About the French Left

By Veronique de Rugy

Monday, July 08, 2024

 

On Saturday, Esther Duflo, a Nobel laureate in economics, wrote about the need for the French Left to unite in case they come out ahead in the elections. She writes:

 

On July 7, France will enter a new political era, regardless of the outcome of the polls. Either the Rassemblement National (RN) and its allies will have enough seats to get an absolute majority or — if a hastily reinvented “Republican Front” holds — it will be kept out of power for now, but there won’t be any coherent majority.

 

If the second scenario comes to pass, credit will be due the left, which, in a matter of days after the election was called, managed to unite all the way from the populist fringe to the centre-left, marginalising in the process the veteran far left leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a divisive figure who is the right’s favourite scarecrow.

 

“The right’s favourite scarecrow” seems to imply that Mélenchon is unfairly targeted. Over at Persuasion, Quico Toro has this to say about Mélenchon and what he stands for:

 

By convention, we talk about the French far right, but the left is exempted from adjectival abuse: it’s never the far left, just la gauche: the left. It’s a telling choice: an implicit way of conveying that while all reasonable people agree that the extremists on the right are beyond the pale, the left is still presentable in polite company. . . .

 

The biggest party in this space, though, is unquestionably Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) and its ascendancy over this space is clearly down to Mélenchon’s own charismatic leadership. In fact, Mélenchon probably has more say than any single other person over who becomes France’s next prime minister. What kind of leader is he, exactly?

 

One former advisor, speaking to Politico, described him as “a scale model of a charismatic dictator,” luxuriating over his explosive temper and sporadic excursions into conspiracy theorizing. With political roots in France’s Trotskyist movement, Mélenchon has an undoubted soft spot for dictatorial figures, which has seen him bounce between bouts of softness for Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad. In his own words, he was reduced to tears at a rally for the dictator who forced me out of my own country, Hugo Chávez. . . .

 

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is, today, the second most powerful person in France. He is, by any reasonable estimation, a far-left extremist. He publicly espouses ideas that, if put into practice, would destroy France’s economy and probably tank the Euro. His comfort around, and admiration for dictators (so long as they are of the left-wing kind) is a matter of record.

 

France is now ungovernable. Macron’s party lost about 100 seats. Le Pen’s party won many seats though the Left coalition with Macron, helped by some horrific RN candidates, prevented an absolute majority — a move that won’t be possible during the next presidential elections. I assume this means that Marine Le Pen will be the next president of France.

 

Also, for all the victory chants coming from Mélenchon, his party lost one seat. It has 74 MPs compared to Le Pen’s party, which has 143 seats now (they had 86 before).

 

Poor France.