On January 10th, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne formally unveiled President Emmanuel Macron's plans to reform the pension system, the key plank of which is to raise the legal age of retirement in France from 62 to 64 by 2030. Almost immediately trade unions announced a day of strikes and protest on January 19th. Meanwhile prominent figures on the French Left attended a political meeting arranged by independent media Reporterre and 'Fakir', to demonstrate their anger towards the reforms. As Mathieu Dejean reports, the need for unity was a theme of the evening, with calls for the Left to remain united against the proposals – and on other issues – heavily applauded by the audience.
Despite the creation of the NUPES leftwing alliance ahead of the legislative elections in 2022, the French Left is still mired in a crisis of faith. Beset by fragmentation and having declined to form a new democratic structure, none of the political parties and movements that just eight months ago formed the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale now seems willing to press ahead with a joint reconstruction of the Left. Yet such a move is essential, argues Mediapart's co-editorial director Stéphane Alliès in this op-ed article.
French voters have delivered a major setback to Emmanuel Macron and his centre-right Ensemble coalition, which has failed to achieve an overall majority in the National Assembly in today's decisive second round legislative elections. This is a huge blow for President Macron who cannot now be assured of Parliamentary backing for his planned reforms. His centre-right coalition has so far picked up 245 of the 577 seats, with 289 being the magic number to achieve an overall majority. This is well down on the number of seats it won in 2017 and means that for the government to have a working parliamentary majority it will have to seek the help of another party. That could be the rightwing Les Républicains who have 61 seats. Meanwhile the broad left and environmental alliance NUPES will be the main opposition party in the new Assembly, with it and its allies winning 147 seats. This is a major achievement for the driving force behind NUPES, veteran leftwinger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose La France Insoumise party only won 17 seats in the last parliament. But one of the biggest winners of the night is the far-right Rassemblement National who have won 89 seats. These dramatic results are now set to usher in a period of political uncertainty. Our live coverage of the second round results and reactions was by Graham Tearse and Michael Streeter.
In the decisive second round of voting in France's legislative elections this Sunday June 19th, a vote for the NUPES alliance of the Left and environmentalists is both ethically essential and a political necessity, argues Mediapart's publishing editor Edwy Plenel in this opinion article. To vote in this way, he writes, is to reject the duplicity of a divisive presidency and to embrace political change via a parliamentary route.
In next Sunday's decisive second round in France's legislative elections there will be nearly sixty constituencies where candidates from the broad left alliance known as NUPES will be in a head-to-head contest with far-right candidates. Yet rather than telling its voters to back the leftwing candidates against the far-right Rassemblement National, senior figures in Emmanuel Macron's ruling party have labelled both those on the right and many on the left as extremists. And they say they will advise their voters whom to back on a case by case basis. Mediapart's Ellen Salvi argues in this opinion article that this cynical approach amounts to bad faith on the part of the president's political movement. She says it goes against both political principles and political history – and also flies in the face of everything that the president claimed to be defending in his recent presidential campaign.
