For many years now, French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin has gone about popularizing a maxim by German poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) according to which, “Wherein lies the danger, grows also the saving power”.
The dialectic inspiration here owed nothing to chance, for Hölderlin was a friend of Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), the pair being fellow students at a seminary attached to the University of Tübingen.
Otherwise put, the phrase suggests that an awareness of danger can lead to a salutary awakening and reaction. That is precisely what is happening in France today with the unexpected dynamic of a union of the Left and the Greens that has come about with the aim of overturning the parliamentary majority of Emmanuel Macron’s party, and in the process setting up a political ‘cohabitation’ with the re-elected centre-right president.
Credit for the initiative should firstly be given to the radical-left La France insoumise (LFI) party, which embraced the historic responsibility it was given by the presidential election score of its candidate and leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon (who garnered 21.95 % of votes cast). He has for the second time become objectively established as the leader of the camp that stands as the alternative to rightwing reactionary and conservative forces in all their various attires.
Mélenchon and his movement learned from their mistake of the last legislative elections, in 2017, when this opportunity was not grasped, and their go-it-alone performance was transformed into a collective defeat for the Left. At the time, in the presidential election, Mélenchon had obtained a 19.58 % share of votes cast, while his then socialist rival Benoît Hamon, behind who the Greens had rallied, garnered 6.36% of votes cast – which amounts to the same combined share of the vote won this year by Green candidate Yannick Jadot and his socialist rival Anne Hidalgo (6.38% of votes cast, when added together).
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The decision by the LFI to lead its 2022 presidential election campaign under the banner of a “Popular union”, rallying figures from social movements (see this interview, in French, with Aurélie Trouvé, spokeswoman for Attac), already offered the prospect of an opening towards the diversity and plurality of the democratic, social and environmentalist Left. Without being naive about the political calculations that are part of the quest for power, it should be recognised that that openness was confirmed in the non-exclusive negotiations which began immediately after Macron’s re-election.
They are a reflection of the dangers that thrived and expanded during the presidential election campaign. These include not only the threat of the far-right, now stronger in France than ever before (the three rival far-right candidates together garnered 32.28% of votes cast in the first round, well above the 27.85% cast for Macron), but above all the persistent gangrening of public debate by nationalist, racist, identarian and inegalitarian obsessions.
From experience, and as Mediapart has largely documented over the past five years, we know that this re-elected president will be incapable of sending them into retreat, let alone fighting them head-on. Constantly playing with fire, which he then pretends to extinguish, he has not only surrendered ideological terrain to the far-right (of which the introduction of a law to curb ‘Islamist separatism’ was the symbol), but he has offered it the frustrations and anger caused by his policies, while adding a personal haughtiness and conceit to their social violence and accompanying police violence.
The same causes create the same effects. There can be hardly any doubt that, following the accumulated failings of the Left and Right over the past 20 years (following the alarm sounded in 2002 when the far-right first reached a presidential election final round), another five-year term in office for Macron, if unchecked by parliament, will lead the far-right closer to the gates of the Élysée Palace in 2027. The only way of avoiding this is to ensure that the re-elected president is not handed a solitary exercise of power, but that instead, as a result of June’s legislative elections, he is made to share power with a new parliamentary majority that follows a different political course.
From an anti-fascist viewpoint, added to this necessity is an imperative issue for democracy; this year’s presidential election has made the exhaustion of France’s institutional system under the country’s Fifth Republic all the more evident, to the point where constitutionalists have recognised that it no longer fulfils its mission of representing the electorate. An increasing number of citizens feel themselves excluded from the process, unrecognised by it and unconcerned by it.
Re-elected by default thanks in large part to voters who wanted to defeat his second-round far-right rival Marine Le Pen, Macron now finds himself in face of what former socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin described as “a country that is frustrated, divided and disturbed at the dawn of an uncertain, second five-year term”. However, despite a minority vote for him (in the first-round contest between 12 candidates, Macron garnered 27.85% of votes cast, representing 20.07% of registered voters), he is in the position of a poker player walking away with all the winnings. That was already the case in 2017 when he ignored the diversity of the votes he benefitted from in his then similar second-round victory over Marine Le Pen.
If in 2022 that scenario is repeated, namely that his party is handed a parliamentary majority as massive as it has been subservient, sweeping aside any contradiction or counter power, a large proportion of the electorate will once more have the bitter sentiment of suffering a dispossession of democracy. In short, a feeling of having been, variously, ignored, despised and spurned. In recent signs of a degree of panic, the demagogic statements emanating from the Élysée and the opportunistic attempts to win over some from across the political divide will change nothing: a swathe of the French electorate won’t be fooled a second time.
An opinion survey by Ipsos for public broadcasters France TV and Radio France, in which 4,000 registered voters were quizzed, confirmed the weak legitimacy of the presidential election results. It found that 42% of those voting for Macron in the second round said their only reason for doing so was to block the path of the far-right. If one adds to that the number of abstentions (28.01% of registered voters), plus the blank and spoiled votes (6.23%), it is clear that the majority of registered voters do not support the programme of the re-elected president and have no wish to give him a blank cheque.
This is underlined by other results of the IPSOS survey, including that 46% of those questioned said they had a “negative” view of Macron’s re-election (against 34% with a favourable view), while 56% said they hoped he “loses the legislative elections and that there is a [political] ‘cohabitation’ with a government from the opposition” which would prevent him from implementing his programme. Finally, 57% said they wanted to see an alliance of the principal leftwing parties for the legislative elections and the fielding of common candidates.
The perspective of a union of the Left and Greens has roused banshee screams from both the presidential camp and from François Hollande and his allies in the Parti Socialiste. Those who just a few days ago were preaching to the leftwing electorate on why they must vote Macron, despite his record, to block the path of the far-right, now see the greatest danger in a union of the Left and Greens behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
To listen to them, the peril of the far-right has suddenly disappeared and been replaced by a yet more serious one, that of an alignment of the Left with the far-left. It echoes the horrified age-old refrain of the dominating classes faced with popular mobilisations – characterised in France during the 1930s by the notion “Rather Hitler than the Popular Front”. This tiresome line pours scorn on all the social and democratic achievements which, never granted from above, are obtained through the mobilisations of those concerned, rising above the petty quarrels of party politics and inspiring and radicalising electoral programmes.
The painting of Jean-Luc Mélenchon as a leftist bogeyman by so-called socialists like François Hollande, Bernard Cazeneuve, Stéphane Le Foll, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis or Julien Dray – and not forgetting the ineffable Manuel Valls – simply illustrates their panic towards radical change, such is their conversion to the dominant social order.
It goes without saying that their record, marked by failure and opportunism, hardly gives them any moral authority. Perhaps it is the fear of having to face up to that which turns them into intimate enemies of the camp they lay claim to, to the point of maintaining the fantasy of “irreconcilable” movements of the Left. That is a machine for dividing the whole of the Left.
As for coherency, that can be found in the publicly available policy agreements signed by the partners of the New Popular Union (in French, Nouvelle Union Populaire, écologique et sociale). It won’t be found in the bizarre couplings within ‘Macronism’ where, from Jean-Pierre Chevènement to Manuel Valls, and Élisabeth Guigou to François Rebsamen, a cohort of those from the Left who lost their way live happily with a range of conservative and reactionary figures – and also corrupt figures given that the clan surrounding Nicolas Sarkozy are also present, almost resembling figureheads.
What twaddle it is, then, this violent campaign aimed at discrediting the only good and happy news for the side of emancipation, a side that refuses to give up, and which understandably troubles that other little world leaning on its class interests. The truth is that, far from having become an extremist, the LFI leader has simply learnt from the movement – the resistances and struggles – of society itself, to the point of having evolved his position over a number of issues; the environmental and climate emergency, secularity, institutional questions, cultural plurality etc.
To remain lucid about the tactical part of this evolution, which still poses questions – notably on international issues (the relationship with the Putin regime) and democratic practices (the independence of the justice system and the pluralism of the press) – does not prevent one from recognising the concrete advances he has made. These include achieving a greater electoral involvement among young adults in socially modest neighbourhoods, a renewed representation of the working classes, and the emergence of new political faces that mirror a multicultural France.
From that point of view, the socialist that Jean-Luc Mélenchon was for a long time (even serving as a minister under then prime minister Lionel Jospin’s 1997-2002 socialist government of political ‘cohabitation’ with conservative president Jacques Chirac) is, regarding his current strategy of rallying the Left together, profoundly of the same approach as François Mitterrand. Because in the 1970s, when disagreements between the parties of the Left, notably on international affairs, were even sharper than today, Mitterrand did more than keep the wheel steady in the direction of a union of the Left. He also, perhaps above all, anchored this electoral dynamic, which would earn victory in 1981, in the process of participating in numerous struggles and movements which constituted its social foundations, and which shook up his own political reference points and his past experience in government.
Thus today, while signing off the inventory of a party that for too long lost its bearings in the management of state power, to the point of turning its back on its social grassroots, the first secretary of the Parti Socialiste (PS), Olivier Faure, in leading the PS into the leftwing alliance, is being faithful to Mitterrand, founder of the modern PS at the 1971 Epinay Congress.
In his 1973 book La Rose au poing (“The rose in the fist”), Mitterrand wrote: “To reconstruct a great socialist party requires that several conditions are met, and firstly that it regains the confidence of those it has for mission to defend by joining beside them on the ground of struggles. Authenticity cannot be invented, it is something proven in practice. The time when one could be elected by the Left [only] to govern on the Right is over.”
It would be easy to underline just how little the 14 years of Mitterrand’s presidency respected that requirement, and indeed at Mediapart we have certainly not been shy to do so. But this gap between an electoral dynamic and the exercise of power is today an additional argument for seizing the opportunity offered by the Popular Union; that of gaining a parliamentary alternance, and no longer a presidential one, and in the process distancing the inherent dangers of French Caesarism in which the will of all is confiscated by the power of one.
It is perhaps our last chance, after so many previous occasions that were lost because of those who had charge of the situation. Does François Hollande need reminding that it was he, as first secretary of the PS in 2001, who accepted the proposition by Lionel Jospin to move the dates of the 2002 general elections, due in March, to June, thus giving the presidential poll, held in two rounds staggered over April and May, the political advantage? Does he also need to be reminded that after his own election as president ten years later, and in exactly the same way as Emmanuel Macron’s election five years after that, that the hopes of a renaissance of Parliament were immediately dashed by the exercise of presidential omnipotence and its permanent abuses of that power?
Time is short. At stake is nothing less than putting France’s republic back on its foundations in order to avoid it crumbling away. A new parliamentary majority, one that is united in its opposition to the presidential ‘monarchy’ and by the will to defend the parliamentary regime, one that is indissolubly democratic, social and environmentalist, would have no other choice than to give free rein to its plurality, the richness of its exchange of opinion and its collective inventiveness.
François Hollande warned the Green party, Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV), that allying itself with the LFI would be crossing a red line regarding the latter’s stance on the EU. But one might recall how, as the newly elected president in 2012, Hollande failed to live up to his election pledge “to renegotiate” the EU Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance signed by his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy. What’s more, it was the sincerely pro-EU Green party ministers in Hollande’s government who led the debate over the issue and the criticism against him.
The presidential system suffocates pluralities, and not just dissidence but also nuances. It standardizes and devitalises, replacing critical thought with automatic discipline, using the pretext of the “presidential majority” – the president’s parliamentary majority – which, by depriving Members of Parliament of the exercise of their free will, transforms them into sycophantic servants.
A parliamentary process that has regained is legitimacy and credibility would protect against the temptations of the personalisation of power and the many abuses to which that leads, such as favouritism, clientelism and other conflicts of interest.
Of course, those temptations will continue, as is illustrated by the LFI’s propaganda that reduces the stakes of the legislative elections to the “election” of Jean-Luc Mélenchon as prime minister, transforming the “us” of the popular union to the “me” of its leader. But the commitments made both in the negotiations this week and in the Avenir en commun programme (see the chapter Démocratie et institutions) regarding the pre-eminence of parliamentary power, its ethical rules and its legislative procedures, are antidotes against an eventual abuse of power – one which a victory in the presidential elections would not necessarily have guarded us against.
The finalisation of the New Popular Union has happened 86 years, almost to the day, after the landslide victory of the Front Populaire alliance of the Left in parliamentary elections in France on May 3rd 1936. That was followed by a massive militant movement of strikes and plant occupations by workers who succeeded in securing decisive social reforms in legislation passed by the new parliamentary majority.
But another date also comes to mind. It was amid the darkness of the fascist movements gaining ground across Europe that, on March 5th 1934, three intellectuals who together represented the plurality of the French Left – the philosopher Alain, a theorist of radicalism, the ethnologist and socialist Paul Rivet and the physicist and communist Paul Langevin – launched a joint appeal “to workers” on the dangers of the rise of the far-right. It was the founding act of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascists (the vigilance committee of anti-fascist intellectuals). It was also one year after the Nazis had reached power in Germany.
In the appeal, the three described themselves as “united beyond all divergences” in face of the far-right, and determined to “save what the people have achieved in rights and public freedoms” and to fight against “corruption” and “against imposture”.
“We will not let the corrupt and the corruptors invoke virtue,” they declared. “We will not allow the anger caused by financial scandals to be redirected by the banks, the trusts, [and] the arms dealers against the Republic, which is that of the people who work, suffer, think and act for their emancipation. We will not let the financial oligarchy exploit, as in Germany, the discontent of masses who are in difficulty or ruined by them.”
Compared to such fine initiatives, those who now give lessons to the unitarian parties of the Left, yet who proved incapable of preventing the return today of this mortal danger, and who even accompanied that return through their cowardice, resemble political dwarfs.
To seize the hitherto unexpected opportunity of a union of the Left is quite simply to continue to block the path of neofascism in the same way as was the act of casting a vote for the best-placed leftwing candidate in the presidential election first round, or for Emmanuel Macron in his second-round duel with Marine Le Pen. In those cases it was about hoping to stop the latter from reaching the second round or, in the event, preventing the weariness of voters from allowing her to be elected.
But on the contrary, to not seize that opportunity, or to caricature it to the point of handing out insults, is to be complicit in allowing a return of the darkness.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.