The Self-Diminished French Left

The French left is now doomed to opposition for the foreseeable future. This is perhaps not the worst place to be, given the fractious nature of the new minority-majority, which lives only on Le Pen’s sufferance. But it is tempting to ask whether various players on the left might have played their cards differently, and what might have resulted if they had.

For Mélenchon and his comrades, the answer is yes, of course, they could have taken a different tack, but then they would no longer have been insoumis. The fate to which they will never submit is to accept a modicum of power in a coalition government achieved through compromise. In their eyes, to rule in such a way is corrupt, a moral surrender to “capital” and its henchmen, who will never cede power unless forced. The New Popular Front was therefore a charade designed to expose the cynicism and hypocrisy of Le Pouvoir, and thus the NFP’s apparent failure was in fact its brilliant success. Mélenchon has kept his purity intact for the ultimate confrontation with Le Pen, which he cannot see he is destined to lose.

For Olivier Faure, his allies, and his frenemies, the question is less simple. He could have interpreted Raphaël Glucksmann’s surprisingly good showing in the European Parliament election as a sign that Melenchon’s appeal was on the wane and that the future of the PS therefore lay in an alliance with the left wing of Macronism. It was perhaps necessary as a first step to revive the left-alliance for the legislative elections, but he should have driven a harder bargain with LFI, insisting on more safe seats for the PS on the basis of Place Pubique’s victory in the EP contest. But Faure instead took the easier path, giving Mélenchon the upper hand in order to fend off his rivals within the PS: Cazeneuve, Hollande, Delga, Mayer-Rossignol.

When he finally decided to put his foot down and oppose Tubiana, he was forced to turn to a non-entity, Lucie Castets, as a compromise candidate, because anyone with a more defined PS-compatible profile would have been unacceptable on principle to Mélenchon.

Meanwhile, it had become clear that there were no takers anywhere to the right of the PS for a government that included ministers from LFI. This was a pretty high-handed position for the center and right to take, so high-handed that many regard it as “un déni de démocratie,” to use Mélenchon’s words. But the two-round voting system, the strategic anti-Le Pen vote, and the lopsided apportionment of safe-slot candidacies among the parties of the left make that a hard position to sustain. There was no love lost between LFI and the PS before the legislative elections, and there was no reason to profess undying matrimony afterward. When Macron’s interminable consultations led to the floating of a trial balloon concerning a Cazeneuve prime ministership, Faure might have seized the opportunity.

Let me clear. Cazeneuve was far from an ideal choice if Macron wished to experiment with a moderate turn to the left. He was and remains too closely associated with Hollande and the ill-will left behind by his failed presidency. But the configuration of the current regime is unprecedented in the history of the Fifth Republic. For the first time Parliament is in the driver’s seat. Cazeneuve, as a nominal leftist acceptable in the eyes of the republican center and right, would have represented an opening for a rebuilding of the left. He apparently laid down certain markers in his conversations with Macron: that there must be some modification of the pension reform, some movement nn the SMIC, and some reconsideration of the wealth tax.

It seems that Macron rejected these conditions, but there was no resistance to his rejection, because Cazeneuve had already been given thumbs down by his own camp, which might have chosen instead to fight for Cazeneuve while pressing for other key ministries to go to figures of the left. But the Bureau National of the PS decided, by a very narrow margin, that the only PM nominee it would back was Castets. The priority was thus to preserve the NFP rather than seek another coalition with a more realistic chance of forming a government, given the refusal of the center and right to swallow the NFP whole. Did Faure push for this outcome out of conviction, or because he thought that any move toward Cazeneuve would strengthen the internal opposition to his own leadership?

It’s impossible to know. But I am convinced that the New Popular Front, for all the emotional exhilaration it unleashed (including in me) in its successful effort to block the apparently irresistible ascendancy of the RN, was a fundamental error. Its apparent strength–entirely temporary and circumstantial–is illusory. Its weaknesses, insofar as it remains subject to the intransigence of the LFI’s leadership, will keep it confined to minority status. Its vaunted position as “the largest group” within the National Assembly, the sole justification of its insistence that the PM must come from its ranks, is weak tea, given how far short its 193 votes fall of an absolute majority, to say nothing of its internal divisions.

As long as the center and right refuse to renounce the support of the RN and remain content to govern under the sword of Damocles that a Le Pen veto represents, the broader left will therefore be without influence on the direction of government. This turn of events, which I find regrettable, was not the result of any Machiavellian brilliance on Macron’s part, nor was it a conscious decision by an embittered president to deliver France into the hands of Le Pen in order to save it from Mélenchon. It was rather a banal consequence of small-bore political decision-making by leaders across the political spectrum, each afflicted with acute myopia obscuring the larger picture from view.