Popular Front paves way for far right

The surprise defeat of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) of Le Pen/Bardella and the victory of the New Popular Front (NFP) in the second round of the French legislative elections on 7 July were greeted with jubilation on the left in France and abroad. In truth, this was a pyrrhic victory. The result confirms the explosive rise of the RN against most other parties in France that claim to represent a “republican front” against the far right.

The NFP, named in honour of the 1936 Popular Front government, is an unholy alliance that includes the Socialist Party (PS) of former president François Hollande, the French Communist Party (PCF), the Greens and the left-populist La France Insoumise (France Unbowed — LFI) of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Even the Trotskyist-derived Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste-L’Anticapitaliste (NPA-A) ran a candidate on the NFP ticket.

The attitude towards such trans-class alliances is a decisive test for Trotskyists. As Trotsky insisted again and again in the 1930s, supporting the popular front is not a tactic but a crime that paralyses the working class by tying it to the bourgeoisie. However, except for our small section, the Ligue trotskyste de France (LTF), the entire far left failed this decisive test and supported the NFP in one way or another.

We print below an abridged translation of the presentation given by our comrade Alexis Henri at a public meeting of the LTF on 11 July. The full text is published in Le Bolchévik no 236 (August 2024).

This meeting is taking place at a crucial moment in this country’s history. We stand before a pile of ruins, with the far right taking another giant step towards power. Yet in its 8 July editorial, the NPA-R (NPA-Revolutionaries) proclaimed “a little moment of happiness”. On Sunday night, Révolution Permanente (RP, affiliated with the Trotskyist Fraction) rushed to declare that “we can only rejoice at the heavy setback for the party of Le Pen and Bardella”. Rejoice at a “heavy setback”, really? RP thus confirms that it was hoping for a popular front victory. In reality, the second round confirms the trend of previous elections, even if superficially the trajectory has been slightly slowed by the republican front. The racist reactionaries of the RN have increased their number of deputies by over 60 per cent in the space of two years: they went from eight deputies in 2017 to 89 in 2022 and 143 today. Funny kind of setback, well, not funny at all.

And if we look at the number of votes cast, the RN’s success is even clearer. In the second round, it received ten million votes, ie three million more than either the popular front or the Macronists. It won 37 per cent of the votes cast, which is more than in the European elections and more than on the first round, compared to 26 per cent for the popular front and the same for the Macronists. The fact that the far-right bloc came third in terms of seats instead of first is due solely to the undemocratic nature of the French electoral system based on obtaining a majority over two rounds.

In the very short term, the republican front will just strengthen the RN’s claim to be the only real opposition to Macron; the only supposedly truly anti-system party, with all the others allied against it; the only party that hasn’t been tried yet and won’t betray you. If the workers movement doesn’t get its act together, fight to unite workers against the anti-Muslim campaign, confront the bourgeoisie and force it to retreat, there’s a growing risk that power will fall into the hands of the RN very soon, perhaps as early as next year. It is the fact that the far left has refused to oppose the republican front, with the one and only exception being ourselves, that constitutes a “heavy setback” — but for the working class, which will end up chained to false hopes that the popular front will implement at least some of its promises.

The only way to confound this catastrophic prediction is for the nominally Marxist left to conduct an urgent and uncompromising assessment of its complete failure in these elections. By supporting the popular front, even partially, it has not contributed to building a new leadership but rather hindered this task and helped to paralyse the working class, demoralise it, and ultimately push some of it into the arms of the RN.

Thanks to the republican front, the electoral results mask the political collapse of the liberal centre represented by Macron.[…] As this morning’s editorial in L’Humanité put it, “the mobilisation around the New Popular Front (NFP) has saved the Macronists from the shipwreck that their leaders’ inconsistency promised.[...] it is once again the left which has preserved honour and saved the Republic.” Macronism was a caricature of the liberal triumphalism of the US-dominated post-Soviet order. In a country like France, the decline of the US order has led to an even steeper decline as the Americans increasingly squeeze their imperialist allies, notably through sanctions against Russia and the imposition of American shale gas. This is the material context, of which the collapse of Macronist liberalism is but a pale reflection in the parliamentary sphere.

By all appearances, we’re heading towards an explicit or implicit coalition (in the form of a “technocratic government”) between the Macronists and the popular front, excluding all or part of the Mélenchonists. We had warned against this in our leaflet calling for abstention in the second round, including by raising the Italian experience where a national unity government was the immediate antechamber to Meloni’s far-right government. The mobilisation of the left and, criminally, the far left, for the republican front will only end up prolonging the agony of the Macronist liberal order while dealing a huge blow to the morale of workers and the oppressed, making the job of RN leaders Le Pen and Bardella much easier when they come to power.

That said, even if the popular front had won an absolute majority, it would have made no difference to the country’s downward spiral. To implement even its minimal reforms, the popular front would have had to launch a merciless confrontation with the French bourgeoisie, which is impelled by its own decline to plunge the masses into increasing misery. It’s obvious that such a confrontation would have been rejected not only by Hollande and Marine Tondelier, leader of the Greens, but also by the PCF and LFI. This didn’t stop the NPA-R and RP from calling for a vote for them, even as the PCF’s Fabien Roussel was announcing on TV that he was ready to govern with the Macronists in the name of republican unity against the RN.

A section of leading members on the right wing of his own party have started to desert the republican Mélenchon (Ruffin had already left in the middle of the election campaign, Clémentine Autain followed him on election night), and he finds himself isolated from the bulk of the popular front, which has already started working behind the scenes to seek a lash-up with the Macronists. But Mélenchon himself remains completely torn between his allegiance to the French republican creed, his own calls for a republican front that extends to the conservative Les Républicains (LR) party, and the sympathy he has actively generated through a few kind words in the quartiers (immigrant and minority neighbourhoods) and in the pro-Palestinian movement. That’s why even the election of a large number of committed Mélenchonists with stronger backbones than opportunists like Ruffin or Clémentine Autain would have changed nothing.

The task of the far left was not to act as a crutch for this left wing of the popular front, as it did, but to begin building an anti-RN working-class pole that is clearly counterposed to the popular front, and in particular to lead workers in breaking from its Mélenchonist left-wing component. This is what we put forward throughout the campaign, addressing the far left in particular.[…]

Now it is the working class and minorities who will pay dearly, not only for the far left’s refusal to take up our calls, but for its open betrayal. Who’s going to believe these people who approached the first round of the elections pretending to be an alternative to the popular front, then called for a vote for it? Or, in the case of LO, said people shouldn’t be ashamed of doing so, and who, once the damage was done, went on to make bombastic proclamations of anti-popular-front radicalism?

We take no pleasure in the discrediting of these organisations, because their capitulation to the republican front has made it more difficult to crystallise a working-class opposition to the popular front. All they have achieved so far is to strengthen the LFI’s hegemony over the workers movement. This will only increase as the popular front fractures between the LFI’s Mélenchonists, who are being excluded from the republican arc, and the others who have rallied to the Macronists.

We may be isolated at present, but we’re confident that the correctness of our programme will soon start to become apparent to growing layers of the vanguard. Left-wing organisations will be shaken by crises because some of their members will demand an accounting from their leaders for the disastrous line they took. These crises must be used to advance a process of splits and fusions around a revolutionary programme, with the perspective of reforging the Fourth International.

Election results

One lesson of the elections that has been ignored by the left is that growing sectors of the bourgeoisie are coming to terms with the idea of placing the RN in power. Hence the crisis in the LR, even if its number of seats has not changed because the left saved the day with its republican front. LR president Eric Ciotti’s move to ally with the RN is not just a personal anecdote; it reflects the shift to the right of conservative sections of the bourgeoisie.[…]

Le Monde can make all the hypocritical, politically correct speeches it wants, but the bourgeoisie and affluent petty bourgeoisie, as well as pensioners (in other words, the mass base of Macron voters) are reassured that Le Pen’s demagoguery a few years ago about the European Union, or again last year over pensions, was just another form of the lies spewed by the bourgeoisie to advance its own class interests against workers and minorities.

Through constant propaganda from the government and the capitalist press that immigrants are criminals and that “we no longer feel at home”, relayed on the left through national unity against terrorism and defence of republican secularism against Muslims, the Macronists worked for years to adopt and legitimise the central themes of the RN’s propaganda in order to divide the working class. They crossed a new threshold by demonising Mélenchon while integrating the RN into the “republican arc” over Gaza, under the pretext of the so-called “fight against anti-Semitism”; and all this with the barely embarrassed assent of the PS and PCF. It is all these liberal, “progressive” governments à la Macron or Hollande that have paved the way for Le Pen.

The Meloni experience has been reassuring for the French bourgeoisie, and also in another respect: Meloni continues to open the borders to the extent that the bourgeoisie needs immigrant workers; they simply have even fewer rights than before and are therefore even more exploitable and at the mercy of the bosses, which further divides and weakens the working class. It’s only a matter of time before the French bourgeoisie puts the RN in power.[…]

Why voting for the NFP will not stop the RN

Sooner or later the next republican front government, regardless of its exact composition, will fall, and the RN, as the only party that won’t have been compromised, will emerge considerably stronger. Depending on the type of election, it will then win either the prime ministership with an absolute majority or the presidency directly. Either way, the NFP, with its republican front, will have paved the way for the RN, exactly as we warned.[…]

It is true that without a republican front, the RN might well have won an absolute majority, and in fact might have done so had the front that was formed not been sufficiently solid. So what would workers have gained if the workers movement had refused to support the republican front? For workers to break with their leadership, it’s necessary for a politically credible alternative to come forward, showing concretely that there is a road outside of the popular front. If this had been the case, a certain proportion of workers would not have felt tied to the traitors who are going to govern us today, and this would have laid the objective foundations for building an anti-RN working-class pole opposed to the popular front.

The working class would have been in a much better position to defend itself than it is today, when workers’ own leaders, for whom they voted (when they didn’t vote for the openly anti-working-class and racist far right), are preparing to bring to power the very government that is going to carry out attacks against them. The unions, which one might have imagined would stand up and mobilise workers in the event of an RN government, will instead now plead for moderation among their rank and file, arguing that it’s necessary to prevent the republican front from falling for fear of the RN coming to power. For the past two years, the LFI as a whole has refused to vote for censure motions against previous governments, arguing that it should not mix its votes with those of the RN.

In the new context, they’re hardly going to take it upon themselves to bring down the government of Gabriel Attal or his next clone as prime minister. Either the reformist workers leaders will bring down the government and speed up the RN’s rise to power, or they will keep it on life support by swallowing every bitter pill Macron dishes out. In other words, they will have to accept attacks that will hugely demoralise the working class, which again will accelerate the RN’s rise to power, as the defeat over pensions has shown. Either the RN wins, or the workers lose: this is the deadly alternative the Mélenchonists and other propagandists for the popular front are trapping us with in the absence of an anti-RN working-class pole.

Since there won’t be a stable government coming out of this election, the six months or a year, or at most three years, that have been “won” will serve only to further disorganise and demoralise the workers vanguard by chaining it to the bourgeoisie through this government it helped install. The longer this government holds out, the worse the damage will be. Just look at what five years of the Hollande government did to the workers movement in this country.

All that the vote for the popular front, and particularly for the LFI, has achieved is to serve as a stepping stone for some of the leaders of these formations to go to the Macronist governmental or parliamentary feeding trough. The bureaucrats and the LFI politicians who broke with Mélenchon will thus compromise themselves even further, while the illusions in the Mélenchonists who have been excluded from this obscene circus will grow stronger. The shift of some Mélenchonists into the camp of the PS and Macron is not a sad, unexpected and unnatural epilogue. Workers need to understand that this is what a populist bourgeois formation like LFI is for: to provide the bourgeoisie with a liberal parliamentary way out, even when such an outcome seems impossible. On the other hand, workers will have more illusions in the LFI rebels who remain with Mélenchon, which will once again paralyse working-class struggle.

On all sides, the working class will be further weakened, and the inevitable coming victory of the RN will take place under far worse conditions for workers and minorities. So the time supposedly gained until the RN’s total victory is time that will ultimately work against us. Let’s face it: we can’t prevent Le Pen from coming to power by parliamentary means. What we need to do is build a working-class opposition to the popular front that is paving the way for her.

A programme against the RN

To stem the rise of the RN, we need a programme of demands and a leadership capable of leading workers in the struggle to wrest them from the bourgeoisie. We devoted a good part of our last leaflet, for the second round of elections, to outlining the main points that such a programme might contain (see “France: Popular Front Paves the Way for Le Pen”, Spartacist [English edition] no 69, August 2024). We sought to show that at every stage, the Mélenchonists will act as a brake on the struggle for these demands, as they did in the fight for pensions, in the defence of quartiers youth after the uprising a year ago, and in the movement for the national liberation of the Palestinians. We can also add to the list the struggle for the national and socialist liberation of the Kanak people, where the Mélenchonists are seeking to save the Matignon and Nouméa colonial agreements so that French imperialism can retain a foothold in the Pacific.[…]

So now RP and the NPA-R are making grand proclamations about the need to struggle. RP introduces its first article commenting on the second round by stating that in the face of the far right, “only the struggles of workers, young people and the quartiers will enable us to win our demands and push back the far right for the long term”. Unfortunately, far from drawing the necessary conclusions in terms of leadership, RP is content with pushing to the left the existing union leadership, which has just spent four weeks campaigning for the popular front. RP concluded its article by stating that “the leaderships of the workers movement, starting with the CGT, must take the lead in this work and stop subordinating themselves to the institutional left”. All of a sudden, the likes of Céline Verzeletti (CGT union leader who formerly led a “union” of prison guards) should see the light? Come off it. Especially since RP endorsed the idea that you could vote for the Mélenchonists and the PCF. By doing so, they prevented left-wing union activists from breaking with the popular front and starting to fight seriously for workers’ demands.

The bankruptcy of the far left in these elections

So again I return to the far left’s capitulation in the second round. Its duty was to explain the need to oppose the popular front before the first round and throughout the week of the election campaign leading up to the second round. Instead, LO and RP ran token campaigns in the first round, with the former explicitly renouncing the idea that its slates could be a factor in the reorganisation of the left, and RP publicly announcing that it was not campaigning against the popular front.

Certainly the NPA-R seems to have been much more consistent in trying to forge an anti-RN working-class bloc that would oppose the popular front. But this only makes their call before the second round to vote LFI-PCF or even, on a case-by-case basis, for other left-wing candidates, more disastrous. For NPA-R activists, it’s a school of cynicism to preach for three weeks that in the words of the NPA-R’s 12 June letter to LO, “What is important for us is to show that we are opposed to the popular front”, and then, when the pressure of the popular front rises, to say essentially that what’s important for the NPA-R is to show that it is not opposed to the popular front, and even that it is calling for a vote to some of its components. The NPA-R even raised the possibility of voting for parties other than the LFI and PCF, in other words Hollande-Faure’s SP and the Greens, on a case-by-case basis.

The same goes for Révolution Permanente. Between the two rounds, it renounced any kind of independence from the left-wing bureaucracies by calling to vote for the LFI and the PCF, thus obstructing the building of a revolutionary opposition to these traitors. We had publicly suspected in our 1 July leaflet that RP would do this, given that its campaign was not oppositional to the popular front. And indeed RP finally stated on 3 July: “local conditions and the context of the second round may justify a critical vote for their candidates”, ie those of the LFI and PCF.

It was easy to refuse to vote for Hollande and his Socialist Party, given the disgust that this party still generates in view of its crimes against the working class when it was in government, such as the El Khomri law, the year-and-a-half state of emergency, the bill stripping French nationality, etc, etc. The real question was opposing the LFI, the left wing of the popular front. That’s where the people’s illusions lie, and it’s these illusions that made the popular front’s relative success possible. Genuine opposition to the popular front requires fighting against Mélenchon’s influence precisely on the issues that have won him political authority among the workers, the very issues that upset the bourgeoisie: his platonic defence of the quartiers and of Palestine. It was necessary to show that this authority had been usurped since the Mélenchonists, because of their republicanism, can do and in fact have done nothing concrete that would violate the bourgeoisie’s red lines. The far left’s refusal to wage this struggle against Mélenchonism can only lead to demoralisation on the one hand, given the absence of an alternative, and to strengthening of the hold of Mélenchonist bourgeois populism on the other.[…]

LO positioned itself a few millimetres to the left of the NPA-R and RP. Unlike RP, they did not state that it would be “justified” to vote for the LFI and PCF but nonetheless said there was no shame in doing so. I quote: “Those who voted for Lutte ouvrière may want to vote for a candidate of the New Popular Front against the RN. If so, they can do this without shame.”

In other words, since you voted LO against the popular front in the first round, it doesn’t matter if you support it in the second. You voted for the workers’ camp in the first round, well, the workers’ camp was dismantled when the polls closed on 30 June, after which you can go ahead and vote for the camp of the bourgeoisie. Because this is precisely how LO explained the nature of the popular front during the campaign, and rightly so. LO knows perfectly well that voting for the NFP means chaining oneself to the bourgeoisie through its political caste. As they said themselves, this means delivering the workers to the bourgeoisie while saying “we warned you”.[…]

This is the exact opposite of the role of a vanguard party, which is to swim against the stream when there is a frenzied campaign to chain workers to the republican front, and therefore to the bourgeoisie, by brandishing the scarecrow of the RN. Here, LO has sunk body and soul into the stinking swamp of the popular front. For LO, this is a really deeply ingrained attitude; they boast of how close they are to the pulse of the workers and how it’s necessary to adapt to their consciousness. Yes, oppressed workers, kept in ignorance and betrayed a hundred times over by their leaders, vote for the reactionaries of the RN or the hypocritical so-called progressives of the popular front. But LO uses this as a pretext to capitulate to the popular front itself. This is an attitude full of cowardice, and also — let’s be blunt — of petty-bourgeois contempt for the working class. LO’s argument amounts to saying that the advanced elements of the class, those who vote LO, were not capable of understanding and following revolutionary directives, or even just clear directives to maintain class independence in the elections.

This is all the more regrettable given that LO voters, although they did not number in the millions, nevertheless numbered over 350,000. It is in particular from these voters that the first cadres of the revolutionary mass workers party that both LO and we ourselves call for, will be drawn. But to achieve this, we must start by calling on precisely these voters to resist above all the sirens of the popular front. Instead of raising their level, LO hid behind the least advanced part of its electorate, leaving them to vote for the popular front if they felt like it.

The coming period can only be seen as a respite if the Marxist left renounces its disastrous policies during this election campaign and starts right away to fight for a working-class pole opposed to the popular front. If it does not do so as a matter of urgency and without further delay, every second of this new popular front will contribute to further defeats and an even greater demoralisation of the working class — in other words, it will speed the RN’s advance towards the presidency. We have little reason to be optimistic about the far left, but we’re not going to remain passive spectators who simply comment from the sidelines on the need for socialist revolution one fine day, as LO is doing. Nor are we going to raise empty slogans such as “Urgent Revolution”, as the NPA-R is doing. The time has come to take stock of the defeats that have taken place since the pensions struggle, the quartiers revolt, the pro-Palestine movement and now this new advance by the RN. The time has come to break with the popular front as a precondition for the working class to fight for its own immediate class interests and advance towards revolution. This is the perspective we propose. Thank you.