French election: Could the Far Left and Right agree an unholy pact to topple Macron?

In the early 1930s, with Hitler on the rise, Germany’s hardline Communist Party, the KPD, was faced with a dilemma. It was happy to dismiss most of its political rivals, especially the Social Democrats, as “Fascist,” but had a grudging respect for the Nazis, who, after all, had a mass following and described themselves as National Socialists. 

Under the slogan “Class against Class,” the view of the KPD leadership was that they should form a front with the Nazis to get rid of the centre-right and centre-left parties, thus clearing the stage either for a final conclave or for a joining of forces. Party chairman Ernst Thälmann went so far as to argue that the arrival of Hitler as Chancellor would bring about the necessary conditions for the establishment of a Soviet-style people’s republic. 

So how did that work out? Three months after Hitler was made Chancellor, Thälmann was arrested, beaten and tortured and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement. On August 18, 1944, with the Red Army advancing towards Berlin, he was transferred from prison to Buchenwald, where, on the Fuhrer’s personal instruction, he was shot dead. 

In the meantime, millions of KDP activists who had spent the 1920s fighting in the streets against the Nazis had switched their loyalty to Hitler, joining the Party and the SS, engaging not only in the war but in the Final Solution. 

It would be a stretch to say that France’s National Rally, formerly the National Front, is equivalent to the Nazi Party, though its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was openly anti-semitic and in years past was an apologist for Hitler. Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter, who took over the leadership of the party when her father retired, has in recent years played down its anti-Jewish rhetoric, preferring to stress the dangers to the French way of life posed by Islamism and Muslim immigration. 

But old-school bigotry does not lack an outlet. These days, the real tooth-and-nail opposition to immigrants and Muslims comes not from Le Pen, but from her rival on the further-right, Éric Zemmour, founder of Reconquête (Reconquest), which, though not avowedly anti-semitic (Zemmour himself being Jewish), would establish a ministry for “remigration,” charged with repatriating 100,000 Muslims a year to their countries of origin until France became once more racially and culturally “pure”. 

Zemmour is not going to win the presidency. His support, after an initial surge, has dwindled to little more than ten per cent, against as much as 22 per cent for Le Pen. Together, however, the Far Right could expect to score as much as a third of votes cast in this Sunday’s first round of the elections. It would be an impressive total, but still, in all likelihood, not enough to topple the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, a centrist (“neither left nor right”) who can be counted on to bring all the power of his office to the run-off on 24 April. 

But this is where it gets interesting and brings us back to the Berlin of 1933. Where Le Pen and Zemmour control the far-right vote, the far-left is dominated by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise (France Unbowed), whose followers, steeped in protest and workers’ rights, have much in common with their counterparts at the opposite end of the spectrum.   

Mélenchon, like Zemmour, started life in North Africa, where he lived until 1962, when he moved with his family to Rouen, aged 11. After university, he trained as a teacher, joining the Socialist Party but maintaining close links with the rival Communists, led at the time by the pro-Moscow militant, Waldeck Rochet. Mélenchon hoped to create a united Left that would storm the barricades, and with the arrival as President of François Mitterrand, there was, briefly, some hope that a merger could be agreed. In the end, Mitterrand – a wise old bird – turned against the idea, and during his 14 years in office the CP withered and very nearly died. 

Jump forward 25 years and Mélenchon, now aged 70, with support hovering around 15 per cent, is still relentlessly pushing the unity line, albeit with himself in pole position. Like Zemmour and Le Pen, he is deeply antagonistic to the European Union. Like Zemmour and Le Pen, at least until 24 February (the day Russia invaded Ukraine), he felt a warm glow at the mere mention of Vladimir Putin’s name. Like Zemmour and Le Pen, he sees no future for France in NATO. Only on the question of immigration does he deviate in any serious way from the populist agenda of his far-right rivals, and even then he has expressed concerns about the growing influence of Islam and the impact of immigration on job prospects for French workers. 

This Sunday, Macron, whose support currently hovers around the 27 per cent mark, is expected to secure first place in the opening round of the election. Second, third and fourth places are forecast to go to Le Pen, Mélenchon and either Zemmour or Valerie Pécresse (the luckless and lacklustre candidate for the centre-right Republicans). 

Most Republican votes, along with those for the Socialists, Greens and other moderates ought, logically, to transfer to Macron in the run-off, giving him the numbers required for victory. But if Le Pen has a good day on Sunday, she will expect not only Zemmour’s “ultras” to come over to her side on 24 April, but half or more of Mélenchon’s irregulars. In that event, with the far-right/far-left circle closed, Le Pen could hope to run Macron close in round two, losing not, as in 2017, by 66-34 per cent, but by more like 55-45. 

There are, of course, those who say Le Pen will do better yet and even squeak home. Anything is possible in a world turned upside down by war and Covid. But much more likely, a chastened Emmanuel Macron, will head back from a low-key victory on 24 April to his office on the first floor of the Élysée to begin his second term in earnest. 

After five eventful years as President under his belt, he will be all too aware that politics is not an event but a process and that an ambush lies around every corner. On 12 June, the first round of elections to the National Assembly takes place, with a run-off two weeks later. The French, like American voters in the Congressional midterms, like to show their displeasure with their elected leaders as soon as possible. They may shy away from the vicious circle formed by Le Pen, Zémmour and Mélenchon, or they may choose to reinforce it, introducing a troubling uncertainty into the legislative programme. 

Come the summer break, it will be a major surprise if Macron’s En Marche party isn’t hard-pressed by its rivals in Parliament, left, right and centre. The runaway victory enjoyed in 2017 was a one-off phenomenon that no one expects to be repeated. The task will be to construct a cabinet of the willing, known in France as cohabitation. For this, at least one other big player will have to come on board, with an eye as much on 2027 (when the political kaleidoscope, sans Macron, gets its next shake) as on the years immediately ahead. These were to have been post-pandemic, with the stress on growth, social and economic reform and European cohesion, but could just as easily be defined by a worsening energy crisis and the revised world order that emerges from the invasion of Ukraine. It is for this reason, if for no other, that Macron #2 still looks to be the only safe pair of hands.