An archive of articles and listserve postings of interest, mostly posted without commentary, linked to commentary at the Education Notes Online blog. Note that I do not endorse the points of views of all articles, but post them for reference purposes.
Retired municipal workers gathered near City Hall Park last
June to voice their support for City Council legislation that would help
preserve their current health care plans. A State Supreme Court
Appellate Division panel on Thursday heard the city’s appeal of a court
decision last August halting the city’s plan to transition the retirees
to a private Medicare Advantage plan from their current
government-administered Medicare
Richard Khavkine/The Chief
Posted
BY RICHARD KHAVKINE
A
state appellate judge and a city attorney sparred Thursday about
whether assurances made to city workers decades ago regarding their
health care were essentially lifelong, unbreakable promises.
The
exchange took place during a hearing by a State Supreme Court Appellate
Division panel considering the city’s appeal of a court decision
blocking the Adams administration from switching municipal retirees to a
private health plan from their government-administered Medicare.
Just as
the city attorney, Richard Dearing, began his statement, Associate
Justice Ellen Gesmer interrupted him to ask whether the city disagreed
with a former municipal official’s affidavit that the city’s promise of
Medicare and a city-paid supplemental plan was an “‘essential recruiting
and retention tool.’”
“I
didn't see anything in your papers that disputed that that was an
essential recruiting and retention tool. Could you show me where, if
anywhere, in the record, you refuted that,” Gesmer said to Dearing.
“We
refute, I think, the premise that that promise was made,” Dearing, the
executive assistant corporation counsel for appeals, replied. He
suggested that the affidavit, submitted by Lilliam Barrios-Paoli,
herself a retired longtime city official who headed several
departments, including that charged with personnel, “hinges on a
passage” from a summary program description of health benefits offered
to municipal employees.
That
did not satisfy Gesmer, who along with three colleagues from the State
Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, First Department, are considering
the city’s appeal of a Manhattan Supreme Court justice’s decision that
blocked the Adams administration’s plan to usher the retirees into a Medicare Advantage plan.
“I
understood her affidavit to rely on her statement of the city policy
with regard to recruiting and retaining employees, not limited to what
was in the [summary program description], but rather limited to what it
was her policy as director of HRA, among other things, to convey to new
employees,” the justice said.
Dearing
said he did not dispute that the city’s promise of free health care
into retirement was intended as a recruiting tool. The issue, he said,
was whether those assurances met a legal standard. He argued that the
city’s guarantees to its employees as outlined in the summary plan
description “do not equate to any such promise or to any such clear and
unambiguous promise under the court's precedents.”
Taking
up his court colleague’s line of questioning, Justice John R. Higgitt
asked Dearing why there was no evidence in the record, such as an
affidavit, refuting the promises of lifetime benefits alleged by the
retirees and Barrios-Paoli. “There wasn't one individual in city
government over that course of 57 years who could say such a promise was
not made?” Higgitt asked.
“I
don't think there's not such a person,” the city’s attorney replied. “I
think we looked at the record and we concluded that the evidence of that
promise, under the standard of New York law, was not sufficient.”
But the
attorney representing the retirees, Jake Gardener, said there was “a
very simple answer” to the justice’s question, namely “because no one
would say, under penalty of perjury, that there was no promise made, nor
would they say that any promise made was unauthorized.”
Conversely,
Gardener said, the hundreds of affidavits from city retirees and
others, attest to “the clear and unambiguous promise delivered by city
officials in virtually every setting, verbally, in person, and then also
in HR documents and [summary program description].”
Adams had disapproved
Gardener
also noted that Mayor Eric Adams himself had disapproved of the
proposed switch when he was running for office, calling the plan, first
put into motion during the de Blasio administration, as a
bait-and-switch tactic.
Shifting
the retirees to the privately run plan would save the city anywhere
from $500 million to $600 million annually, which the retirees have
argued would be equal to less than 1 percent of the city’s $107 billion
budget this fiscal year.
The
city would derive the savings through federal subsidies available to
Medicare Advantage plans. The savings would help replenish the city’s
Health Stabilization Fund, which supplements employee welfare funds.
The
hearing, lasting just under 25 minutes, followed Justice Lyle Frank’s
finding last August that switching the retirees to a private plan and
stripping them of their no-cost supplemental coverage would in fact
break long-ago guarantees the city made to employees.
“The
petitioners have shown that numerous promises were made by the City to
then New York City employees and future retirees that they would receive
a Medicare supplemental plan when they retired, and that their first
level of coverage once that retired would [be] Medicare,” he wrote in his five-page decision.
Frank
dismissed the city’s arguments that the promises “were not definite and
were not forward looking,” by noting that “[w]hen words such as ‘will’
are used, that is to this Court a promise that is future looking.”
The
decision marked the third time in two years the courts sided with the
retirees. Soon afterward, the city said it would appeal his ruling. A
decision from the Appellate Division could take anywhere from a few days
to as long as several months.
Marianne Pizzitola, the president of
the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees, one of the
lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to Frank’s decision, called out
the city’s tactics.
“Retirees know what we were promised
and that was Medicare and a city supplemental plan when we became
Medicare eligible," she said in a statement following the hearing. "A
promise made should be a promise kept, and we relied on that when
choosing to spend our lifetime working for the city. It is shameful that
the mayor’s Office of Labor Relations would encourage unions to sell
off retirees for their raises."
The following is an update from the newly announce UFT Paras For A Fair Contract website: http://fixparapay.org
UPDATE:
We want to thank you for supporting the Fix Para Pay petition. The calls for a living wage and fair contract for New York City paras have resonated and they are earth-shattering.
In
less than a week, we have surpassed over 1700k signatures — and the
totals are still growing strong! Over 65% who have signed on are NYC
paras who are struggling to survive in the NYC area without a living
wage. Almost every signature is a UFT member who stands with paras in
this fight. The others are stakeholders in our public schools.
THE NEXT STEP: MAKE OUR VOICES MATTER IN THE 2024 PARA CHAPTER ELECTIONS
Our
union proud and union strong community of paras and UFT members
believes that it’s time to organize for a meaningful change by pressing
the issues of a living wage and a fair contract at the collective
bargaining table. With rising inflation, skyrocketing costs, and Mulgrew
making us pay more for our healthcare plans, we are left no choice.
We are also are committing to further mobilize to ensure the para chapter and our school chapters are strong.
We
are resolute in our mission: Fighting for respect and dignity for paras
by achieving a living wage and a fair contract for NYC paras.
Lip
service, empty promises, political grandstanding, symbolic gestures,
luncheons, certificates, digital handbooks, more PDs and CTLE
opportunities, will not do.
BE THE CHANGE: LET'S RUN TOGETHER ON THE UFT PARAS FOR A FAIR CONTRACT SLATE
Are
you ready to take back our union? If you are a UFT para and want to run
with us in this election, we want to connect with you. There are over
250 para delegate representative seats within the UFT para functional
chapter that are open in this election. Learn more here: https://www.uft.org/your-union/chapter-elections-2024/chapter-election-faq
We
intend to run as many qualified candidates who want to join us in
solidarity to organize and bring about the change we sorely need in our
beloved union.
We must become the change we all seek by filling those seats with rank and file, hard working members like you.
Our existing team of para leaders and UFT activists is experienced and ready to help. Please submit this form no later than April 2, 2024.
If
you interested in joining this slate for meaningful change for paras,
complete the form below to connect with us. If you are interested in
joining this slate for meaningful change for paras, go to: http://joinslate.fixparapay.org
MORE ON THE PETITION’S PROPOSED RESOLUTION FOR A LIVING WAGE
Mulgrew’s
Unity caucus, the entrenched, stagnant and establishment union
leadership that has had sole control of our union for over 60 years, has
rejected our calls for a comprehensive bargaining plan for a living
wage and a fair para contract.
We organize, mobilize and educate members. And, we vote them out!
We relentlessly march forward as a member-driven labor movement, together.
As
union proud and union strong community of paras and UFT members, we
assert that it’s time to organize for a meaningful change by pressing
the issue at the collective bargaining table. We also believe we must
organize to ensure our para chapter and local school chapters are
strong.
We
will not stand for the status quo. We soundly reject: sub-inflation pay
raises, the further erosion of our healthcare and pension benefits, our
rights being trampled, and a tone deaf, current leadership stifling our
individual and collective voices.
Let’s
stand as ONE to join together to be heard even as those we entrusted at
52 Broadway, UFT headquarters, have become more and more disconnected
from those of us working hard in the classroom and school communities.
In
the next week or so, the federal government will announce a decision
that will clue us in on whether big health insurers that run the private
Medicare Advantage program will have once again succeeded in
browbeating regulators into giving them billions more of our money than
they’re lawfully entitled to.
This is the time of year when the
Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services makes a final decision on how
much of an increase to send to private insurers that now control access
to care for more than half of all Medicare beneficiaries. In past years,
private insurers’ intense lobbying and intimidation have paid off–to
Wall Street’s delight.
HEALTH
CARE un-covered is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts
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That’s
largely because consumer and patient advocacy groups and the media have
not paid close enough attention to what has become the biggest source
of revenue and profits for many of the country's biggest corporations.
But this year is different, and you’ll see some of the evidence below.
Here’s what’s happening:
At the end of January, CMS released its “Advance Notice”
of proposed payment rates and policy changes for health plans that
participate in Medicare Advantage in 2025. The calculations CMS uses are
complicated but the bottom line is that the agency proposed a 3.7%
average expected increase in revenue for MA plans next year. You can
find a good analysis
of what’s going on and what’s at stake in last Wednesday’s edition of
Health Affairs, written by a team of researchers at Brown University and
Georgia State.
Health plans are insisting, as they
did last year and in years past, that what CMS is proposing would
actually result in a pay cut, and they warn that it would force them to
increase premiums, cut benefits, or both. Usually, the back and forth
stays inside the beltway, but last year the fight spilled over into
prime time when the industry-funded Better Medicare Alliance spent a
fortune on a Super Bowl ad that asked viewers to “tell the White House” not to “cut” Medicare Advantage.
The
Brown and Georgia State researchers set the record straight and, in
somewhat restrained academic prose, called BS on the industry:
Indeed,
although MA plans and their lobbying organizations have portrayed these
proposed payment updates as major cuts, this is not true. To put the
2025 MA rate changes in perspective, the 3.7% increase in revenue is
larger than last year’s 1% predicted increase but smaller than previous
years’ increases exceeding 7% annually. The extremely high margins made by MA plans will barely be touched by provisions in the Advance Notice. (Emphasis added.)
STAT News’ Bob Herman, was more direct in his reliably engaging newsletter this morning:
Within
the next week, we will know how the Biden Administration is approaching
next year’s Medicare Advantage plans–and whether it is willing to meet
the health insurance industry’s demands and deposit more money into the
bank accounts of insurers…Billions of dollars are on the line for a
program that still has not saved a dime for taxpayers, despite promises
that it would.
Having been a part of the industry’s
propaganda machine, I know how insurers swing into action at the
slightest perceived threat to Medicare Advantage profit margins. For
years, we organized and financed what we called “granny fly-ins” to
Washington to get “regular seniors” to fan out across Capitol Hill to
deliver the industry’s talking points directly to members of Congress.
We helped thousands of others who couldn’t make the trip to write
letters to the President and lawmakers expressing outrage at the very
notion of putting insurers’ fattest cash cow on a diet.
As Herman
noted this morning, 42,000 comments have flooded into the federal
government on this issue in the weeks since CMS released its Advance
Notice.
What has changed this year, though, is that many of those
comments are from real people and real organizations representing them,
like Public Citizen, the Center for Medicare Advocacy, People’s Action,
Be a Hero and many others that have come together to push back against
the industry’s tactics and lies. In recent weeks, they’ve landed
high-level meetings with Biden Administration officials and members of
Congress and have made it clear that they won’t be happy if CMS caves
once again to industry pressure.
In
addition, the media is waking up and calling foul on Medicare
Advantage. I wouldn’t think of writing this without giving a big
shout-out to Fred Schulte at KFF News (and previously at the Center for
Public Integrity, where Fred and I were colleagues a decade ago). Fred
was among the few in the media at the time whose investigative reporting
laid bare the industry’s blatant “money grab.” If you care about how
your tax dollars have been used to enrich a few executives and
shareholders, you should check out Fred’s series of reports from 2014 to 2017.
But
it would take The New York Times’ Reed Abelson and Margo Sanger-Katz to
make the money grab a hot topic in DC and the rest of the media. The
headline of their October 22, 2022, front-page story was compelling, to
say the least:
In the months
after that seminal story, dozens of reporters have turned their
attention to Medicare Advantage. My team and I have seen most of them
and have brought many of them to your attention. But in case you might
have missed them, we’ve provided links to a few we think you ought to
see. After you read them, we encourage you to “call the White House.”
Here’s a small sampling of some of the stories and commentaries you might have missed:
France
has often been the vanguard of leftist politics — but support in the
streets doesn’t always translate to votes at the ballot box.
By Elisabeth Zerofsky
The
signs that a protest is happening in Paris are nearly always the same:
the quiet of blocked-off streets; the neat rows of police vans
containing the gendarmerie stretching down the boulevard; the sound of
drumbeats and whistles and the neon red flares that spit smoke into the
sky. For six months last year, those signs were constant and ubiquitous,
as furious, sometimes violent marches and general strikes protesting President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms
brought Paris to a standstill. Students and activists, public-transit
operators, custodial staff, medics, mechanics, teachers, oil-rig
workers, writers and celebrities all gathered to rail against Macron’s
plan to raise the national retirement age by two years, to 64.
As
transit walkouts snarled traffic and sanitation strikes caused trash to
pile up in the streets, the protests were ridiculed abroad. Why must
the French, among the best-protected workers in the Western world, make
such a racket over two years of work? But for the demonstrators, this
missed the point: It is because
French workers put up a fight that they are protected. “We actually have
laws on our side,” Samira Alaoui, a union representative at
Teleperformance, a digital business services company, told me. “We are a
model for the world. If we don’t do anything, who will?”
In
2023, France seemed less the exception than the rule. There was a surge
in labor activity around the world last year — strikes and victories —
as much as or more than any year in decades. This was true in the United
States, where the Writers Guild of America,the United Auto Workers and the UPS Teamsters all won significant concessions from executives. In Britain, nurses went on strike
to protest staffing shortages and patient backlogs at the National
Health Service. Still, it was perhaps in France that labor’s rise was
most visible — most combustive and most telling. France has always been a
vanguard of leftist politics. Today it is one of the few Western
democracies where a far left has managed to survive and even thrive, as
it works to invent a new leftist politics that can succeed in a moment
of right-wing ascendancy. How it fares says much about where the left
may be headed and the headwinds it faces, not just in France but
throughout the West.
While once-robust labor unions have seen their numbers decline more
drastically in France than in other European countries — around 8
percent of French workers belong to labor unions, compared with 35
percent in Italy or 18 percent in Germany — French unions remain strong.
In part this is because recent labor activism has been buoyed by a
newly resurgent leftist movement, La France Insoumise (L.F.I.), or
“France Unbowed.” At the final pension-reform march in Paris last summer
— a defanged one, to be sure, as the measure had already been made law —
the area cordoned off for protesters gathering to march down the
Boulevard des Invalides was draped with banners for L.F.I. “A different
reform is possible, 60!” one proclaimed. Another demanded the founding
of a new republic. One protester carried a giant marionette of Macron
peeking out of a bright green garbage bin, an allusion to the scandal
that followed the arrest of a woman at her home for an online post in
which she called Macron “trash.” (The charges were later dropped.)
L.F.I. was founded in 2016 by Jean-Luc
Mélenchon, 72, an unruly populist in the vein of Bernie Sanders with an
even more strident rhetorical style, who is widely credited with
sustaining leftism in France and with its strong showing in the last two
presidential elections. Mélenchon came in third in the 2022 presidential election, with 21.95 percent of the vote, about a point behind Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally
(formerly the National Front), who advanced to the final runoff against
Macron. By contrast, the progressive left in the United States
represents only about 7 percent of registered voters, according to Pew,
and though center-left parties are common throughout Western Europe, it
is unusual for the far left to capture this much of the vote and come so
close to the presidency.
Because of
Mélenchon’s performance in the general elections, he was able to form a
coalition with other left-leaning parties — the P.C.F. (or French
Communist Party), the Socialists and the Greens — each of which garnered
only a fraction of the vote. The coalition, known as NUPES, largely
adopted L.F.I.’s platform: to tame the chaos of the free market by
instituting large tax hikes on the wealthy, increase the minimum wage,
renationalize formerly public companies, and fight climate change and
racial and gender inequality. This week a bill to enshrine abortion
rights in the French Constitution, introduced and promoted by the L.F.I.
and the Green Party, became law. The L.F.I. now leads the largest
opposition bloc in Parliament, which has some 26 percent of the seats,
enough to block Macron from having a controlling majority.
Yet L.F.I. has so
far failed to translate its electoral plurality into the kind of
consensus and broad-based support that could eventually lead to running
the country. Though 62 percent of the French approved of the protests
against Macron, polls later showed L.F.I. to be not much stronger than
before. By contrast, Marine Le Pen, who offered hardly any public
commentary on the pension reforms at all, received a boost in the polls.
On many economic matters, “public opinion is largely with the left,”
Rémi Lefebvre, a political scientist at the University of Lille, told
me. “The French believe that the problems the left wants to address are
important, but they don’t believe in their solutions.”
For the French left, as for center-left parties across Western democracies, the path to power is commonly seen to lie in recapturing the (white) working class outside large urban centers, who in recent years have been drawn toward the far right. But if the left has struggled to attract these voters — and to keep them — it is not just for reasons of policy. Profound economic, social and cultural changes — deindustrialization, the loss of secure jobs, the breakdown of unions and party structures — have so remade politics that even policies that should appeal to such voters cannot persuade them on merit alone. While in France, as elsewhere, the left and the far right are often viewed as vying for power over the political center, this narrative glosses over some critical distinctions. “The condition for winning is not at all the same for the extreme right and the left,” says Samuel Hayat, a political scientist specializing in the history of French political thought at the French National Center for Scientific Research.
Ongoing tensions over immigration and
asylum policies, a spate of lethal terrorist attacks and the explosive
emotions stoked by the Israel-Hamas war (France has both the largest
Jewish and the largest Muslim populations in Europe) create a climate
favorable to the far right on social issues. “Immigration is a topic
that is difficult for the left to address,” Lefebvre says, not only
because many of its constituents are themselves immigrants or the
descendants of immigrants but also because leftist ideology, which
embraces equality for all, is in many ways antithetical to the harsh
enforcement of border laws. This difficulty has been exacerbated by the “droitisation”
of French media, or the ubiquity of extreme right figures. Marine Le
Pen “doesn’t even need to speak,” Lefebvre says. “The debate has become
so right-wing. The other forces do the job for her.”
If
the far right has succeeded in “being hegemonic in the way that the
media interprets certain questions, such as the question of Islam, the
question of immigration,” Hayat says, the left is in the unenviable
position of having to offer concrete proposals and persuade people it
can implement them. “They have to go and conquer every place, they have
to do politics,” he says. “They have to appear as a real force of
opposition that will truly change the lives of people if they arrive in
power.”
Like many recently birthed political movements,L.F.I.
has fashioned itself in and for the era of social media. While its
policy platform is largely out of the left-wing playbook, its tactics
are aimed at the attention economy. From its inception, L.F.I. has
excelled at the optics of protest — what Mélenchon’s opponents call “the
decibel left” — theatrical disruptions of power that attack the
establishment, especially the media and within Parliament. During the
anti-pension-reform marches last spring, its deputies became well known
for shouting down Macron’s ministers. In one notorious incident, an
L.F.I. representative plastered an effigy of the labor minister’s head
onto a soccer ball and posed for a photo with his foot on top of it.
These
kinds of actions are not mere provocations. They are seen by L.F.I. as a
way to mobilize a new kind of grass-roots populism by engaging voters
who have long ceased to participate in politics. Like Chantal Mouffe, a
theorist of leftist populism and a friend of Mélenchon’s, Mélenchon
believes that voters have become demoralized by a technocratic
neoliberal consensus: the primacy of markets and social values that
favor individualism over the collective good. The expression of anger is
meant to make room for changing course, by solidifying support among
the working class and luring voters who might otherwise be tempted by
the far right.
In France, as in
many Western democracies today, the working class is now in large part
nonwhite. The 10th Arrondissement of Paris, where the L.F.I. has its
headquarters in an old uniform distribution center, is a mix of
immigrant workers (and their descendants) and the bobos, as the French
refer to yuppies, who have gentrified the area — the very urban voters
who have become Mélenchon’s strongest bloc. His constituency also
comprises the academic and activist left, who dominate
social-media-driven messaging and give voice to this demographic
coupling.
Last summer, I found
Mélenchon in his office behind a sunny glassed-in antechamber staffed by
older millennials. Warm and extroverted, with a well-deserved
reputation as an intellectual, he relayed anecdotes and reflections in
an erudite yet idiomatic French that was a notch or two above my
nonnative proficiency. On his desk I saw a copy of “The Communist
Manifesto,” which I assumed that Mélenchon, a French sovereigntist with a
fierce anti-American streak, might have left out as a mild provocation.
Mélenchon
was a member of the center-left French Socialist Party until 2008, when
he quit to form a separate party because he thought the Socialists had,
like their counterparts across Europe and the United States, fallen
under the thrall of neoliberalism. “We currently live in a country,
France, the seventh economy in the world, with nine million poor people,
six million who can’t feed their children,” Mélenchon told me. “This
was never France.”
Mélenchon
has advocated the founding of a new republic that would change the
Constitution to shift power away from the president and toward the
people. He described himself to me as “a tribune of the people,” even as
he acknowledged that “the people” of the 21st century is not the same
as the people of the 20th century or the 19th century. He is nonetheless
clearly inspired by the rabble-rousing leftist politics of previous
eras. “The tribune was always someone whose body was engaged,” Mélenchon
said, as he twisted around in his seat and waved at a photo of Jean
Jaurès, one of the founders of the Socialist Party, a diminutive man in a
bowler hat, hanging by one hand from a flagpole, the other hand raised
toward a sea of people below him. “Conflictuality,” he said, referring
to his politics of disruption, “profoundly shocks the mores of the
ruling elite.”
Mélenchon never misses
an opportunity to apply his rhetorical gifts to challenging those in
power. It was to this end that they were deployed last summer when riots
exploded across the country after a police officer killed 17-year-old
Nahel Merzouk in the driver’s seat of his car. (Merzouk was shot during a
traffic stop.) As protesters across the Parisian suburbs, known as banlieues,
looted stores and set fire to cars, schools, town halls and other state
property, leading to thousands of arrests, Mélenchon took to Twitter to
call for justice. While leaders in the banlieues
praised him for acknowledging the lived experience of their
constituents, elsewhere the backlash was vicious. Critics from the
center and the right railed that, even as the country burned, Mélenchon
hadn’t called for calm.
The same defiant
impulse was on display this fall. After the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in
Israel, French politicians organized a march against antisemitism.
Nearly all major political figures in France, including Marine Le Pen,
attended. Mélenchon did not. (He later said this was because of the
presence of the far right.) Once Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip
began, Mélenchon joined marches calling for a cease-fire, from which he
posted pictures. Then he tweeted that the speaker of Parliament, Yaël
Braun-Pivet, who is Jewish and was in Israel on a fact-finding visit,
was “camping out” in Tel Aviv to “encourage a massacre.” The press,
including left-leaning outlets, jumped on Mélenchon’s remarks, calling
them antisemitic — one magazine decried them as “vile misjudgments” —
while newscasters on centrist or mainstream channels praised Le Pen’s
response, creating a media environment in which the left was portrayed
as potentially more dangerous to the country than the far right.
(Mélenchon later said his remarks were not antisemitic because what he
objected to was the unconditional nature of Braun-Pivet’s support for
Israel.)
Mélenchon’s critics,
including some of L.F.I.’s more mainstream coalition partners, cite such
tactics as the reason they think he has hit a ceiling with voters.
“There’s an L.F.I. discourse on social networks, saying, Oh, we don’t
care, we have to be honest and true, and the way to do it is to be the
same in the streets and in Parliament,”’ says Vincent Martigny, a
political scientist at the University of Nice, Côte d’Azur. “But we can
see that this strategy of L.F.I. to be very violent in Parliament at
this point doesn’t work at all. The middle class might be angry, but it
doesn’t want angry people to be at the Élysée Palace.”
In
the past, unions and party organizations worked together to do both —
they mobilized their members to demonstrate and to vote for their
candidates. With unions in decline, and with many of the traditional
left party structures in France now nonexistent, radical actions, even
those that have strong participation across age groups and that enjoy
union support, don’t necessarily lead to greater voter turnout. As has
been repeatedly demonstrated by social movements over the last decade —
Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the Yellow Vests in France and Gezi
Park in Turkey — impassioned social-media-driven engagement in the
streets does not necessarily translate into the kind of engagement
required to acquire and sustain power.
An
electoral map of France from the 2022 presidential election shows that
the L.F.I. won in the immigrant suburbs of northeastern Paris and its
environs and did well in many pockets in the south of France and in
other major cities. The west of France, once a stronghold of the
Socialist Party, went to Macron. The south, which has long been
far-right territory, went to Marine Le Pen, as did large swaths of the
postindustrial northeast, a region that was once the breeding ground of
the French Communist Party. Amid the sea of National Rally victories in
northeast France, the left managed to win only a handful of districts.
Historically, the French
left operated as a coalition of the French Socialist Party and the
P.C.F. Beginning in the 1930s and then again after World War II, that
coalition helped establish what many leftists think of when they think
of the social welfare state. The P.C.F., which played a paramount role
in the French resistance during World War II, operated effectively
through already well-established underground networks. It emerged from
World War II with a new legitimacy, especially in what had been occupied
northern and eastern France. That was also the country’s industrial
base; there, wartime destruction created ample opportunity to champion
the workers who would rebuild the nation.
As part of
coalition governments in the mid-1940s, the P.C.F. fought for and helped
put in place the social security system and the pension system — the
major pillars of the French welfare state. Though national leaders of
the P.C.F. continued to defend Stalin, and Stalinism, even into the
1970s, at the local level, P.C.F. chapters carried out the more
practical functions of organizing, representing and offering services to
workers. In short, the P.C.F. was part of a historically grounded
communal identity. “We built the social model, and we’re proud of that
history,” Fabien Roussel, the current head of the P.C.F., told me.
Roussel,
an energetic 54-year-old, took over the French Communist Party in 2018.
Over Bastille Day last July, I tailed him through St.-Amand-les-Eaux, a
quaint spa town named for its healing waters near the Belgian border,
in what was once French coal country, as he made his holiday rounds.
Roussel greeted constituents at a rock concert, joined a crowd gathered
to watch the fireworks, dropped in on a house party and finally, the
following morning, marched in a Bastille Day parade in the neighboring
town Fresnes-sur-Escaut. There, local officials had assembled in front
of an old union hall dedicated to the Martel brothers, “martyrs to the
resistance,” according to a plaque on the building: Henri, executed in
1942 at age 22, and Germinal, executed in 1943 at 21.
Today the climate
for the P.C.F. is very different than it was in the postwar years. In
the ’80s, the P.C.F. began to lose ground, as the industries that fueled
the economy (coal, metallurgy, textiles) moved out; the idea of
communism, always tainted by its association with the excesses of the
Soviet Union, became increasingly untouchable. As industrial jobs
vanished and workers ceased to be represented by unions, they became
unmoored from the party structures that once granted them political
representation and power — not just the formal ones, like unions, but
the social clubs and community leisure activities organized by workers
who spent their days together. People ceased to think of themselves as
part of a “proletariat,” and the idea of collective organizing began to
fade.
At the same time, many workers began to experience what is known as déclassement:
a halt, or reversal, of improvements to the standard of living. The
economic consequences bred social ones. With less to do, people spent
more time inside their homes watching TV, where right-wing pundits and
ideologues thrived. Soon political protest against the status quo began
to shift from an embrace of the far left into support for Jean-Marie Le
Pen (Marine’s father) and his National Front. By the 1990s, the National
Front was using the language of protectionism to pander to discontented
workers.
As a result,
voters became increasingly unpredictable. “When you had mass political
parties, you could have stability in their vote, because the party was
an organization that defined important parts of your life,” Hayat, the
political scientist, says, “and not just what you voted for every five
years.” Now that politics “has been reduced to what ballot you put in
the ballot box, well, of course, people can sometimes vote for the left,
sometimes not,” he says. Even those who broadly identify with the left
do not join parties, Hayat says. This is largely because political
identities are now formed and expressed on social media, outside party
structures.
This organizational
conundrum does not fall on all parties equally. “If you want to create
stability in the voting, you need organizations,” Hayat says. That is, a
structured, consistent and beneficial presence in communities. In
France, the left no longer has this kind of presence. The same is true
of Italy, which once had one of the strongest Communist Parties in
Europe and which now has a far-right government. And it is also true in
the United States, where, until the 1970s and ’80s, New Deal politics
kept white working-class voters close to the Democratic Party. In the
absence of such structures, Hayat continues, you “need to be the only
party that appeals to a certain emotion that is very strong in the
electorate, for example, fear.” That, of course, is the strength of the
far right.
“They take my exact words,”
Roussel said of Marine Le Pen’s party. “Without paying for rights,
naturally.” But behind it all, Roussel said, their platform is still
neoliberal. “The far-right may talk about raising salaries, but they
would also get rid of the employer contributions that help fund the
social security system,” he said. “I often say to the workers that I
meet: Be wary of the National Rally. It’s like a candy that is very
sweet when you put it in your mouth. But when you bite into it, it’s
very bitter. And it can make you sick.”
The
unemployment rate in St.-Amand now stands, by some calculations, at
23.5 percent. When Roussel took over the P.C.F. five years ago, the
party had just won about 1 percent of the vote in the second round of
parliamentary elections. He managed to double that figure during the
presidential elections in 2022 — to 2.3 percent in the first round. Some
53 percent of those who turned out to vote in St.-Amand voted for Le
Pen in the second round of the presidential elections. But they also
voted for Roussel against his far-right opponent in the parliamentary
elections; Roussel won his seat by nine points. This may be a testament
less to the particulars of his policies than to his multigenerational
roots in the region — his father was a journalist for a P.C.F.
publication — and to his persona and his presence in the community.
“Marine Le Pen is against Macron, and I’m against Macron,” Roussel told
me. “In the national elections, people are fed up with both left and
right, it’s always the same thing, so they vote far right. In local
elections, they vote for people they know, whom they like and who treat
them well.”
As the traditional party
system in France has broken down, and as political figures skirt it to
succeed, “there is a cannibalization of politics by personality,” says
Martigny, the University of Nice professor. In that sense, the left has
mirrored the populist style of the far right, in which personality
trumps the traditional party machine.
Many
French leftists dislike Roussel precisely for this reason, arguing that
his politics are more a matter of making friends than of fighting for
left-wing ideas. Even when it comes to Mélenchon, it is difficult to
determine how many people voted for him because they believe in his
politics and how many voted in favor of a big personality, with enough
charisma and fame to beat out the others in a multicandidate election —
what the French call the “vote utile.”
Some
politicians on the left have taken this to mean that they should each
cultivate their own followings, campaign for the presidency in the next
elections, then rally their followers behind whoever makes it to the
runoff, in the hope that, at that point, there will be enough votes to
form a leftist majority. Vitriolic debates that revolve around questions
of what in France is known as le wokisme have become fertile ground for such self-positioning.
As
a matter of policy, there is little disagreement within the French left
about the importance of feminism, antiracism and other matters of
social justice. Even Roussel, who more than anyone on the left might be
said to represent the kind of cultural conservatism inherent in the old
“white working-class guy” style of politics, largely subscribes to these
principles. When I visited him at his office at the Assemblée Nationale
in Paris, I spotted a poster on his wall that enumerated in Ch’ti, the
regional language of northern France, the historic “Droits de l’Homme,”
the Rights of Man, the document adopted during the French Revolution
that was foundational to democracy. Below it was a poster that
enumerated, also in Ch’ti, the Rights of Woman.
What
disagreement there is centers on the public messaging around such
issues. Roussel has become one of the most popular figures in French
politics, in part because of his sometimes unwitting adventures in the
culture wars. His main sparring partner is Sandrine Rousseau, an
economist and a Green Party member of Parliament who was a leader of the
French #MeToo movement. In 2022, Roussel tweeted that he wished every
French citizen could enjoy “a good steak, a good wine, a good piece of
cheese — that’s la gastronomie française!”
In response, Rousseau tweeted a link to an article noting that, in
fact, couscous, a North African dish, was most popular among the French.
This exchange kicked off a debate as to whether it was still
permissible to define French cuisine as wine and cheese. To the delight
of many, Roussel insisted that it was.
