within the NPF coalition, has argued he
should be the next prime minister, but the more moderate parties in
the NPF — the Socialists, the Communists and the Greens — have
refused to back him.

For the NPF to achieve a majority of votes, it would need support from
Macron’s centrist coalition. Macron, meanwhile, has other options.
On July 18, his coalition got enough support from the far right to
re-elect Macron ally Yael Braun-Pivet
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speaker of the National Assembly over Communist Party deputy Andre
Chassiagne, the candidate of the New Popular Front, by a vote of
220-207.

Meanwhile, support for Melénchon’s platform of radical wealth
redistribution is running high among the young, multi-racial left
based in the _banlieue_, which has been re-energized by months of
protests and now an election victory. 

“We are together! And we continue to construct, day after day, in
our neighborhoods, our high schools, our universities, street par
street, the anti-colonial and anti-racist front of which France is in
need,” says Omar Talsoumi of Urgence Palestine. 

Melénchon made a victory speech on the floor of the French Parliament
on July 7 and then headed to the Stalingrad metro stop not far from
the _banlieue_. 

“And who was there?” said Belabbas, “Arabs, Black people, the
immigrants. They rejoiced! These people eat sometimes only once a day,
their life is hard, you have to understand. I’ve seen misery on the
faces of the young, the old, but this day I saw a great joy. They are
quite aware that the _banlieue _voted. It’s as if a new people of
France has been born with the second round of the legislative
elections, and they all know it. They won’t let it be stolen; they
know very well this is just the beginning.”

_Quotes have been translated to English by Amba Guerguerian._

_AMBA GUERGUERIAN is Associate Editor of the Indypendent_

_THE INDYPENDENT is a New York City-based newspaper
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* elections
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* France
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* voter turnout
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* marginalized communities
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* left coalition
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