The left coalition in France has demonstrated a capacity to compromise, sticking to its fundamental commitments and rejecting Macron’s Machiavellian moves. Fraser McQueen asks, can it holds its ground for the long term?
Over a fortnight after 7th July, when the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) delighted leftists worldwide by unexpectedly winning France’s legislative election, the coalition agreed on their candidate to be named Prime Minister by President Emmanuel Macron. On 23rd July, they endorsed civil servant Lucie Castets. Barely an hour later, Macron dismissed the nomination. Claiming that ‘no-one won’ the election (which he did not argue in 2022, when his own party, like the NFP this year, won a plurality but not a majority), he argued that the incumbent government must remain in place until after the Olympic Games leave Paris on August 11th. He argued that this is necessary to maintain stability, without explaining how announcing a snap election immediately after the far-right National Rally (RN) won a resounding victory in June’s European elections furthered that goal.
Macron’s reaction looks like an intentional snub to the left. If he planned all along to postpone any changes until after the Olympics, why leave it over two weeks to announce? Why wait until immediately after the left announced their candidate?
My reading is that he did not expect the NFP to agree on a candidate. Failing to do so would at best have left them looking unserious, and at worst could have split the coalition. Either outcome would have given Macron a pretext to appoint a Prime Minister closer to his own line. He may now simply be stalling for time, possibly hoping to cobble together a coalition with mainstream right-wingers The Republicans (LR). Such a coalition would hold more seats than the NFP, giving Macron a (highly questionable) case for appointing one of its representatives as Prime Minister.
That Macron has this margin for manoeuvre underlines the difficulties facing the left. Previously, when a French President’s party lost in legislative elections, the winning party’s leader was always named Prime Minister. However, Macron is not constitutionally
obliged to follow suit. Victorious opposition parties of the past won overall majorities, effectively forcing the hands of those Presidents if they wished to avoid a vote of no confidence. Now, the NFP hold only 180 out of 577 seats, leaving them 109 deputies short of a majority. Their coalition already unites almost the entire French left, from the Trotskyist New Anti-Capitalist Party to the social democratic Socialist Party (PS: the party is ‘socialist’ in the way that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party supports the labour movement). If there were 109 sympathetic deputies on hand to ensure a no-confidence motion passed, they would already be in the NFP. Macron is in a position to ignore their victory and name a candidate more aligned with his programme.
Either way it is unclear, with no obvious route to a coalition providing a working majority for any bloc, how anyone will be able to govern. From a left perspective, without a majority, delivering on campaign promises like substantially increasing the national minimum wage, overturning Macron’s hated pension reforms, immediately recognising a Palestinian state, or calling for a ceasefire in Gaza seems impossible. The struggle that awaits became apparent when, although humiliated in the election, Macron’s party voted with LR to keep in place the National Assembly’s incumbent president, Yaël Braun-Pivet.
Can the Coalition Reach Consensus?
The left therefore has multiple fights on its hands even if the NFP remains united. That may also be a challenge. The coalition’s two biggest parties, the PS and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), have clashed in the past. Tensions between the two parties caused the delay in nominating a candidate. Castets was the third name to be floated. First, the PS refused to endorse Huguette Bello, president of the regional council of La Réunion. Subsequently, LFI would not endorse climate diplomat Laurence Tubiana. The Socialists saw Bello as too close to LFI; LFI saw Tubiana as too close to the Socialists.
It is genuinely heartening that they were able to agree on the previously little-known Castets. Castets studied at the prestigious École nationale d’administration, effectively a finishing school for France’s political class, then served as a top financial officer for the city of Paris. She has never held elected office. The words ‘unelected technocrat’ may ring alarm bells, but she has consistently campaigned against defunding public services and by all accounts considers herself left wing. As a compromise candidate for a group without a majority, she seems to satisfy all parties, including those on the left; she at least deserves the benefit of the doubt for the time being.
That cracks appeared in the coalition so quickly is, however, still cause for concern. A similar alliance was formed prior to the 2022 legislative elections only to quickly collapse after the PS refused to endorse LFI’s support for the Palestinian cause. Lessons may have been learned, but only time will tell how the coalition deals with future disagreements between the two parties. The greatest concern is the 2027 presidential election. If agreeing on a prime ministerial candidate took this long, can they find consensus on whom they want to represent them as President?
It is ironic that LFI’s anti-racism has been a sticking point. Alongside their disagreements over the genocide in Palestine, much of the centre-left (including but not limited to the PS)see LFI’s opposition to Islamophobia as a failure to condemn ‘Islamism’ (a term more often used than defined). Yet LFI have hardly been unimpeachable on Islamophobia. Mélenchon has repeatedly voted in favour of legislation against Muslim veiling practices. In 2020, when a Muslim of Chechen descent murdered schoolteacher Samuel Paty, he fulminated that France had a “problem with the Chechen community”, calling for increased surveillance and deportation of Chechen Muslims. He was never a dyed-in-the-wool racist, but embodies a chauvinistic French republican tradition that is at best problematically compatible with anti-racism. That said, his party’s line has shifted in recent years, and is now more unambiguously anti-racist. This probably reflects political calculation rather than conviction, with Mélenchon having realised that he was out of step with his base, but LFI now enjoy the (critical) support of many of my French Muslim friends and colleagues.
When the Socialists were in power from 2012 to 2017, meanwhile, they contributed to (further) mainstreaming racist policy and rhetoric. Surveillance and repression of Muslim communities skyrocketed during the state of emergency declared after the 2015 Paris attacks, many elements of which Macron later had written into permanent counterterrorism law. Reforms they passed weakened workers’ rights; between 2014 and 2016, Macron himself was Socialist Minister for the Economy. Then-President François Hollande is now an NFP deputy. I am glad that the Socialists have agreed with LFI on a prime ministerial candidate, but I remain dubious about their commitment to the NFP’s more radical policy positions.
Lessons for Scottish Anti-Racism
I spoke about these concerns with French friends and colleagues at a recent workshop in Aberdeen exploring Islamophobia in France, Scotland, and England. Two were particularly insightful. The NFP asked Mame-Fatou Niang, a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, to run as a candidate. She declined, concerned that they were using candidates of colour as a ‘colonial army’ to burnish their anti-racist credentials. NFP officials responded at best evasively to her questions regarding their policies on concrete issues of race and racism. The point is not that no-one in the NFP cares about racism; many candidates and activists passionately do. However, if their disagreements with less committed colleagues were simply shelved until after the election, what comes now? Ibrahim Bechrourim who lectures at the City University of New York, feels that the ideological differences within the NFP are too great for a coalition to be durable, but argues that this is not necessarily a problem. A genuinely anti-racist LFI, he thinks, is better placed to militate for an anti-racist left politics than a big-tent coalition including a muzzled LFI.
Mame and Ibrahim’s comments underline the tensions in the NFP. LFI have been pulled toward anti-racist politics by their base. Now they are in a coalition that will seek to drag them back away from those politics. They cannot satisfy both. My sense is that the anti-racism is there to stay. Much of the party is now composed of a younger generation committed to anti-racism in a way that Mélenchon’s generation was not. Equally, Mélenchon himself is nothing if not stubborn. If the PS want him to triangulate on racism, that alone will probably suffice to make him refuse.
There are, then, still questions over how long the NFP can last. I hope that they remain together, with LFI pulling the PS to the left, and can be a force in 2027. Either way, their recent election success raised the question of what lessons it provides for the Scottish left. Tactically, I think the answer is not many: neither Holyrood nor Westminster are amenable to broad-based coalitions. Nor is it clear who would form them: LFI emerged partly as a (presumably unintentional) result of Macron’s scorched-earth tactics, which condemned first the PS and then LR to irrelevance in two consecutive presidential elections. It seemed like voters would be forced to choose between Macron’s reactionary centrism and Marine Le Pen. However, disenfranchised left-wing voters coalesced around Mélenchon and his party. Mélenchon took only 11% of first-round votes in the 2012 Presidential election; by 2022, he took almost 22%, barely over a point behind second-placed Le Pen. Such conditions are absent in Scotland; in Westminster, for all the similarities between Starmer and Macron, it seems fanciful that a left-wing party could emerge from nowhere to seriously trouble him in a first-past-the-post system.
Nonetheless, the NFP’s rhetoric may hint at how to counter the rise of the far right: maybe a greater concern than we realised in Scotland if Reform UK’s recent emergence continues. In Westminster, with the Conservatives obsessed with culture war, Labour chasing them rightwards, and Reform waiting in the wings, it is more pertinent still. Unlike so many mainstream left parties, and centrists like Macron, NFP did not pander to far-right voters. The commitments of its constituent parties notwithstanding, their platform was overwhelmingly left wing. They defeated both the far right and Macron’s centrists despite both having a huge head start. Since the elections, they have continued refusing to normalise the RN, voting tactically to prevent them from reprising leadership positions in the National Assembly won in 2022. The RN’s leaders may gripe about anti-democratic treatment, but they are not a ‘normal’ party and should not be treated like one. Normalising the RN until now has only allowed them further into the mainstream; the NFP are correct to treat the far right with the contempt they deserve. French pundits evoke a recent ‘de-demonisation’ of the RN. The key lesson for the Scottish left to draw from France may be the effectiveness of re-demonisation.
Fraser McQueen is a lecturer in French Studies and Comparative Literature
at the University of Bristol, whose research focuses on Islamophobia and community in contemporary France.