A clear theme emerged from a meeting of the French Left at the Olympe-de-Gouges hall in Paris on the evening of Tuesday January 10th. Not only was the Left, faced with the pension reform proposals set out a few hours earlier by prime minister Élisabeth Borne, once again united, but appeals from the stage for the various leftwing and green political parties to set aside petty differences were greeted with loud applause.
For example, the thousand-strong audience at the meeting, which featured leading figures from the broad leftwing alliance the Nouvelle Union Populaire, Écologique et Sociale (NUPES), greeted a call for unity by Léa Filoche, spokesperson for the Génération·s party, with great enthusiasm.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
“We are united on this and I'm particularly proud of that, but afterwards we can't just talk about pensions,” she declared. “We can't resign ourselves to being divided on a programme for society, we can't resign ourselves to being divided at elections, we can't resign ourselves to being divided among ourselves because we have narrow factions. Our programme for society must be heard well beyond this hall.”
Reviving the flame
Behind her, on the stage, there was a range of reactions from leading figures on the Left and the Greens, a reflection of the recent divisions which have undermined NUPES. The Member of Parliament for the radical left La France Insoumise (LFI), François Ruffin – who is also editor of Fakir magazine and organiser of the event - clapped without hesitation. Mathilde Panot, the president of the LFI's Parliamentary group, gave an enigmatic smile, and Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF), was engrossed in private discussion with Boris Vallaud, president of the socialist group at the National Assembly, and with Marine Tondelier, national secretary of the green Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV) party. It may not have looked like it, but all of them are very well aware that the social mobilisation against the reforms that is now starting, and the unions' united front against those reforms, represent a challenge to them. The challenge is made even greater by the fact that, helped by the pandemic, protests against pension reforms proved successful in 2020.
The very fact this political meeting was organised at all stems from concerns that the recent factional mood on the Left risks overshadowing the successes of the legislative elections in June 2022 when NUPES was formed. It was not NUPES itself who arranged Tuesday's meeting – they have organised one for January 17th at the Japy gymnasium in central Paris – but rather two independent media, Fakir and Reporterre. The latter is an environmental media outlet and its editor Hervé Kempf said the “original idea” for the meeting came from François Ruffin, the LFI MP and editor of Fakir.
Ruffin had been worried about the absence of any plans for a joint rally on the issue – the LFI had refused to go along with a call to march on January 21st with youth organisations, EELV, the PCF and the Socialist Party, preferring to wait for the unions; the latter have now called for protests on January 19th. So before Christmas the MP and journalist started to push for a joint meeting of the Left once the reform plans were formally announced. “The issue at stake is that the Left reunites, and gives a new take on the pensions debate by pointing out that it's an issue about leisure time and the meaning of work,” said Kempf. Later, on stage, he summed up the mood of the evening when he declared: “NUPES raised enormous hopes in June, it's time to revive the flame!”
The alliance has certainly been floundering in recent weeks, due to a number of issues. These include the affair involving LFI MP Adrien Quatennens, who was convicted of domestic violence, which caused tensions in inter-NUPES party relations at the National Assembly, and the leadership crisis at the top of the LFI – some dissidents are planning a meeting on February 16th, which has sparked a debate. At the same time the Greens have said that they want to stand under their own name at the next European elections, and not under a NUPES banner, while there is a risk that the Socialist Party will suspend its involvement in NUPES if current first secretary Olivier Faure loses his post at the party's conference this week. The issue of pension reform, the latest major social and employment battle, could offer a fresh way to bolster the alliance.
They could do worse than pick up the expression that François Ruffin – who late last year wrote an essay on the issue called ' Le Temps d’apprendre à vivre' ('Time to learn to live') – used when confronted by a scrum of media at the start of Tuesday's meetings. Referring to the announcement by Élisabeth Borne that the legal age of retirement will rise from 62 to 64, Ruffin said: “That was not a prime minister we heard this evening, it was a judge. We've been given two years.”
Dispelling a sense of resignation
In his speech Ruffin, who organised the Nuit Debout social protest movement in 2016, emphasised the hardship that will be caused to those in the toughest and least secure jobs by increasing the number of years they have to work. “It's an issue of power over the social body, over people's bodies,” he said. He highlighted the impact that both inflation – if there is no indexation of wages - and pension reform will have on essential jobs, in other words on “those men and women whom our economies pay so badly”. This was an ironic reference to Emmanuel Macron's words of thanks to essential workers on April 13th 2020 during the height of the pandemic.
“We can't speak of retirement without asking ourselves about the nature of work today,” François Ruffin explained a little later, once he had left the stage. “In 1984 12% of employees suffered from three physical ailments, that's now 34% today! Work has become more intense, for the body and the mind.”
On stage, the PCF's Fabien Roussel recalled that NUPES had an agreed policy on the issue. “Our joint commitment is to retirement at 60 for all,” he said, though socialists within NUPES had in fact hesitated over this. Roussel then called for an all-out protest on January 19th. “Let there be a million of us in the street, then they'll talk!” he declared.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The Left has at least started talking again, even if it was just for one evening. Not only did leaders of the main NUPES parties turn up, but there were also other high-profile figures from LFI who attended, and who did so out of more than just personal friendship with François Ruffin. Among them were those whom some in the LFI leadership now call “rebels”: Parliamentarians Clémentine Autain, Alexis Corbière, Raquel Garrido, and MEP Leïla Chaibi. But also there were elected representatives who are close to all factions in the LFI, including Damien Maudet, Christophe Bex, Marianne Maximi, Pascale Martin and Charlotte Leduc.
After a series of speeches that acted as a warm-up for the protests of January 19th, followed by a militant version of the song 'I Will Survive', François Ruffin said he was happy with the success of the event. But he remained cautious, stating that he was all too aware of “our worst enemy – resignation”. He added: “Here we are at the core of the reactor. We must turn the cold anger into hot anger. As I was saying to Marine [Tondelier] during the meeting, now we have to warm up Hénin-Beaumont and Flixecourt [editor's note, a reference to far-right Marine Pen's stronghold and to a small town in Ruffin's own constituency]. ” As far as he and others are concerned, the battle has only just begun.
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- The original French version of this story can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter