https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/magazine/french-left-politics-melenchon.html
Why Power Eludes the French Left
France has often been the vanguard of leftist politics — but support in the streets doesn’t always translate to votes at the ballot box.
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.
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