Popular Front Paves the Way for Le Pen

The surprise defeat of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) 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. Just three years ago, the far right had eight parliamentary deputies, while today they have 143. In fact, if it weren’t for France’s anti-democratic electoral system and the NFP’s frantic efforts to prop up President Emmanuel Macron’s despised and crumbling center, the RN would have obtained a majority.

In every French election it’s the same circus. In the name of fighting the far right, you are told to join forces with whomever stands to your right. This losing strategy has served only to demoralize the working class and increase the appeal of the far right. The NFP, named in honor of the 1936 Popular Front government, is the latest iteration of this. It consists of an unholy alliance scrambled together at the last minute 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 toward 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 paralyzes 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.

Gauche Révolutionnaire, affiliated to the Committee for a Workers’ International; the group soon to be known as the Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire (PCR), affiliated to the Grantite Revolutionary Communist International; and the NPA-A shamelessly beat the drums for Mélenchon and the popular front. As the LTF leaflet printed below explains, the NPA-Révolutionnaires (NPA-R, a split from the former NPA) and Lutte Ouvrière (LO) waged tepid campaigns against the NFP in the first round of the elections only to support its left wing in the second round. At the time the leaflet was written, it was still unclear what stance Révolution Permanente (affiliated with the Trotskyist Fraction) would take. Shortly thereafter, they also caved in and called to vote for LFI and the PCF.

What makes the capitulation of the latter three parties particularly grotesque is the fact that they themselves have written countless articles documenting how the republican front demoralizes the working class and strengthens the right. Despite this, they couldn’t resist soiling themselves with the muck of the NFP. Now that the elections are over, these parties are cynically trying to disappear the fact that they ever voted for the NFP.

We take no joy in our present isolation. It is a reflection of the disastrous state of the French left and the workers movement more broadly. In these difficult circumstances, our French section is determined to intensify the fight to split the working class from left-wing French Republicanism. Only on this basis can we truly defeat the far right and mount an offensive against decrepit French imperialism.

1 JULY—Yesterday’s legislative elections confirmed and amplified the results of the European elections. It is entirely possible that the far-right Rassemblement National will win an absolute majority on Sunday, 7 July. The “left wing” New Popular Front came in second, while Macron’s party collapsed. Macron is now considering forming a government with a “Republican Arc” of the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Greens (including anti-Mélenchon elements of La France Insoumise). This is what happened in Italy, where a national unity government guaranteed that the next elections would be won by its sole adversary, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s Le Pen.

The NFP, including Mélenchon, has already called for its own candidates to stand down in the name of the republican front, in favor of Elisabeth Borne, the architect of the pension reform, or top cop Gérald Darmanin, who thought Le Pen was too soft on immigration. As such, the LFI enables Le Pen’s RN to argue that they are the only opposition to the status quo and Macron. Any call to vote for these NFP traitors further undermines the credibility of the workers movement and can only deepen the crisis of the far left. No vote on the second round!

RN president Jordan Bardella had lost no time in dropping the RN’s demagogic promises about pensions, purchasing power, etc., to focus his entire campaign on just one theme: “uncontrolled immigration.” Everything from the impoverishment of a growing part of the French population, to the decay of public services (especially education) or crime, has been laid at the feet of the Muslim population and the black and Arab quartiers (neighborhoods) being zones of lawlessness. But nevertheless, more than a quarter of the working class probably cast their ballot for the RN, more than voted for the NFP.

How did we get here? It is the result of alternating neoliberal governments of the left and the right inflicting defeat upon defeat on the workers movement, not least in last year’s struggle over pension reform. These governments have worked tirelessly to make work more precarious and to attack pensions. The left itself pushed multiple security campaigns in the name of the “war on terrorism” and defense of “republican secularism” against Muslims (remember the Hollande-Valls SP government!). When the left wasn’t partaking in these racist campaigns it preached anti-racist moral edicts that basically denounced the workers themselves for the rise of racism.

To confront the RN, we need a program based on the interests of the working class that shows how the fight against segregation and oppression of the Muslim minority is in the material interest of the components of the working class that are white and of Christian origin. This is the only way to unite the working class and it is precisely the opposite of the program of the NFP, of all its previous incarnations, and of the trade-union bureaucracy. For all these reasons, the NFP is not a bulwark against the RN.

The Republican Arc Is Crushing Mélenchon, Yet He Clings to It

The republican arc within the NFP itself is in the process of crushing Mélenchon. Whether it’s the PS, PCF or the Greens, for months all components of the NFP have repeated the right wing’s lies accusing the entire LFI of “anti-Semitism,” and Mélenchon of being “an obstacle to the victory” of the NFP. Why? Because Mélenchon, while never abandoning the republican framework, and having done nothing for the quartiers or the Palestinians, crossed the bourgeoisie’s red lines by adamantly denouncing police terror, Islamophobia and the genocide in Gaza. The invectives from the NFP right wing are not benign. They foretell the role that the popular front will play in the coming period, likely without the LFI’s Mélenchonist wing. It will capitulate every step of the way on the key issues of security, the quartiers, Palestine and the war in Ukraine. This is how the NFP, or what remains of it, will continue to pave the way for the RN in the run-up to the 2027 presidential election.

The most conscious workers and the organizations of the far left criticize the LFI’s unity with “friends of the people” like Hollande. But the reality is that Mélenchon’s starting point, just like the latter, is to protect the French imperialist republic, and for Mélenchon this is infinitely more important than the fate of the workers, the quartiers or the Palestinian people. It is for this reason—defense of the liberal republican order—that Mélenchon was able to bring stinking corpses like Hollande back from the dustbin of history. And this is why he calls for support to Macronists and republicans who are in a better position than the LFI against the RN, because he sees the latter as a danger to French imperialism’s international image.

Disgust for the NFP’s snake pit is very real. Despite this, many leftists think that first the RN must be stopped in the elections and that the NFP is the only immediate way to do this. In so doing—despite their intentions—they fuel the RN vote.

How to Organize Struggle Against the RN

So what can be done to stop reaction? We must begin right away to build a proletarian pole that fights to mobilize the working class for its own interests. But that requires a left split with the Mélenchonists. Let’s take defense of the quartiers. Such defense, i.e., the fight against racist oppression and segregation of minorities, is key to unifying the working class as an independent force against the capitalists. Rotting French imperialism is incapable of integrating youth of immigrant descent, who are condemned to misery and segregation in the banlieues (immigrant and minority neighborhoods). To keep the working class divided and weak, the bourgeoisie takes aim above all at the Muslim minority as the enemy within to be destroyed. Using this division, it brings down the living and working conditions of the whole working class.

This is why launching a fight to unite the working class and organize its self-defense against the bourgeoisie requires active defense of the quartiers against the racist security offensive pushed by Fabien Roussel, head of the PCF, as well as Macron and Bardella. It is necessary to mobilize for amnesty for the youth who rose up in revolt last year following the cop killing of Nahel Merzouk, to free those still in prison and erase the convictions from their criminal records. A year ago, to his credit, Mélenchon refused to call for order and denounced the racist cop terror. But then, faced with mass repression, he refused to do anything in defense of the thousands of incarcerated youth! Why? Because in the current context, to defend these youth who attacked symbols of the republic—police stations, town halls, schools—would mean to put republicanism into question.

As for Palestine, the role of the Mélenchonists was to chain the movement to the impotent strategy of appealing to the UN, and to promote a more active intervention by French imperialism independent of the Americans, for the purpose of so-called peacemaking. Mélenchon will never go further than that because Palestinian national liberation vis-à-vis the Zionist state would be a very serious blow to imperialist domination in the region—including to the role played by French imperialism. The weakening of imperialism and the liberation of Palestine are manifestly in the interests of all workers and minorities in France. It is also necessary to demand the withdrawal of French troops from Lebanon, in direct opposition to Mélenchon’s presidential program and that of the NFP.

If Mélenchon is so inconsistent in his anti-imperialist and anti-racist declarations, it’s because he remains a fervent partisan of the “civilizing” role of French imperialism and the “republican secularism” that is entirely directed against the Muslim minority. It is particularly necessary to demand the repeal of the 2004 law banning the veil, as well as the ban on the abaya. We must fight for all the charges against pro-Palestinian activists accused of anti-Semitism and “apology for terrorism” to be dropped.

Pensions? Mélenchon worked to give an aura of combativity to the treacherous union bureaucrats through a certain degree of verbal radicalism (“Blockade everything!”). He always did this in a framework acceptable to the bourgeoisie, and scrupulously respected by the union bureaucrats, characterized by strikes that never seriously affected any branch of the economy and by impotent festive mobilizations. (See “Palestine, quartiers, retraites: LFI paralyse les luttes,” Le Bolchévik No. 234, December 2023.)

No lessons have been drawn by the unions or the far left from these defeats, which contributed enormously to the weakening of the workers movement and the dizzying rise of the RN. The central lesson is this: French imperialism in full decline must attack every gain won by the workers. Winning even the most modest demands of the exploited, be it retirement at 60 or a significant increase in the SMIC [minimum wage], requires breaking the will of the capitalists. But such a perspective is absolutely taboo for the Mélenchonists and the bureaucrats, who consider to the contrary that the rule of the bourgeoisie is a universal law.

The central task today is to build oppositional poles in the unions as the nuclei of a future revolutionary leadership, based on the interests of the working class and workers power. To rebuild the strength of the unions, it is necessary to return to the class-struggle methods that have been disavowed for years by the union bureaucrats, Mélenchonists and all the current leaders of the workers movement in the name of the competitiveness of French capitalism: strike pickets that no one dares cross, strike funds to lessen the financial hardship on strikers, unionization campaigns that integrate temporary and sub-contracted workers around the demands for equal conditions for all, trade-union unification, etc.

Against all the NFP’s components (including the NPA led by Besancenot/Poutou), we must not only oppose NATO but crucially the European Union (EU), the main tool used today by the French imperialists to attack workers at home and plunder the economies of poorer countries in Europe. Workers are fully aware that through the EU their pockets are being picked. The far left’s capitulation to the liberals over the EU contributes to pushing a section of these workers into the arms of Bardella and his sovereignist demagogy. The Ukraine war is about who will pillage and oppress Ukraine, the Russian bourgeoisie or the Western imperialists. Support to the war efforts of NATO and the EU is counterposed to the interests of the proletariat, whether here or in Ukraine. The only favorable outcome for the workers is to fight to transform this reactionary war into a civil war against the Russian oligarchs on one side and the Ukrainian lackeys of imperialism on the other.

The Failure of the Far Left Campaigns

The independent candidacies of the far left were never going to win the elections, but they could have been a promising factor for the future if they had been utilized to unite and focus our efforts toward providing workers a path of struggle against the RN independent from and opposed to the popular front. Beyond the elections, this could have laid the foundations for rearming the workers against reaction in the tumultuous period ahead.

For these reasons, we called on Lutte Ouvrière, the NPA-R and Révolution Permanente to form a workers bloc at the national level and break with the popular front (LTF open letter, 11 June). RP made a minimal effort by proposing “an electoral front of class independence” to the same organizations. The NPA-R made a more substantial effort to come to an agreement with LO. It stopped campaigning for its own candidates in 46 constituencies and, from the start, called for a vote to LO everywhere except in the 29 constituencies where it had campaigns. It proposed a correct axis for a united campaign of opposition to the popular front: “What is important for us is to show that we are opposed to the popular front, because its politics totally conflict with our own. The important thing is to affirm the existence of a communist, revolutionary and internationalist current” (letter to LO, 12 June). LO refused any alliance.

RP ran a candidate in only one constituency in Seine-Saint-Denis, which the popular front was sure to win. Three days before the election, RP finally gave lip service to voting LO (a short sentence at the end of an online article) in the 549 constituencies where LO presented a candidate and RP didn’t. For our part, given that our efforts for a united campaign failed, we called to vote indiscriminately for all three (LTF statement, 19 June) and actively campaigned for them.

LO’s sectarianism sabotaged the possibility of a united campaign of the far left and undermined its own campaign. The result was symbolic, uncoordinated campaigns competing with each other. The campaigns thus relegated themselves to the margins and reaped the electoral result that they had sowed. This irrelevance was even proclaimed in advance by LO, writing in their response to the NPA-R’s proposal that: “We are not in a position to have the slightest influence on the current political situation, whether together or separately. We might as well each conduct our campaigns as we see fit” (letter from LO to the NPA-R, 11 June). This is a declaration of complete political bankruptcy, as if the revolutionary communist program had nothing to offer workers in the here and now.

That said, the real obstacle to a proletarian bloc of these three organizations was that none sought to use the campaign to push forward a break with the LFI, the backbone of the popular front. The RP candidate, Anasse Kazib, undermined his own campaign by explicitly stating on June 19: “We are not here to oppose the popular front, that’s not what motivated our candidacy.” So why run a separate campaign? The only appeal of Kazib’s campaign was precisely that it stood in formal opposition to the popular front.

As for the NPA-R, its 12 June letter to LO was unfortunately far to the left of its campaign on the ground. The NPA-R had no problem denouncing the treachery of former PS prime ministers and presidents such as Hollande, Jospin or Mitterrand. What it couldn’t do was challenge what makes Mélenchon popular among quartiers youth and pro-Palestinian activists. Until it does this, it can’t even begin to chip away at Mélenchon’s political authority. Moreover, the NPA-R’s position of supporting Ukraine in a war that is reactionary on both sides puts it in the same pro-imperialist swamp as the NFP.

At its 22 June campaign meeting in Paris, LO correctly insisted that the NFP is paving the way for the RN. It also correctly criticized the role of the Mélenchonists in rehabilitating left figures from the past, for example calling the LFI specialists in “façade renovations.” But LO obviously could not attack Mélenchon’s strong points, notably on the question of the quartiers which built the LFI’s hegemony in the banlieues throughout the country, since LO’s line on this question is in fact to the right of Mélenchon (see Le Bolchévik No. 235, May 2024). Neither LO nor the NPA-R nor RP is capable of concretely attacking the treacherous role of the Mélenchonists as the central political force, alongside the trade-union bureaucracy, that has paralyzed workers struggles during the entire past period. And as the most left-wing force with the most authority among workers and the oppressed, the LFI will continue to paralyze these struggles.

LO concluded its routinist campaign in a pitiful fashion by explicitly refusing to play a vanguard role against the NFP, declaring that for the second round: “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” (1 July). Clearly LO’s “workers camp” was designed to be dismantled when the polling booths closed after the first round.

The NPA-R’s capitulation was even more explicit:

Comrades of the NPA-R, how can you reconcile this with your campaign statements that “what is important for us is to show that we are opposed to the popular front” or “40 years of the republican front = 40% for the RN”?

As of today, RP has already published two articles on the results of the first round. There is a discreet reference at the bottom of the page in one of them to a 2017 article against the republican front—but they carefully avoid giving any voting instructions whatsoever for today! This in itself is a capitulation to the NFP. We hope RP will reorient, but Kazib’s campaign leaves little room for optimism.

A Program of Struggle Against the RN

This campaign has shown the weakened state and political disorientation of the far left. The workers movement and the oppressed will face very harsh attacks in the immediate future. It is necessary to fundamentally and urgently change course. To start right now to build oppositional poles to provide an alternative leadership to the Mélenchonists and union bureaucrats, we propose the following slogans to far-left activists:

• Expropriate the banks!
  For a planned economy to reindustrialize the country!
• Down with NATO and the EU!
  No military aid to Ukraine!
  Down with French imperialism!
• Palestinian liberation!
  Drop the charges against pro-Palestine militants!
• Defend the quartiers!
  Amnesty for all youth imprisoned after the 2023 revolt!
• Down with the séparatisme and immigration laws!
  Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!
• Down with bans against the veil and the abaya!
• For socialist Kanak independence!
  Freedom for all Kanak militants!