Despite differences, there are deeper common trends, argues Vladimir Unkovski-Korica

The French and British parliamentary elections held in the first week of July were conducted at different political moments, under very dissimilar electoral systems, and produced significantly diverging results.

The French election produced a hung parliament, with the left topping the poll, the centre coming second and the far right third. The British election produced a massive majority for an extremely centrist centre-left party, and an otherwise very fragmented parliament.

There is no denying that these are contrasting results. The French election, ostensibly called to end a political stalemate, failed to do so and will result in immediate crisis. The British election, held early but nevertheless reflecting a regular cycle of elections at least every five years, was a foregone conclusion and promises no immediate crisis.

Nevertheless, I will argue that there were some common themes and trends revealed in both countries, which are worthy of reflection for the left in both countries, and very much by the left internationally. The themes I will cover are not exhaustive, but I will break them down into four sections: the weakening of the centre, the threat of the right, the possibilities for the left, and the need for anti-capitalist politics.

Weakening of the centre

What both countries saw was a visible drop in votes going to the establishment parties, or the ‘extreme centre’ as it’s come to be known in the last decade. This is the result of the global hegemony of neoliberalism, a regressive ideology emphasising market dominance and technocratic governance.

Both in France and Britain, as elsewhere, we’ve seen participation and trust in politics as a whole wane, with mainstream parties difficult to tell apart on account of their weddedness to established neoliberal tropes. That trend has accelerated since the 2008 economic crash, and the resulting decade and a half of austerity, sluggish growth and increasing inequalities.

That is not to mention the wars abroad and racism at home that have gone alongside the rise of neoliberalism on a global scale, as states become more muscular and seek to respond to increased competition by economic, political and increasingly military means. From Iraq and Afghanistan to Palestine and Ukraine, money is always found for warfare, when it’s scant for welfare.

What both the French and British elections showed is that the traditional parties are consequently weaker than ever in terms of holding the loyalties of the electorate. In France, they are all but gone, and the French centrist party, Ensemble, aligned with the embattled French president, Emmanuel Macron, lost its primacy and came second, losing over seventy seats compared with 2022.

The two principal British establishment parties, meanwhile, had the lowest combined vote share since 1918. Even if the Liberal Democrats are included in the establishment tally, those outside the three mainstream political parties gained the highest tally since 1918. The Labour majority, counting almost two thirds of seats, was won by just over a third of the popular vote, on a low turnout, with half a million fewer votes won than in 2019.

The threat from the right

With the governing centre in France and Britain failing to come up with solutions to the serious problems both countries face, it’s very likely that they will face opposition in coming years. The threat of that opposition coming from the right is obvious, and in fact reflects the establishment’s attempt at presenting politics as primarily about the centre vs the right.

In France, the election was in fact called by Macron after the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen topped the European Parliament elections. It was his attempt at positioning his centre party as the main block to the right. That that attempt failed, and that his party was third in the first round of the parliamentary elections, and second in the second round, means that the gamble failed. The far right was foiled by the unexpected rise of the left, and but for that, would likely have won.

In Britain, the Tories were punished for fourteen years of austerity, chaos and culture wars, but a major beneficiary of their fall was the right-wing Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage. If the first-past-the-post system blunted the rise of Reform UK, and they only garnered five seats in Westminster, we should not be complacent. They won more than four million votes, and Farage’s racist campaigning has moved politics rightwards over the years. Labour leader Keir Starmer’s attack on Bangladeshis during the campaign cannot be understood without reference to Farage.

Noticing that the National Rally or Reform UK are less radical than their predecessors should not be understood as a simple ‘centring’ of the right. Their meteoric rise has legitimised reactionary ideas in society, and enabled core groups of fascists to connect with masses of the population more easily. In fact, the National Rally still holds at its core the same people who ran the fascist National Front, which was renamed in 2018, but whose strategy has been to mask themselves as nationalists to renew their legitimacy. An undercover investigation by Al Jazeera as recently as 2019 exposed continuing links between National Rally leaders and neo-fascist groups. It is complacent to think that groups like National Rally getting into government would not be a threat to democracy and the working class.

While Reform UK is a different beast, its programme is not just racist and anti-immigrant, but demands a more repressive state with a militaristic police force, attacks benefits claimants, proposes a new free-speech bill to ‘stop Left-wing bias and politically correct ideology that threatens personal freedom and democracy’, and takes culture wars to schools. There is no doubt that the rise of such a party can feed the rise of fascist layers, who have historically always grown while Labour was in power and failing to deliver. The renewed confidence of the fascist Tommy Robinson in England should be a warning that the right is radicalising and reaching new layers. Ignoring this trend would be folly.

Opportunities for the left

There must therefore be a sense of urgency on the left about the situation in which we find ourselves: the failing centre is feeding a growing right wing, and they in turn radicalise each other in a right-wing direction. If anything, the French situation is a more advanced level of crisis than that in Britain, but the trend has been similar. Put differently, France depicts the direction of Britain in concentrated form.

Nothing, of course, is pre-determined and the importance of political strategy and tactics is critical. Here, what we see in France offers us a glimpse of different possibilities to those offered in the mainstream political sphere. To illustrate this, it’s useful to recall a question posed to Jeremy Corbyn when he won the seat of Islington North as an independent.

He was asked whether the lesson of the evening was that you take Labour to the centre and you win a landslide. Corbyn’s response was that you can win a landslide, but if you have policies that cannot fix the problems facing ordinary people in the country, then what’s the point? Indeed, and that will be a problem for Labour, but the truth is that the French election result shows that a more radical left can in fact also come out on top.

That’s an important lesson. What we can also see in both countries, and what may be an even more important lesson, is that the left did electorally better where it rested on the extra-parliamentary movement. In Britain, candidates of the left, independent or belonging to smaller parties, did well when they stood as an expression of the Palestine solidarity movement and as part of a mass campaign. By contrast, narrower models like the Trade Union and Solidarity Coalition (TUSC) won a derisory 12-13,000 votes nationwide.

In France, the New Popular Front, a coalition of the radical-left France Unbowed, the centre-left Socialists and Greens, the Communist Party, and Trotskyists, developed an insurgent campaign based on a left-reformist programme. The programme was certainly more radical than the Labour Party manifesto, though it was also hardly revolutionary. What was visibly more important is that the campaign grew in size to catapult to first place, after mass, anti-fascist rallies that sought to mobilise those who had not voted in the first round of the election.

The need for anti-capitalism

In both the British and French instances, therefore, despite the difference in scale of the left in electoral terms, there was a common theme of electoral success being built out of real, radical mass movements and mass, active electoral campaigning.

We should, though, introduce a note of caution here: left programmes have been popular and left parties have come out on top (Greece in 2015), joined governing coalitions (Italy in 2006) or come close to government (Corbyn in 2017) in the past few years. None of these stories has ended well. Ultimately, a major problem for the left has been that winning elections was seen as the pinnacle of left-wing strategy. Despite talk of ‘one foot in government, the other foot in the streets’, leftist parties and coalitions have found it impossible to turn office into power.

The problem has been that there has not been clarity about the relative importance of the streets vs elections. It is clear that the French left’s ability not only to deprive the right of a victory in July this year but also to accelerate the crisis of the French political system was due to a successful electoral campaign. Elections can be important, and it is clear that the left in Britain should develop a stronger electoral wing.

But it is equally clear that there are weaknesses on the left in France. The left would have been far stronger against the right had it produced the kind of mass and anti-fascist campaign that it saw in the last few weeks over the last couple of years or decades. The New Popular Front is also a coalition of parties, with some parties prone to making quick deals with the centre, in the belief that that is the route to government and salvation from the right. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The proposal to form local assemblies of the New Popular Front is a good way to continue the momentum built out of the last month of campaigning into other social and political struggles, and act as a counterweight to the ‘governmentalist’ logic of the more moderate sections of the coalition. Similarly, we in Britain should not shy away from discussing electoral vehicles in forthcoming local elections, but our strategy should not be determined by a potential national election five years away. Rather, we should redouble our efforts to stand in solidarity with Palestine, to defend the NHS, to rebuild trade-union power, and to combat Tommy Robinson.

Such a strategic orientation requires clarity of thought and an understanding that, ultimately, the capitalist state cannot be reformed but needs to be overthrown. That is an understanding that comes with deep engagement with anti-capitalist, revolutionary theory and practice spanning back to the nineteenth century. To gain such an understanding is a collective task, forged through collective deliberation and struggle. It is the fruit of being part of a revolutionary party: one committed to building the most mass and militant response to attacks on working people in the here and now, alongside other forces in the labour movement, but also one committed to seeing beyond the current battle and to forging the consciousness needed to break with the capitalist system as a whole.