France: what has happened to the country’s Left?

What has happened to the Left in France? It gives every appearance of being on its deathbed. If the Socialists – the party of François Mitterrand – make it to the second round of the presidential elections on April 24, it will be an event as miraculous as the resurrection of Lazarus.  

Five years ago, François Hollande was President and his Socialist Party (PS) held 279 out of the 577 seats in the National Assembly. But Hollande, struggling to contain an upsurge of Islamist violence while presiding over high unemployment and economic stagnation, had long-since run out of road. His successor as party leader, Benoit Hamon, then found himself up against Emmanuel Macron, who, having come out of nowhere, destroyed everything in his path.  

Hamon was blown away, winning a dismal 6.36 per cent of the vote in round one. The following month, in elections to the National Assembly, the PS held on to just 45 seats, against 350 for Macron’s ad hoc coalition, En Marche.  

Nor have the party’s prospects improved in the years since. According to the latest polls, Anne Hidalgo, the Spanish-born mayor of Paris, will be lucky to break the five per cent barrier in round one of the upcoming elections. Hidalgo, from the Socialist mainstream, held on to a strong personal vote in the city-wide elections in 2020, but her concerns for immigrants, along with her efforts to transform Paris into an anti-car, ecological showpiece, have resulted in a sharp fall in her ratings.   

Elsewhere on the Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Insoumise (France Unbowed), who, in a sop to the Right, has spoken in favour of dispatching trains to Calais filled with migrants bound for England, is expected to do better. The polls suggest that the 70-year-old Marxist could secure twice as many votes as Hidalgo but would still be left trailing in the wake of the right-wing populists Marine Le Pen (18 per cent) and Éric Zemmour (12 per cent).  

The Greens, meanwhile, having surged in the most recent metropolitan elections, looked to have peaked too early. Jannick Jadot, standard-bearer for the stridently named Europe Écologie Les Verts, will apparently be lucky to top seven per cent, while Christiane Taubira, a former justice minister, heading the challenge of the Radical Party of the Left, seems set to disappear beneath the visibility threshold.  

Add the scores and you get a total of, at best, a quarter of what we must still call the popular vote. Good sense dictates that a composite candidate, supported across the Left, might just, at a pinch, have the sniff of a chance of making it to round two. But, of course, that is not how the Left operates. 

A campaign to bring radical opinion together under a single banner has so far failed dismally. As in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which the Judean People’s Front loathes nothing more than the People’s Front of Judea, so the Socialists of France would rather lose their deposits than sully their fractionally different brands of the true faith. 

By common consent, the biggest issue confronting the Left is its perceived dissociation from the concerns of ordinary working people – immigration, jobs, housing, health and a secure retirement – in favour of ideals or -isms most obviously rooted in race, gender, sexual preference and climate change. The Far Right could hardly believe its luck and moved with alacrity to fill the vacuum, providing answers to complex questions that made immigrants and Muslims scapegoats for everything that has gone wrong in France in recent years.  

Zemmour, whose party, Reconquête, with its conscious echo of Spain’s medieval Reconquista, vows to prevent France from being turned into an Islamic Republic, was this week convicted of hate speech for the third time in recent years, only to present the verdict as confirmation that the liberal élite are determined to shut him up – which is almost certainly true. 

It is said that he may not succeed in finding the 500 mayoral signatures required to endorse his candidacy and could end up in an unholy alliance with Marine Le Pen, conceivably as her choice to be minister for the interior. Le Pen’s National Rally, formerly the National Front, has softened its image since 2017 but her message and Zemmour’s remain substantially the same. 

Should the two, unlike the Left’s various factions, decide to work in harness, the result could force the traditional Conservative contender, Valérie Pécresse, out of contention. This would open up at least the possibility of a President committed to ending immigration from the developing world and treating the country’s six-million-strong Muslim community as hostages to fortune. 

With support hovering at around 18 per cent, Pécresse hopes to head the Crazy Right off at the pass. Her party, Les Républicains, is about low tax, EU integration and big business, not beating up Muslims. But to maximise her vote, she has to appeal to those further to the right of the spectrum attracted by Le Pen and “Z,” and to do that she has had to get down and dirty herself, promising to take a tough stand on both their headline issues. 

If she continues this approach, she could certainly hope to broaden her appeal on the Right, but, equally, moderates, whose first priority remains old-style economic and political management, might drift towards the Macron camp.  

Elections, like hangings, tend to concentrate the mind, and it could be that Pécresse will attract enough votes away from the “silent majority” to leave her in second place on April 10, behind Macron. Pollsters reckon that the President, seeking his second term in office, can rely on the support, first time round, of some 25 per cent of the electorate. But after that, with just two contenders in a first-past-the-post race, anything could happen. 

This is where the Left re-enters the picture – or would if it had any sense. Socialism in France has a checkered history. Its roots, beyond the Revolution, lie in the Paris Commune, Marxist-Leninism, the Résistance, support for Stalin in the 1950s Gula and the laboriously named, long-forgotten French Section of the Workers’ International. It might be supposed that the Socialist Party has existed since at least the 1920s, but bizarrely, it was only in 1969, after the previous year’s student uprising, that the present-day PS was unveiled as a counterweight to gaullism. 

The party’s finest hour, lasting a full 14 years, from 1981 to 1995, came with Mitterrand’s seizure of the middle ground as the second-most transformative President of the Fifth Republic after General de Gaulle. The new occupant of the Élysée – aged 70 at his inauguration – was a superbly gifted, entirely pragmatic political manager whose key achievement was to persuade his fellow citizens that Socialism was not a precursor to the reappearance of the guillotine.  

The problem for the party was how to follow the great man (old fraud though he undoubtedly was), and thus far the Socialists have come up empty. Twenty-first century ideologues, steeped in social media, are unimpressed by centrist posturing. They would rather take to the streets, as anarchists or “ultras,” or else vote for Mélenchon and his perennially promised brave new world. They are unmoved by the fact that large parts of the white working class, especially in the far North and deep South, who should be their natural constituency, are more and more in thrall to the siren-calls of the extreme Right.  

The idea that in these circumstances Anne Hidalgo is about to pull off a miracle is risible. She is not even at the starting gate. Her only hope, pending a nationwide re-birth, is to persuade the wider Socialist family to put aside their differences, and their pride, to help prevent a political catastrophe for both their cause and France.   

It may be like herding cats, but if she could pull the ragged Left together, she could at least keep the flame alive and, by taking votes from the Far Right, ensure that whoever makes it to the Élysée, it will not be Le Pen or Zemmour.  

Beyond the election, the PS could do worse than look to the example of its sister parties, the SPD in Germany and the Labour Party in Britain, both of which, after lean years at the ballot box, are experiencing a renaissance in their fortunes. The new Chancellor of Germany is Olaf Scholz, an old-school Social Democrat, while in the UK Keir Starmer, freed from political stasis by the meltdown of Boris Johnson, is finally being debated as a plausible prime minister.  

Meanwhile, somewhere in France, as Macronisme moves into its next phase, there are surely young Socialists dreaming of a new beginning. And their time will come. It has to. If not, France could be stuck for decades in the position of choosing every five years between the Right and the Further Right, with the workers’ movement lending its support not to a struggle for justice and equality, but to a society based on cheap diesel, early retirement and the last knockings of white supremacy.