France: The Enemy at the Gates
Once again, France stands at the epicenter of the shockwaves rocking Europe. The continuous rise of the FN-turned-RN (National Rally, formerly called National Front) in more than a decade, combined with the palliative solutions that amount to voting for Emmanuel Macron and going back to business as usual, produced a long-feared and long-awaited upsurge in RN – their biggest feat yet, but hardly the worst they have in store. The pretty boy that hides the hideous face of fascism, Jordan Bardella, obtained more votes than the two following lists combined. This landslide victory threw French politics into disorder, and a fully-blown recomposition is underway. The mainstream right in France, representing the Gaullist tradition, is facing imminent implosion as one of its strands stated its readiness to be coopted by fascists – as the respectable bourgeois politics is wont to do when the push comes to the shove. Macronism is poised to die a humiliating death. The left, on the other hand, reached the ingenious conclusion of facing this historic stand-off with the RN with lists dominated by the Socialist Party, under whose anti-worker reign the RN thrived – including, grotesquely enough, none other than François Hollande.
The long-making of RN’s victory
Make no mistake, the RN’s electoral victory did not come out of the blue. It is but the culmination of a decades-long process significantly accelerated in the Third Great Depression after 2008/09. Without going into the nitty-gritty of the historical record, let us recall that since 2012, the party (both under its original name FN, and its post-2017 reiteration RN), never dropped out of the top three of electoral results, be that presidential, legislative or European elections. It also won the popular vote in 2019 European elections, a first in their history. In the meantime, neither the bourgeois politics in general, nor the bourgeois left in particular produced any viable strategy against this constant rise. In a nutshell, bourgeois politics insisted on its anti-working class policies in full throttle while borrowing from the political arsenal of the RN when it came to law-and-order issues or immigration. The so-called left limited itself to moralizing lectures towards the people turning towards the RN, singing the praise of multiculturalism. This combination gave the RN ample room to make inroads into once solidly communist/socialist working-class constituencies. At the same time, the de-demonization tactics of Marine Le Pen, at the helm of RN since 2011, gradually eroded the anti-fascist sensibilities within the larger French population. As a result, the mass mobilizations against Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002 gave way to lackluster showings from the late 2010s onwards. All in all, facing meek enemies in the electoral scene and preempting the mass backlash in the streets with de-demonization, the RN positioned itself to take the once unimaginable leap into power.
The 2024 European elections produced the perfect storm. To be precise, the 2024 victory comes at the heels of a spectacular showing in 2022 – understandably shadowed by Le Pen’s second-round loss in the presidential elections in the same electoral cycle – which saw the RN seats in the French parliament skyrocket from seven to a mind-boggling 89. We are yet to see a detailed study that would offer a glimpse into the composition of the RN’s new voters, but a pre-elections study published by Fondation Jean-Jaurès indicates that RN gained close to one-fifth of those who voted for Valérie Pécresse’s (the candidate of Les Républicans) presidential bid, around one-tenth of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s (the France Unbowed, or LFI candidate and the party’s leader) voters and some six percent of those of Macron. Strikingly enough, the shift in the opposite sense, from Le Pen’s voters to Mélenchon’s party LFI, stands at zero percent (which does not mean that there are no individual cases, but rather that it is statistically negligible). While we need more detailed studies to reach a definitive conclusion, this seems to mean that Mélenchon’s and LFI’s uphill task of eating into the RN’s disillusioned working class/popular voter base has failed, with some of LFI’s own base crossing the line to the other side. As LFI was the only sizeable French force potentially capable of achieving this feat in the short term, this failure might lead the RN consolidating its hold on white French workers for the foreseeable future.
Recomposition and decomposition in French politics
One of the immediate results of the European elections is the internal crises emerging in at least three of the main French political parties, which might just prove fatal. Emmanuel Macron and his party, Renaissance, which have long presented themselves as the only possible bulwark against the RN, could barely cling to a distant second spot. Macron’s electoral base among well-off urbanites wore off to a significant degree, probably feeding into Raphaël Glucksmann’s Socialist Party candidacy – whom Macronists themselves deemed “Macron-compatible” before his unexpected rise in the polls. Macron reacted by an audacious, if ill-advised move, by calling snap elections. He seems to hope to capitalize on the moderate as well as left-leaning voters rallying around his banner against the RN for the lack of any other alternative. However, the rapid formation of the New Popular Front (see below) could potentially lead to this gamble backfiring. In that case, the Macronist bloc is all but certain to see the rise of internal challengers, not least the former prime minister Edouard Philippe and his Horizons party, who already asked for more autonomy within the heteroclite majority that supports Macron’s presidency in the parliament.
The second and slightly counterintuitive crisis is unfolding within the ranks of the grand victors of the elections, i.e., the fascists. Eric Zemmour’s Reconquête! (Reconquest, REC) party, who ran in the European elections with lists led by Marion Maréchal, the RN leader Marine Le Pen’s niece. Zemmour and his party, once presented as a contender that could unseat RN at the head of French fascism, scored well for all intents and purposes, sending five deputies to the European Parliament – same with French ecologists and just one shy from Les Républicains. However, the temptation of becoming part of the new proto-fascist government in France proved bigger than themselves, and as the RN-REC negotiations to field joint candidates came to naught, four out of five REC Europe deputies rallied to the alliance emerging around the RN, including Marion Maréchal herself. At this point, REC’s candidates seem unlikely to fare well in the face of RN’s momentum, which might bring this episode of intra-fascist competition to a close.
The third and arguably the most spectacular crisis is taking place within Les Républicains (LR) – one of the main pillars of the French 5th Republic, under whose colors half of the presidents of the 5th Republic governed. The party is now a shadow of its former self, whose seven percent score in these elections is part of a pattern of underwhelming electoral results. Stuck between the Macronist center that took the mantra of economic liberalism, and the RN, which espouses social conservatism better than LR ever could, the party has long been struggling to carve itself a political space and establish a clear raison d’être. This dilemma often led LR to cozy up relations at times with Macron and at others with the RN group in the parliament. As Le Monde recently broke, Vincent Bolloré, a reactionary French media mogul and once standard bearer of Eric Zemmour, has apparently been pressuring Eric Ciotti, the chairman of Les Républicains, to convince him into an alliance with the RN. This long-haul groundwork, combined with the RN’s newly-found dominant position, led Eric Ciotti to unexpectedly announce his party’s intention to form an alliance with the RN to establish a “union of the rights.”
The magnitude of this decision in the French context cannot be overemphasized. French politics had for decades the unofficial rule of excluding the FN/RN from alliances and government coalitions, commonly called “cordon sanitaire.” The increasing electoral score of the RN, combined with the de-demonization policies, has been gnawing into this rule, but so far, unable to break it entirely. Ciotti’s decision marks the end of an era and the success of French fascism in breaking the cordon sanitaire. Admittedly, Ciotti’s decision is a far cry from the consensus within his party. On the contrary, the central instances of the party reacted vehemently, meeting the following day and excluding Ciotti not only from his leadership position but from the party itself (a tribunal declared this decision unlawful in the following days, giving Ciotti a boost). Whereas Ciotti’s wing seems to constitute a minority, a number of important figures in the party – from several Eurodeputies to the leadership of the party youth – declared their support to the pro-RN line. The 62 candidates – of whose less than half are members of Les Républicains – who will run from the seats that RN earmarked for Ciotti constitutes a momentous step with which the RN starts to coopt the rest of French right.
Front Populaire
The main left parties in France responded to the snap elections and the prospect of an RN government by starting the talks for an electoral alliance. After a few days of intense negotiations, the LFI (France Unbowed), PS (Socialist Party), PCF (French Communist Party), and the Ecologists announced the formation of the New Popular Front. The new alliance is quite similar to 2022’s NUPES in its composition, but the PS’s rise in the last elections led to it taking a bigger part of the seats, to the detriment of the LFI. The new alliance also received the backing of several parties of revolutionary Marxist origins, including NPA-A (New Anticapitalist Party-Anticapitalists) and POI (Independent Workers’ Party).
One could only sympathize with the enthusiasm of hundreds of thousands of people who hope to have found a tool to resist rising fascism. Yet the tool at hand is utterly defective. Even the original Popular Front, often lionized as a sort of golden era by important sections of the French left, ended up giving way to Pétain’s pro-Nazi and collaborationist government. This stemmed from the fact that that front included parties and groups within its ranks, while not contributing anything of importance to the anti-fascist struggle, burdened the front with the bourgeoisie’s program. Presenting the bourgeoisie’s interest in the anti-fascist ranks only hindered a more consequent struggle that could have blocked the way to fascism by destroying the roots that feed fascism. Also, the futile efforts to placate the bourgeois parties within the ranks served as shackles for the working class, impeding it from unleashing its full force with the weapons of the working class. However, even with all these defects, the original Popular Front was the direct – if distorted – result of the class struggle, whose first showing was not joint slates but communist and socialist workers forcefully crushing the fascist uprising of February 6, 1934, with mass mobilization and street battles.
Now, the supposedly second coming of this savior of French democracy seems utterly indifferent to a blow-by-blow fight against the fascist menace beyond the ballot box. It is crystal clear that the Popular Front’s participation in the anti-fascist demonstrations was to limit them to electoral meetings instead of using them to build mass resistance. What renders the new front even more toothless is its new internal balance. Notwithstanding all its problems and limitations, LFI showed itself at times willing and capable of successfully addressing the working-class/Yellow Vest public that swelled the RN’s ranks. As we mentioned above, the LFI seems to have failed at its bid, but it was still a rare political force capable of gaining a base among the urban poor of French banlieues, often of North African or Sub-Saharan African origin. Now, the PS seems to take the driving seat in the alliance, as seen in the Popular Front’s program underlining its unwavering support for Ukraine or condemnation of “Hamas terrorism.” A good chunk of the Popular Front’s candidates will come from the PS, including former President François Hollande, infamous for the anti-worker labor code he passed as a bill. Who would you think a French worker would vote for, between the architects of many anti-worker policies and the RN who has long been trying to adopt a deceivingly pro-worker posture?
This is undoubtedly a dark hour for France and Europe. The working class and toiling masses face an uphill battle against the imminent menace of fascism, a fight rendered exponentially more difficult by the absence of its own political parties. The task at hand is challenging, but the working class and its revolutionaries have seen darker hours and prevailed, facing steeper odds. The fascists might have carried the day in a battle, but the war will certainly be ours.
