JUSTIN PICAUD/Sipa via AP Images
Following the European Parliament elections and the dissolution of the National Assembly by French President Emmanuel Macron, demonstrators rallied against the far right, June 10, 2024, in Rennes, France.
Last weekend’s European Parliament elections didn’t mark a decisive continental turn to the far right, as my colleague Bob Kuttner noted yesterday, but it did signal a menacing rise in support for extreme nationalist parties in the EU’s two most important nations, Germany and France. With the German economy, historically powered by Russian natural gas, walloped by the gas’s cutoff due to the Ukraine war, the party in power—the Social Democrats—came in a dismal third, trailing not only the Christian Democrats but the not-quite-neo-Nazi AfD.
But even that result pales alongside the one in France, where Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party—something of a great-grandchild to France’s Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis after the Germans overran France in the opening year of World War II—won nearly one-third of the votes in last weekend’s election. As if this weren’t bad enough, French President Emmanuel Macron, whose own centrist party pulled down a meager 15 percent of the vote, promptly decided to dissolve the parliament and hold new elections in the next three weeks, putting his nation at clear risk of having a far-right, pro-Putin parliament by early July. That risk only grew graver today when the leader of the Gaullist center-right establishment’s party said he’d form an electoral bloc with the National Rally, though many of his fellow party members volubly opposed that move.
But that’s not the only bloc-building that has transpired at warp speed in the 36 hours since Macron decided to roll the nation’s dice. The historically fissiparous French left, abruptly facing the prospect of a neofascist government, came together to proclaim that its various parties—the Socialists, the Greens, the Communists, and the far-left Insoumise—would also form an electoral bloc that could well win somewhere between one-third and 40 percent of the vote.
All of which could leave Macron’s party in a micro-middle. By the terms of France’s de Gaulle-devised constitution, Macron will remain president until 2027 regardless of the outcome of the upcoming parliamentary election, and thus in command of the nation’s foreign policy. But if his own party is outpolled by both the right bloc and the left bloc, which now seems a distinct possibility, his party would have to agree to play second fiddle to the left in forming a new government—assuming that it would make that alliance in order to keep Le Pen’s legions from taking power. (Of course, if the right bloc wins more than 50 percent of the seats, it will take power regardless, sharing it grumpily with a president who clearly opposes their Putinistic foreign policy. Snap polls, for whatever they’re worth, show the right winning a plurality, but not a majority.)
The key to the left’s revival was the Lazarus-like resurrection of the Socialists in the EU elections. Led by the charismatic Raphaël Glucksmann, the Socialists—historically, the dominant party of the French left—recovered from a near total eclipse in the most recent presidential election to win 14 percent of the vote, which put it just a hair behind Macron’s party, and well ahead of the other left parties. In recent years, the far-left Insoumise—more or less the Gallic equivalent of U.K.’s Labour when led by Jeremy Corbyn—outpolled the Socialists, but now it’s Glucksmann’s party, whose ideological substance is somewhere between the Joe Biden Democrats and the Bernie Sanders Democrats, that is the left’s biggest fish.
One challenge before the left bloc is choosing a prime minister candidate whom all participating parties can agree upon. (Le Pen, who plans to run for president in 2027, has designated Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old who headed her party’s EU slate, as her PM pick.) Glucksmann had suggested as a possible PM nominee the recent leader of France’s largest union federation, who’d led the fight against Macron’s policy of raising the nation’s retirement age—in other words, someone not primarily associated with any of the left parties. Glucksmann’s suggestion has yet to receive a second, but the logic of choosing someone who fits that left-but-nonpartisan description is sound.
It was the last Popular Front, in which a coalition of majority Socialists and minority Communists governed France in the mid-1930s under the Socialist Léon Blum, that created the French equivalent of the New Deal, setting minimum wages, legalizing unions, and creating the right to compensated vacation time that the French famously enjoy. It came together to block the rise of a viciously authoritarian and antisemitic French right. (Blum, a Jew, was actually physically assaulted a few months before he became prime minister, and during World War II, the Vichy government turned him over to the Nazis, in whose concentration camps he spent the rest of the war.)
The war of the racist nationalist right against the tolerant socialistic left is an old and recurring story in France, peaking during the Dreyfus affair at the turn of the 20th century, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely convicted of treason, again in the years of the Depression and World War II, and now with the anti-immigrant backlash and stagnant working-class economy that has brought Le Pen to the brink of power, and subjected Glucksmann to antisemitic attacks. France seems condemned to fight the same battles over and over and over again.
