The left in France may not be much good at winning elections but they are excellent when it comes to forming coalitions. Within twenty-four hours of Emmanuel Macron’s shock announcement on Sunday night of a snap election on June 30, left-wing parties made a declaration of their own. A coalition of communists, socialists, greens and the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) — similar to the one formed for the 2022 parliamentary elections — would fight the election in a coalition called “The Popular Front.”
Prime minister Gabriel Attal described his former party’s decision to ally with LFI as ‘revolting’
The first such “Popular Front” in France was created in 1936 and went on to win that year’s general election. Its leader was Léon Blum, a man who probably wouldn’t be welcomed by some of today’s left in France, given that he was Jewish. The antisemitism of LFI — the party that most alarms France’s Jewish community — has been brushed under the carpet by the socialists, greens and communists in their haste to form a coalition.
Prime minister Gabriel Attal, a socialist before joining Macron’s centrists, described his former party’s decision to ally with LFI as “revolting.”
Jean-Luc Melenchon, the founder of LFI and a friend to Jeremy Corbyn, made the conflict in Gaza the sole focus of his party’s European election campaign. One of its candidates, Rima Hassan, was questioned by police over comments about the Israel-Gaza conflict (she has not been charged and says she has always condemned Hamas’s attack on Israel), and the party itself was accused by the government of courting the Islamist vote.
Melenchon was a satisfied man on Sunday evening, after the LFI took 10 percent of the vote, a three percent increase in their 2019 election score. Describing his voters as “the new France, which has been built up over the last two generations,” he called on them to “rise up” and “make France your own, make it your home.”
Melenchon’s nemesis, Eric Zemmour, said his words were proof that LFI was now the party of “Islamo-Gauchists” and he called on a union of the right to ensure they are kept out of power.
Talks began on Monday between Zemmour’s number two in his Reconquest Party, Marion Marechal, and the National Rally. Marechal — the niece of Marine Le Pen — was a National Rally member of parliament between 2012 and 2017 before quitting politics to launch a private university. She returned to the fray in early 2022, not alongside her aunt but with Zemmour, a decision that Le Pen described as “violent and painful.”
A rapprochement was expected but on Tuesday Marechal posted an angry message on social media. “Just as we were about to finalize an agreement…Jordan Bardella informed me this afternoon of a change of position.”
The reason was Zemmour, considered by Bardella as too radical in his views on immigration and Islam, and therefore not conducive to his strategy of “normalization.”
There was another reason. Marechal wasn’t the only person who Bardella and Le Pen had been talking to. Negotiations were ongoing with Eric Ciotti, the president of the center-right Republicans, and at lunchtime on Tuesday he announced an alliance between the two parties. “We need to put an end to Macronist power,” said Ciotti, who was elected president of the party in December 2022 on a right-wing manifesto.
He said that objective could not be achieved without an alliance with the National Rally, pointing out that, while Bardella won 31 percent of the vote in the European elections, the Republicans managed just 7 percent, despite the fact their candidate, Francois-Xavier Bellamy was considered to have run an excellent campaign.
Ciotti admitted that he has been a fierce critic of Le Pen in the past but he justified his pragmatism by saying the Republicans were “too weak” to survive on their own. As for the National Rally, despite their success in the European elections, the two-round system of the legislatives makes such a triumph much harder, particularly if the left and the center gang up on them in the second round. They therefore need partners.
Ciotti’s declaration provoked a swift and bitter backlash from the party’s Grandees and, according to today’s Le Figaro — the paper of the Republicans — they are “on the brink of implosion.” It is a party torn between two factions: those who cleave to the center ground and those who believe the only way to survive is move to the right.
Many senior figures have demanded Ciotti resign and others have muttered about leaving the party. An emergency meeting will take place this afternoon. Ciotti, however, will be encouraged by the results of two polls. One, conducted by a polling company, found that exactly half of right-leaning voters approved of an alliance between the Republicans and the National Rally. The other, run online by Le Figaro, asked if readers were favorable to a coalition and of the 257,000 who had replied by Wednesday morning, 54 percent said they were.
What seems to trouble many Republican members is the thought of allying with a party led by a Le Pen. But they should ask themselves what is the alternative? Macron’s Renaissance Party is a busted flush and the left has formed a strong coalition. If Republicans think a Le Pen government would be indecent, just wait and see what one run by a mix of communists, radical greens, Hamas apologists and socialist chancers would look like.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.