In France, the Far Left Is King
Marine Le Pen lost. That doesn't mean France won.
For weeks, pundits have been speculating that France’s snap legislative election could blow up in President Emmanuel Macron’s face—and boy did it. Only it’s blown up in a way nobody expected. Instead of the much-feared far right victory, the election will probably force the centrist president into an awkward coalition with the left, an exercise likely to leave both sides badly bruised.
Macron had called the snap poll long before he was legally mandated to, following the far right’s surprise win in last month’s European election. Then, Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National Rally had stunned Paris by coming first in France, with 31% of the vote. Macron reacted by dissolving the legislature three years ahead of schedule and calling a snap poll, seemingly to shock French voters into rethinking.
France’s one-of-a-kind two-round legislative election—which whittles down the field between rounds, but can still leave many candidates competing in the final run-off—is hard to forecast. After the far right again topped the first round on June 30, many of Macron’s own centrists felt forced into a tactical alliance with the left to try to block the National Rally, with some centrist candidates who had come in third agreeing to drop out in favor of the left, and some third-place left candidates doing the same reciprocally for the center. The tactic worked, and the result—foreseen by no one—was a legislature with the left as the largest group, the centrists second, and the far right languishing in third place.
Keen-eyed readers will already have noticed an anomaly. By convention, we talk about the French far right, but the left is exempted from adjectival abuse: it’s never the far left, just la gauche: the left. It’s a telling choice: an implicit way of conveying that while all reasonable people agree that the extremists on the right are beyond the pale, the left is still presentable in polite company.
But how presentable is this left bloc that will presumably now get to govern France in coalition with the ever-so-presentable—though obviously past his sell-by-date—centrist president?
Well, as inevitably happens with left-wing movements, there’s a bit of everything in the coalition that campaigned this election as the New Popular Front: from the zombified remnants of the once-powerful, relatively moderate Socialist Party (remember François Hollande?) to a gaggle of environmental groups to what remains of French communism. The biggest party in this space, though, is unquestionably Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) and its ascendancy over this space is clearly down to Mélenchon’s own charismatic leadership. In fact, Mélenchon probably has more say than any single other person over who becomes France’s next prime minister. What kind of leader is he, exactly?
One former advisor, speaking to Politico, described him as “a scale model of a charismatic dictator,” luxuriating over his explosive temper and sporadic excursions into conspiracy theorizing. With political roots in France’s Trotskyist movement, Mélenchon has an undoubted soft spot for dictatorial figures, which has seen him bounce between bouts of softness for Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad. In his own words, he was reduced to tears at a rally for the dictator who forced me out of my own country, Hugo Chávez.
Mélenchon’s party ran on a program that makes Bernie Sanders look like some kind of milquetoast Third Way type. La France Insoumise’s platform calls for a “tax revolution” that translates into much heavier taxes and much, much more intrusive state regulation across the board. Mélenchon fancies himself a moderate because he’s backed off of the proposal he touted back in 2017 for 100% marginal tax rates for incomes above 400,000 euros: the top rate of income tax he proposes now is just 90%. (Lest you worry he’s gone soft, inheritances beyond 12 million euros would still be taxed at 100%.) It takes a particular kind of political mind to look at France’s sclerotic, low-growth, hyper-regulated economy and conclude that the solution is higher taxes and more intrusive regulation.
Mélenchon wants France out of NATO. He wants a vastly reduced EU too, vowing to simply disobey EU law when he judges that to be in France’s national interest. His gut reaction, upon hearing that Putin had annexed Crimea back in 2014, was to justify Russian aggression and declare the problem solved (though he has since corrected course and condemned Russian aggression in an uncharacteristically mealy-mouthed manner).
You can’t, of course, be a proper left-wing lunatic if you’re not at least a little anti-Semitic, and here the war in Gaza has given Mélenchon all the rope he needs to hang himself. His strident support for Palestinian statehood has often been made in terms coded with anti-Semitism, such as the time he accused a French Jewish lawmaker of “camping in Tel Aviv” for going there to express her solidarity with the Jewish victims of the October 7th attack. In fact, Mélenchon has avoided apportioning direct blame to Hamas for those attacks, and invariably deflects questions about the events that started the wars into occasions for attacking Israel. On the topic of recent anti-Semitic attacks against French Jews, Mélenchon minimized the issue, calling anti-Semitism “residual” in France and “absent” from pro-Palestinian rallies. Mélenchon’s visceral support of the Palestinian cause often seems tinged with the kind of anti-Semitic dog-whistling Jews know only too well how to spot, leaving some in the bizarre position of siding with the National Rally as the lesser of two evils. Indeed 92% of French Jews see France Unbowed as furthering an anti-Semitic agenda.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon is, today, the second most powerful person in France. He is, by any reasonable estimation, a far-left extremist. He publicly espouses ideas that, if put into practice, would destroy France’s economy and probably tank the Euro. His comfort around, and admiration for dictators (so long as they are of the left-wing kind) is a matter of record.
So why won’t the press affix the richly deserved “far-” to his sobriquet? The decisions owes something, I suspect, to Mélenchon’s single correct view: his unabashed championing of “créolisation”—the blending away of racial and cultural differences between white French people and French people of color. On this, Mélenchon echoes a consensus elite view for once, in ways that contrast with the most hateful aspects of the xenophobic National Rally. He gets good mileage from this, and he should: he’s right.
But Mélenchon’s forward-looking racial instincts are only a small part of the reason his version of “left” escapes the “far-” qualifier. The decision obviously owes much more to the commentariat’s own left-wing proclivities, and the chattering classes’ difficulty seeing anyone “on their side” as being precisely as objectionable as those on the other. Jean-Luc Mélenchon leads a movement for the kind of brain-dead statism that has ruined plenty of countries in the past, and will ruin France if he’s allowed to determine its future direction. Yet this is the path the French have chosen for their government. God help them.
Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion. He writes about climate policy on his Substack 1% Brighter.
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@Freddie deBoer: From my classical liberal perspective, Persuasion tends to run center-left. I value it because it is one of a few forums with an open-ness and willingness to engage constructively with different perspectives, which is extremely rare these days.
This essay does not exactly equate leftists and fascists, but it would have a fair point if it did. Look at all the topics where their viewpoints currently align: soft on Russian neo-imperialism, soft on anti-Semitism, down on Nato, big on expansive government.... To me, Big Government bullies who want to take away our rights and run everything are all of the same ilk, even though they might differ slightly about which rights they want to take away. Distinguishing between the types is like debating whether to call shit excrement or feces. You don't want to step in it either way.
France is now at the highest govt. spending to GDP ratio in the OECD, at ~56% (China is only at ~35%). So what's your idea of balance: a leftist who argues that it should be 80% or 90%?
Yes, we should call the far left the far left.
Not surprised Melenchon is autocratic himself. It comes with the territory. There is, BTW, a horseshoe vision of politics where fascist and far left idea can almost converge.