Fractured French left seals pact to fight snap elections

France’s usually fractured leftwing parties have sealed a pact to run a single list of candidates in snap elections at the end of the month as they seek to block the ascendancy of the far right led by Marine Le Pen. 

“We want to carry out a programme with new social and ecological policies to build an alternative to Emmanuel Macron and combat the racist project of the far right,” they said on Monday night.

That they managed to hash out a preliminary agreement so quickly is a sign of how President Macron’s shock call for snap elections has upended the political landscape in France, sending parties scrambling to find alliances ahead of the two-round vote that starts on June 30.

The president called for the vote immediately after a landslide loss to the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) in European parliament elections at the weekend. He is expected to give a press conference later on Tuesday.

Late on Monday night, a joint statement that outlined the plan was signed by the Socialists, Communists, Greens, the far-left France Unbowed party led by controversial leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and several smaller parties, including that of activist-turned-politician Raphael Glucksmann, who ran a strong campaign for the French left in the EU election.

The parties also echoed calls from labour unions and student groups to mobilise protests against the far right. “We urge people to join the demonstrations,” the statement said.

Le Pen’s RN is in a strong position to scoop up many more seats in the 577-member parliament than the 88 it holds now. The party’s leaders say they are gunning for an outright majority that would allow them to take the prime minister’s office and run the government, which would be a calamity for Macron and an earthquake for France.

The first polling released by Harris Interactive late on Monday predicted the RN would come in first with 235 to 265 seats, short of the 289 needed for an outright majority, while Macron’s centrist alliance would win 125 to 155 MPs, compared with the 249 it holds now. 

A combined leftwing list would win 115 to 145 seats versus the 153 they have now, the poll predicted. The conservative Les Républicains, inheritors of the Gaullist movement that still has a significant group of MPs in the current parliament, are on track together with other, smaller rightwing parties to win 40 to 55, compared with 74 now.

The new leftwing alliance branded their new alliance as the Front Populaire, or Popular Front, named after a short-lived tie-up of Communist and Socialist factions that started in 1936 and led socialist politician Léon Blum to become prime minister. 

But behind the slogans lies a tough reality for the left — they remain divided on geopolitical issues such as Russia’s war against Ukraine and the Israel war with Hamas in Gaza, as well as on their attitudes towards the EU. During the recent campaign for EU parliament, the parties were violently criticising each other on these differences. 

A previous leftwing electoral coalition, dubbed Nupes, was also signed under pressure in the days before the 2022 French legislative elections after Macron had won his second term as president. It glossed over policy differences to win seats but then quickly blew up once the MPs were in parliament and Mélenchon’s then dominant France Unbowed took increasingly radical far-left positions.

Whether a weakened Mélenchon still demands a pivotal role in the new alliance remains to be seen, but his presence is opposed by the other leftwing parties. Former prime minister and Socialist Bernard Cazeneuve said on social media that he opposed any alliance in which Mélenchon’s LFI party was involved.

Glucksmann laid down a red line on Tuesday saying Mélenchon could not be a figurehead of the left, nor could he be pitched to voters as their potential prime minister as in the 2022 campaign. “I have an idea and it will clearly not be Mélenchon,” he said, adding that the popular former union leader Laurent Berger would be a good choice.

In another sign of the simmering tensions on the left, one of Glucksmann’s fellow MEPs, Aurore Lalucq, said on social media after the Popular Front alliance was announced that “it was not an accord, just an opening of discussions that allowed us to set our conditions”.