The left-wing New Popular Front coalition announced in a joint press conference Friday just how much its ambitious economic programme is going to cost – and how it’s going to fund it, reports FRANCE 24.
But for a left fighting against decades of neoliberal economic orthodoxy, convincing voters that alternatives are possible could prove an uphill struggle.
The bombardment has begun. “Unfunded gifts”, a “major risk” of “long-term stagnation” in the French economy, a “total delusion”, “dangerous” propositions. Whether coming from President Emmanuel Macron, prime minister Gabriel Attal, finance minister Bruno Le Maire, the Movement of the Enterprises of France (MEDEF) employers' association or non-stop TV talking heads, a hefty part of France’s political and media landscape has been blasting the economic programme put forward by the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) this week.
As programmes go, it’s ambitious. The NFP – a coalition of left-wing parties including Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed, the Socialist Party, the French Communist Party and the Greens – plans to raise the monthly minimum wage to €1,600, impose price ceilings on essential foods, electricity, gas and petrol, repeal Macron’s deeply unpopular decision to raise the retirement age to 64 and invest massively in the green transition and public services. Critics accuse the bloc’s policies of being costly, uncosted or even, to borrow Attal’s words at the launch of his own coalition’s programme launch Thursday, a “fiscal drubbing”.
"It’s a strategy designed to scare people,” France Unbowed’s Éric Coquerel, the former president of the National Assembly’s finance committee, said. “When the left has the capacity to govern the country, we lose count of the slanders levelled against us. It’s classic. It happened in 1981 [with Socialist François Mitterand’s victory] when people said that Russian tanks were going to roll into Paris. It happened in 1997 [with the victory of the ‘Plural Left’ in legislative elections and the cohabitation of right-wing President Jacques Chirac and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin], with very violent attacks from the MEDEF head at the time – and now it’s the same.”