A sea of yellow and red flags, passionate supporters and, above all, a taste of victory: At Raphaël Glucksmann's headquarters at the cultural center La Bellevilloise in Paris, the election evening got off to a good start on Sunday, June 9. It was 8 pm when the TV screens displayed the first estimates for the Parti Socialiste-Place Publique (PS-PP, socialist) campaign. Glucksmann and the other candidates on his list had obtained 13.8% of the vote, nipping at the heels of President Emmanuel Macron's candidate, Valérie Hayer.
"We're at a level nobody expected," said Glucksmann, who lamented that the far right obtained an aggregate 40% of the vote. "We're living at a tipping point," he added. But, he said, the election enables him to open up a "new political space," different from the radical left of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise (LFI). "The line we've defined, we have to stick to it. It's a line on substance and form," he said. The young activists present loudly approved.
The Socialists have reasons to be happy, as they bounced back from the disastrous 2022 presidential election when their candidate Anne Hidalgo won 1.75% of the vote. "There's a glimmer of light, it's a first step that shows there's a possibility of building, and not of conflictualization," said Sébastien Vincini, the head of local Socialist branch. "Yes, it sets the line on the left," said freshly re-elected MEP Nora Mebarek. She said the campaign had been "extremely violent."
"I've never experienced anything like it, even though I come from territory [that votes] far-right," added the former deputy mayor of Arles, in southern France, referring to the LFI, who harshly attacked Glucksmann and the socialists.
The joy was short-lived. It was around 9 pm when French President Emmanuel Macron took the floor to announce the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale. The room erupted. Wearing a light blue suit and white T-shirt, the Socialist mayor of Rouen, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, said he thought the president's decision was motivated by "the terror of the far right" and the "monumental slap in the face" that Macron had just received. "Tonight is the end of Macronism," he said.
Though the left weighs in at around 30% of the electorate on aggregate, based on Sunday's results, it is in a sorry state. Formed during the 2022 parliamentary elections, the left-wing NUPES alliance broke down over the massacres perpetrated on October 7 in Israel and LFI's refusal to describe Hamas as "terrorist." Since then, name-calling has been rife between LFI and the Socialists. At Glucksmann's election night event, the questions kept coming, but no one had an answer. How to return to the campaign trail so fast? What kind of alliance is possible? Many said there was no question of renewing the NUPES agreement, signed when the PS was in an extremely weak position. "There's just been an election, and it's set the scene. Noise and fury doesn't work," said Mayer-Rossignol. Young people chanted "unity, unity, unity."
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