The posters strung across the street in Montreuil, east of Paris, were still fluttering in the breeze days after the stage, the microphones and the politicians at the launch of France’s newest political force had gone.
Here, out of the smouldering ashes of the country’s bickering left, a coalition had risen to take on the far right.
The Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front; NFP) is a tetchy alliance of Socialists (PS), Greens (EELV), Communists (PCF), hard left Insoumises (Unbowed; LFI), and other red-banner candidates that polls suggest is the country’s best – if not only – hope of staving off a Rassemblement National (National Rally; RN) majority government in the final round of legislative voting in two weeks.
For France’s Socialists, allying with LFI after its outspoken leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s insults and attacks on the man who led their European campaign, Raphaël Glucksmann, has been a bitter pill to swallow. But swallow it they must, Glucksmann says, if they are to win what he calls “the mother of all battles”.
“It’s complicated … I’m not going to tell you it’s a marriage of love,” he said of the left’s new coalition.
The coalition has agreed to divvy up constituencies to ensure no leftwing candidate stands in opposition to another. But its launch in Montreuil last Monday evening was tense, coming after the shock announcement that five LFI MPs had been deselected, including the town’s outgoing MP Alexis Corbière, after criticising Mélenchon. Corbière and his partner, Raquel Garrido, LFI MP in the neighbouring Seine-Saint-Denis constituency, who was also dropped, are now standing as independent NFP candidates.
Establishing a programme for the hastily created NFP hydra, most of whose heads loathe each other, has involved even more pill swallowing and compromise.
What it has come up with is a manifesto to increase the minimum wage; freeze the price of essential goods and energy; abolish the pension age rise to 64, reducing it back down to 60; and tax rises on income, property, wealth and inheritance. It has denied opponents’ claims that this will cost between €100-200bn, but has yet to produce its own figure.
Émeric Bréhier, the director of the Observatory of Political Life at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation thinktank, said the left had been forced to rise above considerable political differences by the prospect of an RN majority in the 577-seat Assemblée Nationale.
“Separately they risked losing and letting the RN and Emmanuel Macron’s party through; by joining forces nationally the aim is to get as many [NFP] candidates as possible into the second round,” Bréhier said.
“The RN hasn’t put a foot wrong in this campaign … it has gained credibility and made people think it’s another normal party. It is saying things people want to hear. To fight it, the left has had to cooperate and compromise to form an alternative political force,” he said.
Macron, who called the snap election, has presented his centrist alliance as the only political alternative to Marine Le Pen and the RN’s president, Jordan Bardella. Polls suggest otherwise. A poll for Les Echos by Opinionway on Saturday suggested the RN was still well ahead with 35% of intentions to vote in the first round, followed by 28% for the NFP and 22% for Macron’s coalition. Those questioned said their priorities were the cost of living, immigration and social protections.
Bréhier said the predicted high turnout and a lower number of candidates this time could lead to more “triangulars”: the unusual situation where three candidates qualify for the second-round vote instead of two. In the past, when two parties faced the far right, one would often withdraw to avoid splitting the vote.
So far, the PS and LFI have said they will advise voters to support whoever will keep out the RN after the first round vote next Sunday.
But while in previous elections, voters of all stripes have tended to vote against the far right, this time may be different. For many in France, Mélenchon’s radical left is as distasteful as Le Pen’s far right.
Last week, Kylian Mbappé, captain of the France men’s football team, warned voters to shun “les extremes”, a comment interpreted by some as criticism of the radical left LFI as well as the far right. Serge Klarsfeld, the activist and Nazi hunter famous for documenting the Holocaust, stated he would vote for the far right if faced with a choice between RN and LFI, while the French Jewish philosopher and member of the Académie Française Alain Finkielkraut has said he will do the same. The philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy has opted for the neither right nor left stance.
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Frédéric Sawicki, professor of political science at the Sorbonne, rejects the “both extremes” equivalence and sought to reassure moderate leftwing voters balking at supporting an LFI candidate by suggesting other coalition members would neutralise the radical left’s more extreme elements.
“There’s a big difference between the RN and the LFI, which is now in a coalition whose programme is democratic. In any case, there is no guarantee that within the coalition the LFI will win the most seats, which means it will have to work with socialists and others [in parliament],” he said.
“The real danger is an RN government so the hope is that voters will vote, not abstain in the second round, and will not hesitate between an NFP and RN candidate.”
In Montreuil town hall, mayor Patrice Bessac, of the French Communist party, said an RN government would shake everyone in a town with a large migrant population of more than 60 nationalities and be a wider threat to French diversity and social cohesion.
“People here are afraid. They know the far right’s first target will be the immigrant population and working-class areas like ours,” Bessac said.
“The danger from the far right means the left must put disagreements aside and campaign together. The only thing that matters is that we propose a new path for the country that is not the RN.”
Glucksmann, who led the PS’s relatively successful European campaign – it came third narrowly behind Macron’s party – said he understood the reluctance of his “social democrat, ecologist and pro-European” supporters to vote for an LFI candidate but that unity was the only way to avoid a “triumph of the worst”.
In a Le Monde op-ed he wrote: “We must prevent France from sinking into the abyss in a few days’ time. This is the mother of all battles, the battle that makes all the others possible. There is little time left, very little time, and history is watching us.”