{"id":462716,"date":"2022-01-09T09:11:48","date_gmt":"2022-01-09T09:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2022\/01\/french-presidential-election-socialists-melenchon-neoliberalism\/"},"modified":"2022-01-09T12:02:17","modified_gmt":"2022-01-09T12:02:17","slug":"frances-left-has-lost-touch-with-the-working-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/01\/09\/frances-left-has-lost-touch-with-the-working-class\/","title":{"rendered":"France\u2019s Left Has Lost Touch With the Working Class"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Ahead of April\u2019s presidential election, France\u2019s left is badly divided. But calls for unity behind a milquetoast centrist threaten only to deepen the Left\u2019s split with its historic working-class base.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n French Socialist Party member and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo photographed in 2016. She is currently running for president of France. (A.Schneider83 \/ Wikimedia Commons)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

The campaign for April\u2019s French presidential election is already polarizing around the \u201cculture war.\u201d The flood of anti-immigrant<\/a> messaging isn\u2019t just coming from the far right or even President Emmanuel Macron\u2019s <\/a>administration, but also many of France\u2019s leading capitalists \u2014 not least billionaire tycoon Vincent Bollor\u00e9<\/a>, owner of the Fox-like CNews.<\/p>\n

The situation ahead of this spring\u2019s vote thus looks perilous. There is every likelihood that the runoff will again set the neoliberal (and increasingly conservative-hued<\/a>) Macron against a candidate of the hard or far right. Logically enough, fear is spreading in left-wing circles, which by current polling seem hard-pressed to mount a strong challenge in April\u2019s contest.<\/p>\n

One expression of this fear is the plea for unity among the various left-wing candidates, none of whom currently polls much above 10 percent. While Jean-Luc M\u00e9lenchon generally stands out as the top-ranked left-wing candidate, there are a slew of alternatives, from the more liberal (such as Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo<\/a>, of the Socialist Party, and the Green<\/a> Yannick Jadot) as well as the French Communist Party\u2019s<\/a> (PCF) Fabien Roussel, former Socialist minister Arnaud Montebourg, and three Trotskyist candidates (Philippe Poutou, Nathalie Arnaud, and Anasse Kazib). Fran\u00e7ois Hollande\u2019s former justice minister Christiane Taubira also looks increasingly likely to throw her hat into the ring.<\/p>\n

Faced with such fragmentation \u2014 with at least eight candidates dividing barely 25 percent of the national vote \u2014 finding a joint candidate may sound like a plausible solution. With just three months before France heads to the polls, surely something must be done to bring together the divided family of the Left? On this account, the main obstacle to progress is various rival candidates’ petty defense of their own importance.<\/p>\n

But the proposals for unity, as currently formulated, not only look unworkable (especially given the reticence of several major runners to take part) but in many ways promise to deepen the Left\u2019s woes \u2014 not saving its blushes but rather guaranteeing that it will have no impact on the 2022 contest. The causes of these divisions run much deeper than candidates\u2019 egos, owing as they do to a decades-long separation between the neoliberalized left and the working class. Calls for a \u201cleft-wing primary\u201d cobbling together the existing small parties\u2019 remaining activist core are hardly a recipe for reversing this process.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

Common Ground?<\/h2>\n \n

The instrument generally expected to achieve this unity on the left is the online platform primairepopulaire.fr<\/a> \u2014 a small organization built by a group of activists, with a leadership on a professionalized NGO model. Reflecting the appeal of calls for a primary among some liberal-left circles, it has collected nearly 300,000 signatures backing its approach.<\/p>\n

Its plan had seemed to gain traction last month, thanks to unexpected support from Paris mayor Hidalgo. Candidate for the once-mighty Socialist Party (from the 1970s to the 2010s one of France\u2019s two dominant forces), her flopped campaign launch and sub-five-percent polling numbers soon made her into a partisan of the primary call. Yet, this week, she announced she wouldn\u2019t stand unless the Greens\u2019 Jadot did so, too \u2014 admitting that this was off the table “for the moment<\/a>.” With both the Green and Socialist candidates backing out for now, on Friday center-left figures exasperated by the lack of progress launched a hunger strike<\/a> to demand that a joint candidate be found.<\/p>\n

Primairepopulaire.fr does at least have a procedure in mind if the candidates agree to take part. First, there is to be a preselection of sponsored candidates, with a list to be announced on January 15. Then, a vote on January 27 to 30 will select a candidate via \u201cmajority judgement\u201d (i.e., whoever secures the highest median score among primary voters).<\/p>\n

This plan also sets out at least some notion of overcoming political differences on the Left \u2014 if not a very convincing one. The idea is that the winner of the primary will undertake to promote the spirit of \u201cle Socle Commun\u201d (a document apparently establishing \u201cthe Common Ground\u201d of the Left, as determined by the platform\u2019s organizers) and thus “rally together” the array of left-wing and progressive forces.<\/p>\n

With at least eight candidates dividing barely 25 percent of the vote between them, the idea of a common candidate sounds plausible.<\/q><\/p>\n

With this last point, we touch on the fundamental problem. Not only would the eventual winner only have to commit to a little-binding call to \u201cpromote the spirit of the Common Ground,\u201d but this \u201cCommon Ground\u201d is itself highly vague. Apart from a few measures (socializing the debts of farmers who switch to organic, the rejection of free trade treaties that defy the Paris climate agreements, gender parity on company boards, and the abandonment of unemployment insurance reforms), no issue is addressed in precise terms.<\/p>\n

Instead, the Common Ground proposes unspecific calls for a \u201csolidarity income from age 18\u201d and \u201cincreasing health professionals\u2019 incomes\u201d. Most important, it speaks of \u201csome form of reduction of working hours (differing according to candidates: the four-day or 32-hour week, more paid vacations, or retirement at 60).\u201d Thus, while Macron has waged a major offensive against pensions \u2014 prompting a major social revolt that saw this plan suspended at the beginning of the pandemic \u2014 this question appears only in parenthesis, as one of so many possible ideas.<\/p>\n

In reality, even this minimal basis is in dispute: While M\u00e9lenchon\u2019s France Insoumise<\/a> (LFI) backs full pensions from age sixty, Hidalgo wants to \u201cprotect\u201d retirement at age sixty-two, i.e., at a level that right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy introduced only a decade ago. Meanwhile, the Greens\u2019 program does not speak of returning to full retirement at age sixty for all, but only of the possibility of it for those doing especially arduous jobs.<\/p>\n

Yet more striking is the silence on two other fundamental questions. The first is the European Union, an essential factor in the implementation of any major policy. But the word \u201cEurope\u201d does not appear in the document \u2014 still less so the question of the existing European institutions or treaties. This is no accident: the Left has been split on this issue since the referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty in 2005.<\/p>\n

The second question is racism or Islamophobia, which this Common Ground does not even mention, even though it is the main vector of the cultural wars waged by the bourgeois bloc<\/a> (in its liberal, conservative, and fascist variants). This is hardly insignificant: We already saw the Socialist Party and its candidate refuse to participate in the November 2019 demonstration against Islamophobia after an armed attack on a mosque, while repeatedly attacking \u201cJean-Luc M\u00e9lenchon\u2019s ambiguities\u201d over \u201cIslamism\u201d because of his defense of Muslims and participation in this same march. Hidalgo, Roussel, and Jadot each participated in a police unions\u2019 demonstration in front of the National Assembly with far-right slogans calling for the submission of the judicial system to the police, whereas M\u00e9lenchon and the far-left candidates denounced this initiative.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

The Soft Left\u2019s Record<\/h2>\n \n

So, it would appear that the \u201cCommon Ground\u201d will not provide for an even basic unity of purpose. But any chance of this intra-left vote choosing a joint candidate are also put into serious doubt by what already happened in 2017. Back then, in a Socialist Party primary light on programmatic detail, Beno\u00eet Hamon<\/a> won by taking a line critical of the outgoing Hollande presidency. Yet far from then leading a united campaign, he was systematically abused and betrayed by the party\u2019s most prominent figures, many of whom rallied behind Macron\u2019s rival candidacy.<\/p>\n