[France Insoumise wants to change the face of parliament —
including by turning hotel cleaners and bus drivers into MPs. Building
a left rooted in the working class also means ensuring our parties
aren’t just represented by professional politicians.]
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REBUILDING FRANCE’S LEFT IS ALSO ABOUT PUTTING WORKERS IN
PARLIAMENT  
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William Boucher
June 12, 2022
Jacobin
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_ France Insoumise wants to change the face of parliament —
including by turning hotel cleaners and bus drivers into MPs. Building
a left rooted in the working class also means ensuring our parties
aren’t just represented by professional politicians. _

NUPES candidate Rachel Keke, a hotel worker who successfully led the
longest strike in the history of the French hotel industry, seeks to
represent Val-de-Marne in parliament., JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images


 

The last month has marked a turning point in the French left’s
history. After years of infighting, in May, the Greens, Socialists,
and Communists joined forces with France Insoumise
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to form the Nouvelle Union Populaire écologique et sociale
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(NUPES). Thanks to this unprecedented agreement, these forces will be
running joint candidates in each constituency in the parliamentary
elections slated for June 12 and 19. In just days, NUPES debunked
pundits’ oft-repeated claim that different left-wing movements were
irreconcilable. More than that, it showed the possibility of the Left
uniting behind a bold and ambitious agenda, largely based on France
Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s presidential campaign
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With NUPES polling neck and neck with neoliberal president Emmanuel
Macron’s Ensemble
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vehicle ahead of the first round today, the establishment has resorted
to fearmongering to try to discredit the newly formed coalition. In
scenes reminiscent of the US political establishment’s reaction to
the rise of Bernie Sanders, former prime minister and Macron supporter
Manuel Valls decried the coalition as “against police and security
[as well as] economic growth and jobs” while pro-Macron MP Aurore
Bergé warned of “an economic implosion” if NUPES triumphed.

NUPES faces such demonization because it threatens to upend a status
quo that has long only benefited elites. With measures like lowering
the retirement age to sixty, increasing the monthly minimum wage to
€1400, implementing price freezes for basic necessities,
constitutionalizing certain environmental principles, and replacing
the current presidentialist Fifth Republic
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NUPES’ proposals are as far-reaching as they are ambitious.
Altogether, they lay the groundwork for a major social, economic,
environmental, and democratic shift if NUPES succeeds in winning a
majority in the National Assembly.

However, NUPES does not simply hold the promise of an ideological
rupture. By nominating many candidates from civil society and
working-class backgrounds, it also offers the possibility of making
the National Assembly more representative again. Historically
dominated by white, upper-class, and white-collar men, the parliament
continues to be plagued by the underrepresentation of women, ethnic
minorities, and working-class France in general. The landslide victory
for Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche (LREM) vehicle in the
2017 legislative elections, branded as an unprecedented renewal of the
National Assembly, did little to change this, even if parliament
turned out somewhat younger and more female. People from ethnic
minorities represented a mere 6 percent of MPs and, for the first time
since the Fifth Republic was created, in 1958, the presence of
blue-collar workers in the National Assembly fell to zero. In
parallel, the share of MPs from upper-income backgrounds continued its
inexorable rise, reaching 68 percent — a 15 point increase from five
years earlier.

This trend is the logical consequence of a growing rift between the
working class and political parties. “The French Communist Party at
the time, through its local organization and structure, managed to
have people who entered the Communist Party, who were trained in the
Communist Party, and who learned how to become party officials of the
Communist Party,” explained a member of the France Insoumise’s
legislative campaign team. The decline of the Communist Party and of
other workers’ parties, coupled with their bureaucratization and
professionalization, saw blue-collar France disappear from electoral
politics. NUPES offers the possibility of a genuine renewal of the
National Assembly. Rachel Keke, Noé Petit, Youenn Le Flao, and
Cédric Briolais are the faces of this changing political landscape.

From Pickets to Parliament

For each of them, running for Parliament as NUPES candidates marks the
continuation of labor, social, and environmental fights they’ve
waged. For instance, Rachel Keke, a chambermaid, successfully led the
longest strike in the history of the French hotel industry
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in a struggle against Accor and its subcontractor. Similarly, Cédric
Briolais, a bus driver, went on strike for fifty days to protest
Macron’s reform of the pension system. In addition to working as a
mailman, Youenn Le Flao is a coordinator of alter-globalist
organization Attac’s local chapter and a union official. Noé Petit,
a high school student, led the fight against land artificialization as
copresident of _À Bas le Béton_. Altogether, these candidacies
reflect a broader movement within left-wing forces. With the NUPES,
the political, associative, and labor spheres, once hermetic and
parochial, are becoming increasingly permeable and intertwined.

Feelings of political alienation played a key role in pushing these
NUPES candidates to run for parliament. Candidate and bus driver
Briolais explained that his alienation from the professional political
class fueled his desire to enter the electoral arena. Similarly,
Rachel Keke pointed to the indifference of the government to the
strike she led alongside her chambermaid colleagues as one of the
reasons why she decided to launch her campaign. She recalls how then
secretary of state for gender equality Marlène Schiappa refused to
intervene in support of the strikers, despite the gendered dimension
of chambermaids’ exploitation. “She told us it was a private
conflict and that she therefore couldn’t intervene,” Keke bitterly
tells me.

Frustrated by the inaction of politicians in the face of mounting
ecological disasters, Petit decided to run for parliament at the age
of eighteen. “I’m young,” he concedes, “but I don’t want to
wait twenty years to get into politics because in twenty years, it
will be too late.” The nomination of members of the _gilets jaunes
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movement — a movement composed in vast part of individuals who felt
abandoned by public authorities — constitutes further proof of
NUPES’ commitment to including those marginalized from French
society.

By virtue of their status as chambermaids, mailmen, students, and bus
drivers, these NUPES candidates experienced the deficiencies of the
established public authorities’ firsthand — and bear intimate
knowledge on the issues confronting French society. As a bus driver,
Briolais witnessed the deterioration of public services and the ways
in which decades of negligence and cost-minimizing strategies by
public authorities led to this situation. “Liberalism began to be
increasingly present and oppressive,” recalled Briolais, resulting
in worsening working conditions. After five years of nominally
socialist president François Hollande followed by five years of
Macron — presidencies each characterized by major labor-rights
regressions — Le Flao noted a major worsening of his conditions as a
postman. “A dwindling interest in the human aspect in the
organization of work” and “​​colleagues that are increasingly
unwell,” he explained, characterized his past few years working for
France’s state-owned postal service company. Similarly, Keke
experienced firsthand the ravages caused by the increasingly
widespread use of outsourcing. Deeply aware of the consequences of a
lack of government action on the topic, if elected to the National
Assembly, she pledges to address the lax legislation that enabled her
and her colleagues’ exploitation.

Coalition Deal

Yet the broader picture indicates that problems of representation
remain. As diverse as a significant part of the NUPES candidates are,
one can hardly mention the stories of these candidates from
civil-society and working-class backgrounds without evoking the fate
of many of their less fortunate peers who remain in the margins of
institutional politics. Taking a predominant place in NUPES, France
Insoumise, with candidates representing the alliance in 60 percent of
the constituencies, has historically relied on the electoral support
of low-income neighborhoods. Yet their difficulties integrating
inhabitants of these neighborhoods into their movement — especially
in high-ranking positions — has been the subject of long-standing
criticism. The alliance between France Insoumise and other left-wing
parties exacerbated these problems of inclusivity. “The coalition
put forward members of the political apparatus,” lamented a party
official from France Insoumise familiar with the backstage of the
negotiations.

 

The national agreement provided for a single candidate in each
electoral district, meaning that many who were already nominated by
their party would have to step down. During the negotiations, the
Greens, the Communists, the Socialists, and France Insoumise demanded
that their respective high-profile party officials be nominated in
their chosen constituencies. Ultimately, the national agreement
reached between the left-wing parties resulted in many influential
party figures being nominated at the expense of candidates from
low-income neighborhoods or from civil society. For example, NUPES
nominated Julien Bayou, national secretary of the Green Party, as the
coalition’s candidate in the Fifteenth Electoral District of Paris
at the expense of putative France Insoumise candidate and
emergency-room doctor Christophe Prudhomme. In another instance,
France Insoumise candidate Djamel Arrouche, a high school teacher who
grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Villejuif, abandoned his
bid for parliament in the Eleventh District of Val-de-Marne as part of
the NUPES agreement in order for Green senator Sophie Taillé-Polian
to be nominated.

The NUPES also reveals the perverse effects of coalition-making on
legislative candidates’ representativeness. Since the party
negotiators are themselves party insiders, they are inclined to
advance the interests of fellow party insiders. In parallel, those who
wielded the necessary political influence could mobilize personal
networks in order to secure their nomination by NUPES. According to a
party official familiar with the negotiations, France Insoumise
candidate Caroline Mécary, facing the threat of losing her nomination
in favor of a Green candidate, utilized her connections to prevent it.
“She’s a lawyer, she knows how to influence people,” explained
the party official. “She jostled her way through, calling people who
were involved in the negotiations and people close to the
negotiators.” The party official continued, “Because these sorts
of practices aren’t at everyone’s disposal, people who aren’t
from the political apparatus are at a disadvantage compared to those
who are.”

All things considered, NUPES remains a historic feat. In a move that
would have been unthinkable a few months ago, the agreement managed to
gather the four main left-wing parties into a single coalition, behind
a bold and ambitious agenda, that is riding high in polls. The set of
candidates nominated by NUPES certainly could have been more
representative of its electorate; nonetheless, the nominations of
Rachel Keke, Noé Petit, Youenn Le Flao, and Cédric Briolais —
among many others — point toward significant strides in the
inclusion of candidates from civil society and from the working class.
NUPES “will have members of parliament that aren’t from the
classic political establishment,” rejoiced a party official. “We
could have done better,” they conceded, “but we are doing far
better than others.” A sentence that perfectly sums up a qualified
victory for representation.

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* NUPES; French Parliamentary Elections; Insoumise;
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