Eric Lee writes:
It is exactly ninety years since the French Socialist and Communist parties began to create the Popular Front, which dominated French politics in the mid-1930s. The danger then was the threat of the far Right — a threat which turned into a reality when the German army invaded France in 1940. Some of the same right-wingers whom the Popular Front had kept out of power returned to rule as minions of the Nazi invaders.
Though an invasion of France by its NATO ally Germany seems rather unlikely at this point, the threat of the far Right has not diminished. As a result, The main parties of the French Left — Socialists, Communists, Greens, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s “La France Insoumise” (LFI) — have come together in a New Popular Front (Nouveau Front Populaire, NFP) aimed at denying power to the National Rally of Marine Le Pen. Some polls show that the New Popular Front may win as many votes in the legislative elections at the end of this month as Le Pen’s party. If that happens, a government of the centre-left becomes not only possible, but likely.
But what kind of Left?
Mélenchon is as unpopular as Le Pen among many French voters. He has been accused of being pro-Putin, which he denies, and of supporting Hamas. As Politico reported last October, Mélenchon’s “reluctance to condemn Hamas despite the scale of the attack against Israel, and the brutality of the violence inflicted on civilians, is seen as crossing a red line for many in France.”
Until recently his LFI was the largest party on the French Left, but the recent European elections have changed all that. A resurgent democratic Left led by the charismatic Raphaël Glucksmann, is now at the centre of the NFP — and it’s having an effect on what the new bloc stands for.
At the end of negotiations to draft the party program, Glucksmann summed up what had happened with these words: “It’s been hard, but what we’ve obtained is a very clear commitment on support for Ukraine … and that the attacks of October 7 be described as ‘terrorist’.”
Mélenchon had taken a step away from the limelight, and the new platform reflects that. Nevertheless, his LFI is being given the largest number of candidates for the legislative elections, though it is not clear how many of them will be elected.
The NFP position on Hamas sounds surprisingly reasonable. If elected, they are committed to “act for the release of hostages held since the terrorist massacres of Hamas, whose theocratic project we reject” — in other words, Hamas are in fact terrorists and theocrats.
On Ukraine the platform calls the Russian invasion an act of aggression and demands that Putin answer for his crimes. The NFP calls upon France and the West do more to support Ukraine, with specific measures including ramping up weapons deliveries, cancellation of Ukraine’s foreign debt, and seizure of assets of Russian oligarchs who support Putin and his war.
The NFP has also identified the rise of antisemitism in France as a specific problem that needs to be addressed by the incoming government. “All those who spread hatred of Jews must be fought,” they say. “We will propose an interministerial plan to analyze, prevent and fight against anti-Semitism in France.”
Glucksmann was himself the victim of antisemitic attacks — as was Léon Blum, the Jewish leader of the original Popular Front, decades ago. Mélenchon had insisted “that French antisemitism was merely ‘residual’,” according to Art Goldhammer, who writes about French politics. Glucksmann’s view prevailed on this too.
The NFP, thanks to Glucksmann and his allies, sounds a lot more like Keir Starmer than Jean-Luc Mélenchon, or Jeremy Corbyn, and that is a very good thing. The further Mélenchon and his toxic ideas fade in the background, the better for the French Left and for France.
In adopting a clear position supporting Ukraine and rejecting Hamas, the NFP has passed a litmus test for political decency that many parties and leaders on the Left have failed in recent years. The success of the NFP — and its creation is already a success story — may lead other Lefts in other countries to rethink their own views.
• Eric Lee wrote this piece for Solidarity in a personal capacity. He is the founder editor of Labour Start.
Martin Thomas writes:
According to the unions, 250,000 marched in Paris on 15 June, and nearly 400,000 in other cities across France, against Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National in the run-up to France’s snap elections on 30 June and 4 July.
The protests were backed by the mainstream left parties, the far left, and all the main union confederations bar Force Ouvrière, which has a rigid “anti-politics” stance.
The RN got 31% in the 9 June Euro-poll an could win a majority or near-majority in the elections. In 2022 the RN got 23% in the first round, and 41% in the second, for the presidency. It got 89 seats, from 19% of the vote, in the legislative elections following. Previous: 8 seats in 2017, from 13%; two seats in 2012, also from 13%.
The Socialist Party, the Communist Party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, and the Greens have formed an alliance for 30 June as they did in 2022, so that the spectrum stands only one candidate in each of the 577 constituencies on 30 June, with a better chance of the 12.5% required to enter the 7 July second round.
This time they have called it New Popular Front (NPF), trading on references to the 1930s. However, the Popular Front majority in the Assembly elected in 1936 broke up in 1938, and by 1940 that same Assembly voted full powers to Pétain, who set up the fascistic Vichy regime during World War Two.
The French Trotskyists opposed the Popular Front alliance in 1936 because it meant the Socialist Party, where they were then active, and which was then much more left-wing, trimming its politics to bring the Radicals (then the biggest bourgeois party) into the alliance.
It’s not quite the same now. None of the parties in the NPF is so left-wing that joining the NPF trims its message that much. A deal which can allow at least some minimal left alternative to the RN in run-offs is better than dispersion. Still, the NPF is no answer.
On 30 June the revolutionary socialists of Lutte Ouvrière and the NPA(R) [New Anticapitalist Party (Révolutionnaires)], will stand candidates in 550 and 29, respectively, of 577 constituencies . Those will give a chance to flag up support for a working-class alternative. Given LO’s and NPA(R)’s poor scores on 9 June, probably the only choice on 7 July will be the NPF candidates where they have got through.
The NPF has shared out seats for 30 June by giving allocations to the SP, CP, France Insoumise, and Greens. The Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (A) — the other side of the December 2022 split in the previous NPA — has rallied to the NPF and been rewarded with a seat from Insoumise’s allocation, an already-RN seat in a non-industrial small-town area on the Spanish border.
France Insoumise is in some turmoil because its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon (it has no ordinary party structure) has excluded some prominent Insoumise members of the Assembly (at odds with him since late 2022) from standing.
Some Macron ministers from backgrounds with the mainstream-right Les Républicains (LR) have called for a “centre” coalition for 30 June, but with little effect. Eric Ciotti, president of LR, proposed a deal with the RN. He has since been expelled by LR’s committee, then reinstated by a court. He has announced 62 “Friends of Eric Ciotti” candidates, agreed with the RN.
The RN has fascist origins — in the street-fighting group Occident, before 1972 — and for decades the French left (and Solidarity too) have usually called it “fascist”. It got 31% of the vote in the Euro-election of 9 June, and polls now suggest it will win enough on 7 July to block alternative majorities, or even a full majority.
The Assembly has no power to remove a president. What will happen?
Ugo Palheta, an academic writer on fascism who is with the NPA (A), calls the RN now “proto-fascist” or “neo-fascist”, but also writes that we should worry about the RN’s possible “fascist future” more than its “fascist past”. His analysis suggests a RN prime minister “cohabiting” with Macron as president until 2027 (and probably recruiting LR ministers) would produce something like a government in Britain run by Suella Braverman and Nigel Farage — harsh against migrants and civil liberties (with some “social” pay-off for the supposed “French French”), damaging democratic spaces but not yet irreparably. The Financial Times (18 June) reports that the RN has been reassuring big business that it will respect fiscal rules, and that some big business is now “rooting for” the RN, having given up on Macron.
The RN has softened its image. Since 1972 it has been strictly electoralist, abjuring street-fighting. Its steward-squad, DPS, used to carry out “punitive actions”. That has faded since the late 1990s. The RN relies for “security” now on smaller more street-oriented far-right groups, like that of Axel Loustau.
It has seen off several exclusions of or splits by former leaders (Marine Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie; Bruno Mégret; Florian Philippot; Marion Maréchal). It has accepted the EU and the euro and even (mostly) Schengen. It has given more space to social and economic demands. It has deliberately dropped antisemitism, and recently distanced itself from the German AfD on that count. Over decades it has broadened its stable electorate to include many big-city dwellers and young people, and as many women as men.
It is a small party. It claims 83,000 members, but sceptical journalists reckon more like 20,000. Comparison: the SP and the CP both have about 40,000; the SP had 280,000 as recently as 2006, and the CP 710,000 in 1981. The Croix de Feu/ PSF, the biggest of many interwar fascist groups in France, had 700,000 in 1940.
There are still relatively few RN local councillors — 827 elected last time round, out of 223,000 in other-than-tiny municipalities.
With its small membership, the RN is probably too weak for the most drastic measures.
The RN is hostile to unions, saying the big confederations in France are “too political”. And the strength of unions in France depends heavily on favourable laws. But that strength exists, and the RN may decide for now that it is too risky to change laws embedded in the constitution.
In 2018 Palheta reckoned it “not out of the question that [the RN] could evolve… into a right-wing conservative party” through a process of “notabilisation” (its leaders valuing the perks of managing the status quo).
Palheta warns, though, that RN leaders are still on the old message of a war against “two globalisms” (“financial” and “jihadist”). And its base is a personal following of the leaders, capable of being led where the leaders wish: no equivalent of the millions in Britain who vote Labour but detest Starmer. The RN’s three leading slogans are: To support purchasing power; To get France back in order; To stop the flood of immigrants. The RN has a nucleus which could harshen its politics rapidly in a favourable crisis.
In short, there is still time — time for street mobilisations and strikes, like 15 June, to rouse people against the RN and to stall an RN government if elected. But not all the time in the world. A mass working-class political force in France is also needed. As Yvan Lemaitre of the DR current in NPA(R) puts it: “there is no other answer to the threat of the far right than a workers’ government to end the domination of big business”.
There is also a lesson for us in Britain. If a Starmer Labour government operates like the abjectly neoliberal Socialist Party administration in France in 2012-7, and there is no left political intervention of sufficient quality, that can bring a collapse in the labour movement base and a rise in the far right here.
- This article also appears in the present issue of Solidarity and on the Workers Liberty website.
Shiraz Socialist (Second Run) 