Manoeuvring among French politicians to avoid a left prime minister must be opposed by mass mobilisation from below, if the far right is to be blocked, argues Kevin Ovenden 

A presidential coup against the voters. That is how the radical left and many others in France are rightly characterising efforts by centrist President Emmanuel Macron to recover through parliamentary horse-trading what he lost at the general election. He called the snap election last month after his party suffered a crushing defeat in the European elections, where the far-right National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen came first. 

Lacking a majority in the National Assembly, Macron hoped that he could use the shock of the RN’s victory, which put it on the path to winning the presidency in 2027, to dragoon behind him in a four-week election the majority of France opposed to the far right, while at the same time taking the votes of a divided left. 

The opposite happened. The emergency formation of a bloc of parties of the left meant that after the second, run-off round of the election ten days ago, the new National Assembly is not only more fractured, but it has a weaker centrist bloc. 
 
The New Popular Front (NFP) comprising the radical-left France in Revolt (LFI), the Communist Party, the Greens and the Socialist Party (PS) gained 49 seats to become the largest bloc with 180 out of the 577 total number of deputies. Macron’s bloc fell by 86 to 159. RN and its far-right allies gained 53 seats to 142. The traditional conservative right is down to 39. 

The hung parliament has ushered in a great political crisis which Macron’s gamble, taken without consulting anyone outside his inner circle, was meant to solve. While no one has a majority, it is not true that ‘no one won the election’. That is what Macron and his allies, extending into the mainstream media, have been claiming in order to justify him not appointing a new prime minister tasked with forming a government. 

The left NFP is the biggest bloc and it gained in the election. The far right is the smallest bloc, though it also gained seats. Macron’s bloc lost badly. The left won the election. 

When, two years ago, his own bloc lost its majority but remained the biggest, Macron did not hesitate to appoint a prime minister from his own current. Now he claims there is no clarity from the electorate. But voters were clear. They have punished Macron’s government at an election with the highest turnout for over forty years. 

While it is unclear constitutionally, it has been the practice to appoint a prime minister from the largest bloc in the National Assembly. Instead, Macron, the business lobby and the pro-capitalist centre are manoeuvring, in effect, to negate the election and cobble together either a technocratic government or a new centrist alliance which was not on the ballot paper and for which people didn’t vote. 

The main aim is to peel away from the NPF its most conventional and conservative elements: those in the PS, especially those who are habituated to wheeling and dealing and holding office. The former president Francois Hollande, whose term was so disastrous he didn’t stand for a second in 2017, was returned to parliament under the dividing up of seats between the NPF’s components. 

That was one of the compromises in the formation of the electoral alliance. The alternative would have been no alliance and being faced with the invidious choice of voting for anyone but the fascists in very many more seats than turned out to be the case. 

But such consequences put a premium upon the radical and anti-capitalist left organising independently and also more widely than the narrow party-political contest. 

Contradictory pressures  

The PS leader, Olivier Faure, said on the night of the shock second-round results that his party would consider supporting a prime minister only on the basis of the reforming, emergency programme the NPF stood on together. That includes reversing the recent rise in the pension age, increasing the minimum wage to 1,600 euro a month and reintroducing the wealth tax abolished under Macron. 

These and other measures are very popular in France, beyond the voters of the left. A massive fight against the rise in the pension age from 62 to 64 mobilised millions last year, but was defeated. 

Yet at the same time, it was even on the night of the election no secret that Faure would manoeuvre alongside forces of the centre to try to isolate the (just) largest force in the NFP, France in Revolt, whose most prominent figure, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has been demonised in exactly the same way Jeremy Corbyn has been in Britain. And over similar issues, Palestine, false accusations of anti-Semitism, opposition to Nato and to the Ukraine war. 

After vetoing a proposal to put forward the president of the French overseas territory of Reunion, Huguette Bello, as the NFP’s proposition for prime minister, PS figures have proposed a Macron-friendly politician who has signed an appeal to form a national unity government spanning the centre left and centre right, excluding the ‘twin extremes’ of France in Revolt (LFI) and the National Rally. 

In Italy and Spain over a century ago, this practice of politicians elected for one party and on one programme either switching to another or leading their MPs to back some other figure became known as ‘turnism’ or ‘transformism’. One result in both cases was to strengthen authoritarian anti-democratic forces on the right, including fascism. 

The proposal from PS figures for a Macronite prime minister seems to have been a calculated insult to the left with the aim of trying to blame it for the lack of unity. LFI on Monday suspended talks about proposing a prime minister. It issued a statement insisting that it will not accept some outside candidate from the NFP and that the issue now is the opening of the National Assembly. It will have to elect a new speaker. Without doing so, it cannot proceed in session. So that vote will be a test of all the blocs of deputies. 

More importantly, the LFI communication backed the rallies already called by the CGT union federation, the Attac social-justice organisation and many others in civil society. They are called to demand Macron respects the results of the election and stops claiming that no one won, so he can govern as he pleases. The France in Revolt statement said: 

‘Emmanuel Macron’s coup will not be undone without popular mobilisation. We salute the people who mobilised to the call of youth organisations on 14 July to refuse the coup [there were various protests on Sunday]. We call for massive participation in all initiatives decided by trade union organisations for this Thursday, 18 July.’ 

Initiative and organisation from below 

The logjam and crisis at the top remain unresolved, and are spreading. The governor of the central bank has waded in to warn of the risks of instability. France has a large budget deficit and the European Union Commission during the election campaign put the country on a list of seven facing special measures if budget cuts are not made. Bigger cuts than already scheduled under Macron. 

The governor went on to say that it is a ‘golden rule’ that you do not increase the deficit but look to cut it. It was a political intervention against the NFP and its programme to generate growth by investment and to redistribute to the poor via taxes on the rich. Unusually for France, the NFP’s emergency economic programme was fully costed.  

Leading business figures let it be known during the election campaign they oppose the possibility of a government on the NFP’s programme more than they do the possibility, now not immediate, of one on Le Pen’s RN, which has accommodated more and more to big business the more it has advanced. 

So the political crisis is widening to include the ruling institutions and class interests. That involves all the mainstream political parties. The centre bloc itself is far from unified. There are those who favour allying mainly with the centre left and those who would prefer the centre-right, and all of them are having to contend with the fact that even with both they would still not have a majority. 

Then there is the jockeying for position at the 2027 presidential election when Macron’s term comes to an end. He already looks like a broken president, with his grand schemes for European reform of seven years ago in the dust. Leading figures from the three components of the Macron bloc are looking to establish some distance as they seek to burnish their own credentials. The fact that he didn’t inform them before calling a surprise election has added to the fractiousness, as it did when Rishi Sunak did the same thing to the British Tories. 

The unanticipated consequence of Macron’s decision was to spur hundreds of thousands of people across France into left electoral activity, demonstrations and protests as the real prospect of a fascist, the RN’s Jordan Bardella, becoming prime minister in a matter of weeks jolted people. Some 800,000 people demonstrated the weekend after the election was called. 

Tens of thousands joined the NFP’s campaign, which itself was the result of pressure for unity from below as much as it was of emergency negotiations between parties to foil Macron’s plan. That plan dangerously involved using the far right as a scarecrow rather than confronting them. That is what he did in 2017 and 2022. The result has been the continued rise of the RN, with the left and mass good sense providing a barrier, not the mainstream politicians. 

Now, in response to Macron behaving as if he had not lost the election, and to some PS figures behaving as if they owe nothing to the left, its voters and mass anti-fascist good sense, it is again a mass and militant intervention from below that holds out the prospect of breaking the logjam and pushing back the far right which is waiting in the wings. 

 
The call for mobilisations on Thursday to demand a prime minister from the left agreed by the NFP and for the implementation of the emergency recovery programme can be a prelude to more mass action. Not just with demands aimed at the top but also looking to implement change from below: from fighting racism to battling over wages, housing and jobs. 

A second encouraging sign in recent days has been growing calls to bring together supporters of the Popular Front with others in local Assemblies or Action Committees to confront Macron’s antics and demand the leaders of all the Popular Front parties hold firm to the programme on which they were elected. That and to organise initiatives and solidarity locally. We must hope that these take off. 

For one thing they could be central to is drawing together, in a much more systematic and organised way, the opposition to fascism and to racism, which sprung to life in the election campaign. That was despite the thirty-year efforts of the fascists to detoxify their image, a campaign that has been successful with the traditional right and many voters. 

The frightening prospect of a fascist prime minister produced a semi-spontaneous surge of opposition in France over the last five weeks. It forced the leaders of the centre-left into a tactical alliance with the radical left, whom they have spent eighteen months denouncing. 
 
That Popular Front was able to maximise the vote and results against Le Pen but also against Macron. Many of his deputies owe their positions to the 70% of left voters who backed them in the second round where they were in the run-off against the far right. The votes the other way were only 50%, and under where the candidate was of LFI. 

The electoral weapon can go only so far. Now Macron is using the weapon of his executive power and of the establishment to set aside the election results. In confronting that, and pushing back the far right, the left and working-class movement will have to turn to the methods of mass, collective struggle, and a refusal to collapse behind the failing centre. If that happened, it would be a huge gift to Le Pen.