NFP campaigners in Avignon, southern France. Photo from L’Anticapitaliste.

The French far right pushed back – for now

Ian Birchall assesses the results of the second round of France’s parliamentary elections, celebrating a defeat for the far right and assessing the problems and opportunities ahead.

The results of Sunday’s second round of the French elections were a pleasant surprise after the widespread warnings of a possible far right victory. The Rassemblement National [RN] has gained 143 seats – just half of what some of the more dire warnings were promising. But that is no reason for complacency – it is an increase of 54 on their previous total, and the most they have ever had.

Macron’s centre supporters seem to have recovered slightly, but the best news is that the largest group in the National Assembly, with 182 seats, is the New Popular Front (NFP), an alliance of parties of the left. The largest single group within the left is La France Insoumise (Insubordinate France – LFI), with some 74 deputies.

This was a high-profile election, arousing strong feelings on all sides. This was reflected in the high turnout of 63%, the highest since 1981, compared to just 51.5% in the European elections which provoked Macron into calling a snap election.

The racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric of the RN pervaded the campaign. But it seems to have made its biggest impact in rural areas where there are relatively few migrants. In the large cities where French workers live and work alongside migrants and those of migrant ancestry, the RN’s lies and smears seem to have had less impact.

The threat of a far right victory has run through French society. Musicians and sporting personalities have spoken out against the RN. Above all there have been massive demonstrations, often called or supported by the trade unions. The demonstrations have been enormously important, actively involving thousands of citizens. But it is quite wrong to juxtapose demonstrations to voting, to argue that mobilisation at the base is all that matters and that elections are irrelevant. Of course, in the long term voting alone cannot halt fascism. But at the present juncture voting was the key factor. The demonstrations inspired and mobilised people to vote.

In fact the NFP has been crucial to the halting of the RN. By bringing together the great majority of  forces on the left and centre left, and organising withdrawals for the second round of voting to get wherever possible a single focus against the RN, it made the relatively good results on Sunday possible.

Yet many have criticised the NRF from a left position. Those criticisms must be taken seriously.

The biggest left current in France to oppose the NRF was Lutte Ouvrière (LO). In the past LO has run some very impressive election campaigns; the commitment and dedication of its members is not in doubt. In the first round LO ran 550 candidates – a remarkable achievement for a group of a few thousands members. They won 352,856 votes, but made no impact on the overall situation.

Before the second round LO declared that: ‘there will be no solution without a revolutionary communist workers’ party’. True in a sense – but such a party does not exist. LO has been aiming to build such an organisation for over fifty years, and is not significantly nearer to its goal than it was in the aftermath of 1968. It is also questionable whether LO’s strict and semi-secretive form of organisation, which has led to their members being described as ‘soldier-monks’, can ever achieve the aim.

So after the first round, LO effectively told its supporters that it did not care how they voted in the second round: ‘Lutte Ouvrière is not recommending how to vote and so its electors are free to vote for a candidate of the left or to abstain’ – a remarkable declaration of agnosticism by a self-styled revolutionary leadership. However, after the second round the result was described as a ‘relief’.  Hopefully some LO members will start to ask questions about their organisation’s strategy

Other critics of the NFP have pointed to the way it allied with reactionaries in the Socialist Party and withdrew candidates to give people like the Islamophobic Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin  and ex-president François Hollande a clear run against the RN.

Now no socialist could be happy to support reactionaries like Hollande and Darmanin. But critics of the NFP strategy need to be clear about what they are saying.

Any alliance involves compromises and concessions. If the NFP had refused compromises the alliance would have collapsed. Would the NFP’s critics have preferred there to be no alliance against the RN? In particular the Socialist Party could not have been drawn into the alliance if other currents had refused to support some of its leading figures. Would the NFP’s critics have preferred to refuse an alliance with the Socialist Party, just as the German Communist Party refused to ally with Socialists in 1933?

Many of the NFP’s critics would describe themselves as Trotskyists. So it is worth recalling what Trotsky, who lived through the rise of fascism and fought consistently for a united front, wrote in 1932: ‘in the struggle against Fascism the Communists [are] duty-bound to come to a practical agreement not only with the devil and his granddam, but even with Grzesinsky.’ Grzesinsky was head of the Berlin police, then Minister of the Interior; he was responsible on May Day 1929 for police action which led to the shooting of over thirty workers.  But he opposed Hitler, was driven into exile, and spent his last years campaigning against the Nazis.

Those who criticise the NFP have to ask themselves if the RN could have been blocked without it. The RN presented a serious threat, especially to those inhabitants of France who were migrants or were descended from migrants. Among other things it proposed the refusal of medical care for undocumented migrants, offering social housing to French nationals only, and excluding people with dual nationality from public service jobs. To forget this, to fail to see the defeat of the RN as the overriding priority, was to fail to see the situation from the standpoint of the most exploited and oppressed, notably Muslim women, who faced the possibility of having their lives wrecked by a ban on the hijab.

Mélenchon has come in for a lot of criticism, some of it justified, much of it not. He is not a revolutionary socialist – but he does not claim to be one. The LFI is not a Leninist revolutionary party, but it does exist, while there are no Leninist parties available.

In fact. Mélenchon has done reasonably well in comparison with other left reformist leaders who have come to the fore in recent years. Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders were both contained and ultimately suppressed by their own organisations, and Corbyn’s recent break from Labour, whicle very welcome, has not had the national impact that Mélenchon’s did. Mélenchon has maintained a left organisation growing in influence, which has had a real impact on the course of events.

Mélenchon and the LFI have been accused of anti-Semitism. Now there may have been instances of individual LFI members making anti-Semitic remarks. If so, they deserve total condemnation. But for the most part such criticisms are based on the wilful confusion of anti-Semitism with opposition to Zionism – just as we saw with Jeremy Corbyn. The NFP has made a strongly worded statement against anti-Semitism.

In reality anti-Semitism in present-day French politics comes mainly from the RN.  The RN has focussed most of its attention on attacking Muslims, but historically it is still rooted in the tradition of French anti-Semitism going back to the Dreyfus case. And as Jeremy Harding points out in the London Review of Books, France’s consultative commission on human rights has shown that 24%  of Le Pen’s followers believe that Jews have too much power in France.

The LFI’s intervention against the RN has had a very positive impact on the left. John Mullen, a supporter of the LFI, described the impact on local activity:

Left parties, but also trade unions, women’s rights groups, charities, and pressure groups like Attac or Greenpeace are pulling out all the stops, leafleting railway stations, and contacting all their supporters. Eight hundred thousand demonstrated in over 200 towns in a trade-union initiative; women’s rights groups organised marches in dozens of towns. Every day there are rallies, called by youth organisations or by the radical press and so on. …. In one week, over 50 000 people registered as supporters of the France Insoumise, and tens of thousands asked to get involved in the campaigns.

And another French activist, Denis Godard, not a member of the LFI, described the way other leftists have worked with the NFP:

We say to people distribute leaflets for the NPF, organise for the vote. But crucially come to the demonstration, come to a meeting locally to know what we can do. If a fascist wants to come on the market to campaign let’s organise. Let’s do it ourselves. And let’s tell the unions we need strikes—clear strikes against fascism.

There are of course criticisms to be made of the LFI. When candidates were chosen for the recent elections, the LFI dropped five sitting deputies, including Danielle Simonnet and Alexis Corbière, and replaced them with new candidates. The way this was done was all too reminiscent of similar moves in Starmer’s Labour Party. It seems the five had been critical of the LFI leadership.  The Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste – L’Anticapitaliste, an organisation of Trotskyist origin within the NFP, expressed support for Simonnet: ‘At a time when the left must be united against the far right, it is irresponsible to be divided.’ Three of the five, including Simonnet and Corbière, stood as independent candidates and won their seats.

What happens next is unclear. No grouping in the National Assembly has a majority to form a government. Macron remains president; the constitution of the Fifth Republic, drawn up by General Charles de Gaulle to embody his own power, gives the president the possibility of various authoritarian measures. The left will have to assert itself firmly, while some within the NFP may prefer to work with the Macronite centre and exclude the LFI.

It is a long way to the 2027 presidential election, for which Le Pen is already preparing. As we have seen in Britain, a situation in which working people see little to hope for from any of the established parties can lead to a situation of great political volatility. The left will have many challenges and battles in the coming years.

British socialists should be very cautious about offering advice to our French comrades on questions of strategy and tactics. Internationals and international tendencies do not have a good record. But, very tentatively, I would conclude that French socialists probably have the best prospects if they work within or alongside the LFI.