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While the French far right has been at the center of wall-to-wall coverage since topping the EU elections, it might just be the left that delivers the killer blow to President Emmanuel Macron’s hopes of holding the political center.
Macron may be on the verge of a near total wipe-out in impending parliamentary elections. If polls prove accurate, his coalition’s losses in the National Assembly after July 7 risk being so devastating that he would be a lame duck until 2027 when his term ends.
Just 10 days ago, the French left seemed irremediably torn. Policy disagreements — from nuclear energy to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine — amplified by personal antagonism among its leaders — culminated in vicious mudslinging.
But after Macron’s risky decision to call early elections following the far-right National Rally’s crushing victory in the EU vote, left-wing parties have come together in a swift marriage of convenience.
The country’s four main left-wing forces, the Greens, Socialists, Communists and hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI) movement, sealed an agreement on Thursday with a shared manifesto to run under one banner, the New Popular Front.
Former presidential candidate Mélenchon and social-democratic leader Raphaël Glucksmann endlessly attacked each other during the EU campaign. Now Glucksmann, whose party landed the third-highest vote in the EU election, seems to be heeding counsel to avoid ego-driven divisions in public and has been mostly out of the limelight.
This smoothing over, however long it may last, is very bad news for Macron’s coalition, which is now polling a distant third in terms of voting intentions and could end up going from 250 seats to less than 100 in the 577-seat assembly, according to current projections.
French elections are conducted over two rounds — this one will be held on June 30 and July 7. In most cases, only two candidates make the runoff, which means splitting the vote in the first round can lead to elimination.
Had the left parties decided to run separately, their chances of making the run-off anywhere would’ve been slim. But with single candidates in each district, the left has offered itself a chance to become the National Rally’s strongest and main challenger.
Splitting the left vote has become the presidential coalition’s main strategy heading into a short, intense campaign.
The stakes have never been higher since Macron swooped in to the Elysée in 2017: If those who voted for left-wing candidates in the European election follow their leadership and back the New Popular Front, the pro-Macron coalition would make the runoff in only a few dozen of ridings, with New Popular Front vs. National Rally match-ups nearly everywhere else.
If an opposition party wins an absolute majority, the president will be obliged to appoint a prime minister from the party that won the elections. This would force Macron into a cohabitation government, that could lead to a paralysis in governance for the remainder of his presidential term.
In order to avoid such a debacle, Macron’s allies are focusing their attacks on the left.
“It’s pathetic,” Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti said Saturday about the new alliance, underlining the absurdity of a coalition fielding a Trotskyist former presidential candidate, Philippe Poutou, alongside the former social-democratic President François Hollande.
The legislative elections are made up of 577 separate races, so projecting nationwide results can be tricky, with local issues and each individual candidate’s appeal also playing a role in shaping the result. Some voters may also choose not to follow their party into a new alliance.
New polling shows 25 to 28 percent of likely voters backing the New Popular Front on June 30, against roughly 31 percent for the National Rally, while Macron and his allies remain below the 20 percent threshold. Such a gap could effectively block the president’s coalition from making the runoff in an overwhelming majority of electoral districts.
The presidential camp’s collapse won’t necessarily propel the left to power. “At this stage, [pro-Macron voters] would become the arbiters in a race between the left and the National Rally,” said Jean-Yves Dormagen, a political scientist and head of the Cluster17 polling institute. “The fate of the election will depend on who these voters pick in the run-offs … As things stand now, the left would lose most of its match-ups against the National Rally.”
The Mélenchon bogeyman
Macron’s main hope is that the chunk of moderate voters who backed Glucksmann’s social-democratic candidacy in the European election — nearly 14 percent — would be unwilling to back the New Popular Front which includes more radical forces, mainly Mélenchon’s France Unbowed movement, in its fold.
The president has so far pitted himself as the only reasonable option against the two “extremist” blocs, but attacks are largely centered on the left’s most radical elements — and the figure of Mélenchon himself.
“Mr. Glucksmann ran a really respectable campaign … Can [his voters] support an alliance which by definition, were it to win, would propose Jean-Luc Mélenchon as prime minister?” Macron asked during a press conference on Wednesday.
Mélenchon’s influence over his own movement remains clear. The 72-year-old claimed his leadership of France’s left off the back of a strong showing in the 2022 presidential election. His hold persists: LFI has refused to back five MPs who had been critical of the three-time presidential candidate’s leadership, a move critics described as a “purge.”
Glucksmann, a champion for center-left politics, insisted during the European campaign that his success would mean the end of Mélenchon’s influence over the left.
Now, with Glucksmann finishing first among left-wing candidates in the EU election, Socialists have almost leveled the playing field. Of the 546 candidates who will be representing the new alliance, 229 will be backed by LFI, against 175 for the Socialists, 92 for the Greens and 50 for the Communists.
Glucksmann spent the weeks in the run-up to the EU election lambasting Mélenchon’s “brutality” and divisiveness — but after four days of negotiating, the social-democrat agreed to put the divisions on halt for now.
“At some point, every man and woman must look back at history and know what their duty is,” Glucksmann said Friday, stressing the urgent need to block the far right’s rise while insisting that Mélenchon would not be prime minister were the left-wing alliance to win a majority in the National Assembly.
Mélenchon is also claiming that, for the sake of unity, he is willing to step aside. “I will never be the problem,” he said Sunday. “If you don’t want me to be prime minister, I won’t be.”
Former president Hollande, despite being a staunch critic of LFI, will run under the New Popular Front banner in his home district of Corrèze. “To prevent the far right from coming to power, there comes a time when we have to look beyond our differences,” Hollande said.
But the big question is if all left-wing voters will, like their leaders, back the new alliance, or if some will be reluctant to do so. Polling shows that while over 85 percent of LFI voters will cast their ballots for the New Popular Front, between one third and one sixth of Green and Socialist voters could opt for other options.
