[Although it faces significant obstacles, the French left is
stronger today than it was after the 2017 presidential election]
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OBSTACLES AND PROSPECTS FOR A UNITED LEFT IN FRANCE  
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Thibault Biscahie
May 30, 2022
Canadian Dimension
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_ Although it faces significant obstacles, the French left is
stronger today than it was after the 2017 presidential election _

Jean-Luc Mélenchon in Toulouse, April 16, 2017, Photo by
MathieuMD/Wikimedia Commons.

 

On May 29, the united French left presented a program of 650
propositions
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offering a glimpse of what left wing governance could mean in
contemporary France. Gathered in the _Nouvelle union populaire
écologique et sociale_ (“new popular, ecological and social
union,” NUPES), La France Insoumise (LFI), Parti Socialiste (PS),
Europe-Écologie Les Verts (EELV) and Parti Communiste Français (PCF)
clearly laid out their main objectives, including the minimum wage
increase to €1,500 monthly, the return to retirement at 60,
ambitious ecological planning and the establishment of a Sixth
Republic.

Despite Emmanuel Macon’s re-election on April 24, Jean-Luc
Mélenchon’s movement Union Populaire came third with almost 22
percent of the ballots cast. This strong result encouraged most
parties on the left to coalesce into a new alliance, under his aegis.
For the first time in 25 years, the majority of left wing parties
formed a would-be governing coalition in France ahead of legislative
elections.

NUPES is the last iteration of a long tradition of alliances on the
French left, from Front Populaire (1936) to Programme Commun (1972)
and Gauche Plurielle (1997). With this lineage in mind, how
significant is the new French left coalition? What are the historical
tensions and competitions besieging the French left? What role did
Emmanuel Macron’s election play in the deliquescence of Parti
Socialiste, whose most neoliberal factions he poached in 2017? Fifty
years after the signature of Programme Commun, what are the prospects
and obstacles facing the new union on the French left?

The United Left in modern France

The French left was historically shaped by three political forces: the
Communists (PCF), the Socialists (SFIO, PS) and the social-liberals
(Parti Radical, _deuxième gauche_).

When it originated in 1905, Section Française de l’Internationale
Ouvrière (SFIO), dominated by Jean Jaurès, defined itself
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party of “class struggle” and “revolution,” with a conflicted
relationship to the state. Created by SFIO dissidents in 1920, Parti
Communiste Français promoted strike action and opposed colonialism.
Their first _rapprochement_ occurred in 1934 to counter the rise of
far-right leagues. Alongside Parti Radical, they formed Front
Populaire (1936-1938), a coalition government that enacted the most
radical social reforms of the inter-war period: paid vacations, pay
raises, reduction of the working week from 48 to 40 hours, securing
the right to collective bargaining and strike, and so on.

After the Libération (1945), socialist resistance fighters embraced a
Keynesian, or _dirigiste_, approach to economic problems and endorsed
industrial and agricultural planning. European unification proved a
key SFIO marker, with the Treaty of Rome’s ratification in 1957. The
shame of the Algerian war nonetheless haunted the party, and led to
its split in the late 1960s. In 1971, François Mitterrand founded
Parti Socialiste (PS), which prided itself with being the most
socialist party in Europe throughout the 1970s. Two years later, he
signed Programme Commun (July 1972) with Parti Communiste—back then
the hegemonic force on the left—and Parti Radical. This joint
platform, shared until 1977, paved the way for Mitterrand’s
presidential victory and eventually weakened the orthodox PCF led by
Georges Marchais.

Before becoming president in 1981, Mitterrand ambitioned to “change
life.” Against the tide of its Western partners, the PS in power
decided to reinforce the state’s economic role
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Keynesian stimulus mechanisms and the nationalization of selected
industries and banks. Despite meaningful social reforms (retirement
age at 60, abolition of the death penalty), it only took two years
before the Socialists’ governance emulated the policy programs of
the Gaullist and liberal right.

Mitterrand swiftly capitulated to finance orthodoxy and promotion of
the supply-side in the name of European integration and monetary
unification. This policy shift was partly the result of
“reformist” left think-tanks’ work of persuasion and the strong
ideological influence of _deuxième gauche_ (“second left”)
representatives Jacques Delors and Michel Rocard in the 1980s, for
whom the “German model” was a powerful referent. It was indeed
under Franco-German impulse that the norms and rules acknowledged in
successive European treaties—_Single European Act_ (1986),
Maastricht Treaty (1992), Stability and Growth Pact (1997)—came to
directly translate ordoliberal tenets of monetary stability and strict
competition into EU law, building-up the normative structures of the
social market economy through the supranational door. In parallel,
eminent transnational representatives of the French PS also advocated
for further liberalization
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organizations (IMF, EU and WTO).

The French Socialists gradually shaped what Chris Howell called the
“paradox of French state intervention
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using state powers to undermine _dirigisme_ and reduce capacity in
the sphere of social relations while increasingly exposing its
institutions to international market forces. The reformist left
naturalized the predicaments of European monetary unification,
presenting them as necessary steps towards “modernization” in the
post-Cold War global political economy, with bombastic
post-ideological discourses praising the advent of a novel “liberal
international order,” a narrative that further marginalized the
French Communists.

Following an ill-advised National Assembly dissolution by Jacques
Chirac, the Gauche Plurielle (“plural left”) majority led by
Lionel Jospin came to power in 1997, in an alliance with Les Verts,
PCF and Parti Radical. This was the third (and last, to date)
cohabitation—a situation whereby the president and the prime
minister are not from the same political persuasion—of the Fifth
Republic. In lieu of a blunt rupture with Chirac, Jospin’s
government privatized more companies than successive right wing
governments: in the air industry (Air France), in telecommunications
(France Télécom), in electronics (Thomson-CSF) and in the banking
system (Crédit Lyonnais), all in the name of ‘free and fair
competition.’

This retrenchment was counter-balanced by rather ambitious social
welfare programs: the youth employment program, the “Universal
Health Coverage” and the still controversial 1999 “Aubry” laws
on the 35-hours working week which, according to many experts,
created up to 350,000 jobs
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Consequently, the economic situation recovered during Jospin’s
mandate (1997-2002): growth picked up and unemployment fell to under
eight percent. Inflation did not accelerate and public debt even
decreased, despite the introduction of the euro. The French Socialists
did not adopt the notion of the “Third Way” promoted by Tony Blair
and Gerhard Schröder. Unlike in Britain, social justice remained
associated with redistribution through progressive taxation, not with
“equality of opportunity.” French governmental elites did not
entirely reject state interventionism: they engineered the retreat of
the state (through deregulation) in order to circumscribe state
intervention to strategic areas or businesses in trouble.

In sum, Socialist governments have implemented the most significant
neoliberal reforms
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transformed the French model of capitalism: financial deregulation in
the 1980s and 1990s, corporate governance reform and privatizations in
the 2000s. The main factor that made PS converge with its European
social-democratic counterparts was the political will to abide by
European competitive and budgetary norms in order to deepen commercial
and monetary integration. As in the Anglophone world, most of the
neoliberal transformations have thus originated from the ranks of the
established left
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reformist French left was careful to expand social protection for
those most affected by liberalization measures in order to ensure
consent. This state of affairs changed in the mid-2010s.

Election posters of L’Union Populaire. Photo by Caratello/Flickr.

Emmanuel Macron and the _coup de grâce_ to Parti Socialiste

Over the last 20 years, the politics of the mainstream left and right
in France became almost completely interchangeable. The calamitous
presidential term of “Socialist” François Hollande, with its
far-reaching labor law reforms, generous subsidies to the private
sector and creeping criminalization of dissent, substantiated the
claim that nothing (not even the scope of repression) distinguished
the neoliberal programs implemented by the mainstream left and Right.
Emmanuel Macron ⁠—Hollande’s Minister of the Economy⁠—took
advantage of this ideological stalemate to propose a seemingly new
political project in the May 2017 presidential election with his new
movement En Marche!

On the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s movement La France Insoumise,
supported by disappointed PS voters and large sections of the youth,
achieved a breakthrough, garnering 19.58 percent of the vote share.
Mélenchon’s rhetorical talent and ambitious program⁠—curtailing
the power of the banks, improving working conditions, reducing the
length of the working week, increasing employees’ control over their
work environment⁠—decimated the PS, that collapsed to 6.36
percent. Only Macron and Marine Le Pen (Front National) qualified for
the second ballot
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and the former ended up winning by default against the far-right
candidate.

A profound shift in the balance of social and political forces
followed Emmanuel Macron’s election, orchestrated by what Antonio
Gramsci called _trasformismo_, a process whereby left and Right’s
programs converge until there ceases to be any significant difference
between them. In a similar fashion to Italian prime minister Agostino
Depretis who decided to recruit his ministers “indiscriminately from
both sides of the parliament” in 1876, Macron decided to nominate
Edouard Philippe, a mayor and MP from centre-right party Les
Républicains (LR), as prime minister of France on 15 May 2017. The
Philippe-Macron duet recruited prominent figures from LR (sowing
discord in Philippe’s _famille politique_) as well as from PS:
Jean-Yves Le Drian (Hollande’s former Minister of Defence) as
Minister of Foreign Affairs and Gérard Collomb (Socialist mayor of
Lyon) as Minister of the Interior. This opportunistic circulation of
the political personnel’s most neoliberal factions towards the
‘centre’ of the political space was the manifestation of a
profound ideological crisis that tore the whole political and partisan
landscape apart.

While PS took the path of inward conflicts and divisions, Emmanuel
Macron’s victory provided an unprecedented opportunity for local and
national political executives whose political careers were at a
standstill. Disillusioned with their original political grouping, many
candidates in the 2017 legislative elections also resorted
to _trasformismo_, repudiating their former partisan affiliation to
join a nascent and potentially fruitful political enterprise: La
République en Marche (LREM). The fear of marginalization led dozens
of Socialist MPs to dump their PS affiliation in an attempt to secure
a Macron ticket and be elected under the colors of LREM. The dynamic
had a territorial character
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following the early defections of local PS underbosses who wanted to
boost their political career: Richard Ferrand (Brittany), Gérard
Collomb (Lyon), François Patriat (Burgundy) and Christophe Castaner
(Provence). Thus, large sections of centre-left PS officials (and some
Greens) seceded from their original parliamentary group and switched
their partisan affiliation.

Emmanuel Macron’s _transformism_ provided clarification on the
left. Parti Socialiste was drawn and quartered between a neoliberal,
pro-European strand enthusiastic about the new president and a
social-democratic strand hostile to him. Further on the left, La
France Insoumise became active on the parliamentary terrain, with a
combative new group in the Assembly, but failed to implant locally and
scored rather poorly at most intermediary elections. Nevertheless, LFI
morphed into Union Populaire (UP) and triggered a sustained and
sophisticated war of position, with an impressive outreach on social
media and a detailed program with a very large environmental
dimension, alongside measures of economic redistribution and
institutional renovation that formed the core of the 2017 manifesto.

Prospects for a left government in 2022

Initially captured by the anti-immigrant and islamophobic stances
of fascist polemicist Éric Zemmour
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the 2022 presidential campaign debates centred on purchasing power,
inflation and rising energy prices following Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine. Pretexting that his predecessors did not engage with other
candidates in their bid for re-election, Macron consistently refused
to cross swords with his competitors, making for an unusual campaign.

Once more, Macron and Le Pen qualified for the second round on April
10
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with 27.8 and 23.1 percent of the vote share respectively. Jean-Luc
Mélenchon scored higher than ever, failing to qualify for the second
round with 21.95 percent of the votes, some 400,000 ballots behind Le
Pen. PS candidate Anne Hidalgo collected 1.75 percent of the ballots.
Three opposing blocs now seem to be structuring French politics
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a pro-European, economically neoliberal bloc centered around Emmanuel
Macron, a nationalist and economically neoliberal bloc structured
around Marine Le Pen, and an ecological, economically redistributive
bloc with Jean-Luc Mélenchon at its helm.

In a televised interview before the second round, Mélenchon urged the
left to unite around a common program
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elect him as prime minister, an unusual phrasing since the French
prime minister is appointed by the president to lead the majority that
won the legislative elections. In an attempt to remobilize his
electorate
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another campaign, Mélenchon implied that the June parliamentary
elections were akin to a “third round” of the presidential
contest.

Starting in late April, long and heated negotiations ensued between
representatives of Union Populaire, Europe-Écologie Les Verts, PCF,
PS and Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) to sign an electoral
agreement for the legislative elections, with the aim to capitalise on
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s strong score and impose a cohabitation to
Emmanuel Macron, who was re-elected on April 24. The negotiations
proved successful, except with NPA. On May 7th, the heads of leftist
political formations celebrated the creation of _Nouvelle union
populaire écologique et sociale_ in Aubervilliers
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For the first time in 25 years, the French left was united ahead of
decisive legislative elections.

The NUPES’ manifesto reveals a holistic and ambitious political
program. Its far-reaching measures tackle both conjunctural
emergencies (minimum wage increase, price freeze for basic
commodities), structural inequalities (reshuffling of taxation to make
the wealthy contribute more, 60-year-old retirement age), as well as
systemic challenges (65 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by
2030). Importantly, these priorities are deemed legitimate enough to
‘disobey’ certain EU treaty rules if the latter are considered a
hindrance to progressive change.

Despite the credence gained by this popular anti-racist bloc, there
are three main obstacles to NUPES’ success in the 2022 legislative
elections.

The first obstacle is Parti Socialiste’s social-liberal old guard
(“_éléphants_”)⁠—former president François Hollande
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former first secretary Jean-Christophe Cambadélis
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Occitanie region’s president Carole Delga⁠—that expressed strong
criticisms against the coalition, which they depicted as an act of
‘submission’ to Mélenchon
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a dissident from PS). In many constituencies, PS grandees maintained
their candidacy against the NUPES, as in Delga’s Occitan
strongholds.

Echoing the anti-communism of mainstream media at the time of
Programme Commun, the oligarchic French media is also
predominantly hostile to Mélenchon and NUPES
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Thus, hordes of reactionary editorialists presented NUPES as a
coalition of totalitarian Marxist revolutionaries
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the Republic, a “cult
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of irresponsible and violent people, or a ‘national-populist’
movement headed by a worshiper of “Jaurès, Castro and Chávez.”

Lastly, structural constraints complicate NUPES’ prospects to obtain
a majority in June (289 seats), such as the traditional lower turnout
in legislative elections, especially among the youth and proletarian
classes who predominantly voted for Mélenchon. Besides, although
NUPES is polling first nationally, the parliamentary elections take
place in 577 constituencies. The strength of Mélenchon’s project is
to give shape to an alliance between non-white and white working
class segments
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Yet, despite very strong showings in large cities, popular
neighbourhoods and Overseas Territories, its appeal is weaker in small
towns and the countryside.

Although it faces significant obstacles, the French left is stronger
today than it was after the 2017 presidential election. Even if the
united left fails to obtain a majority on June 19, its presence in
parliament will likely increase significantly, alongside its ability
to counter Macron’s Caesarist solutions to crises in contemporary
France.

_Thibault Biscahie is a doctoral candidate in the Department of
Politics at York University, where he specializes in political
economy, international relations and comparative politics. He holds a
Master’s degree from Sciences Po Lille and has also studied at the
Université du Québec à Montréal and the Université de Provence._

_Canadian Dimension is the longest-standing voice of the left in
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* France
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* Left Unity
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* Jean-Luc Mélenchon
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* Emmanuel Macron
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