The unending fool's game which played out over the summer, following the June 30 and July 7 parliamentary elections, is drawing to a close with the imminent appointment of a new prime minister. No winner has come out of it at this stage, but it has left one loser: The left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance, whose candidate, Lucie Castets, was rejected by President Emmanuel Macron on Monday, August 26.

At the end of a long and courteous hearing at the Elysée, attended by representatives of the parties in the NFP – La France Insoumise (LFI), the Socialists, the Communists, and the Greens – Macron deemed Castets unfit for service on the grounds that "a government based solely on the program and parties proposed by this alliance... would be immediately toppled by all the other groups represented in the Assemblée Nationale." Neither the virulent protests of the left-wing parties, who immediately denounced it as "a denial of democracy," nor LFI's call for "marches for the respect of democracy," coupled with putting forward a motion to impeach the president of the French Republic, produced the desired effect. The retort was a flop.

If politics is first and foremost about power dynamics, the one that the left tried to impose in the wake of the second round of the parliamentary elections, from which it emerged in pole position, proved particularly ineffective.

On July 7, the great loser of the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale was Macron, who, being solely responsible for the disaster he had provoked, found himself particularly ill-equipped to manage the complexity of an incomprehensible Assemblée, while his own bloc heaped scorn upon him. A month and a half later, the president's situation has not substantially improved, but that of the united left has deteriorated significantly.

Strategic differences

The timeline of mistakes made by its leaders sums up the coalition's weaknesses. Boosted by the success of the "republican front" put in place to counter the Rassemblement National (RN, far-right), from the outset the NFP undermined the electoral momentum it had set in motion by failing to quickly agree on a candidate for prime minister.

A fortnight separated LFI founder Jean-Luc Mélenchon's initial forceful push to impose one of his supporters from Socialist leader Olivier Faure's endorsement of Castets, a virtually unknown figure. In that time, all sorts of names, more or less serious options, were bandied about, only to be immediately rejected by one party or another, undermining the coalition's credibility.

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