What is Left for the French Left?
Jean-Luc Mélenchon speaks at a campaign rally (c/o Lionel Bonaventure/AFP)
For any French person whose politics place them to the left of, say, Hilary Clinton, the Presidential Election ended not this week but on April 10th, the night of the first round of voting. All that remained to do after that date was to cast a begrudging, vital vote for Emmanuel Macron: begrudging because of how inadequately he has repaid the decisive support of left-leaning voters in his first election to the Presidency in 2017; vital because the alternative was the far-right nativist Marine Le Pen. The leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who was within a single percentage point of advancing to the runoff at Le Pen’s expense, was suddenly the unenviable king- (or queen-!) maker of the final contest. As in 2017, Mélenchon exhorted his supporters not to “give a single vote” to Le Pen and celebrated her final defeat. But as in 2017, he never endorse Macron outright, and indeed reveled in the fact that he was ultimately elected with such meager support.
Mélenchon’s stance is morally, if not strategically, blinkered. To abstain in the choice between the infuriating Macron and the odious Le Pen would be perverse. Exit polls nonetheless indicate that a narrow plurality of Mélenchon’s voters did just that, which is every bit as much the result of Mélenchon’s hedging as Macron’s politics, despite the former’s attempts to shirk agency. On the other hand, an only slightly smaller portion than the abstainers did ultimately support Macron, while very few, just over one in ten, switched Le Pen. That more than counteracted the automatic bonus Le Pen received from absorbing the support of the eliminated TV pundit Éric Zemmour, propelling Macron to a second term.
The results of the two rounds of the 2022 French Presidential Election (c/o Wikipedia)
It’s easy to imagine what will happen next: once again owing his victory to the left, Macron will proceed to govern essentially from the center-right, even though the center-right electorate effectively no longer exists having slipped below 5% in the first round. There is always the chance that, once freed from the prospect of a reelection battle against Le Pen, Macron will realize a sense of his historical purpose as a unifier who owes much to the left but to whom the left owes nothing, since most of its voters supported him (twice) only as the least-bad option. Perhaps Macron will try to genuinely earn the left’s faith in a way he has been unmoved to in his first term. In his victory speech, he seemed to open the door to just that possibility, acknowledging that “Many in this country voted for me not because they support my ideas but to keep out those of the far-right.” Perhaps. I am not holding my breath.
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As to the man who so nearly disrupted the right-of-center duopoly of French politics, Jean-Luc Mélenchon should be no one’s idea of an ideal alternative. Among other ideological quirks, he has a nationalist streak that at times makes him sound closer to Le Pen than to Macron on key issues. He a leftwing critic of mass migration on the basis that the importation of cheap labor threatens the French social model, which was the standard view of European social democrats prior to the 1990’s. His sympathy for the Yellow Vests protesters spilled over into open support. He is an incorrigible eurosceptic who, in the event that a President Le Pen ever calls a vote on France’s EU membership, can be expected to behave about as impressively as Jeremy Corbyn did leading up to the mass defection of Labor voters in the Brexit referendum. Like most of Europe’s green politicians, he foolishly opposes nuclear power, which provides 75% of France’s electricity. In many ways, Mélenchon is the instantiation of Chantal Mouffle’s call for a renewed left populism, meaning that his political style can alarmingly resemble that of his rightwing opponents, even if his program is totally different. He has effectively spent the last decade continuously running for President, and the experience seems to have addled him. He blusters constantly, the most eloquent of France’s perpetually blustering political figureheads. The low point of his most recent campaign was an ill-advised talk show appearance in which he offered meandering, Trumpesque intimations about an October Surprise orchestrated by the right.
Having said that much, Mélenchon’s candidacy nonetheless presented a transformative opportunity and, in many ways, a model for the global left. He unveiled his 694-point political program, “L’Avenir en commun,” in a remarkable three-hour public broadcast featuring a comprehensive costing assessment by a host of policy experts. The program amounts to €250 billion of fully-funded annual spending on public services, the environmental transition, a minimum income, and a large increase in public sector employment. Other measures would lower the retirement age, reform the tax system, regulate the financial sector, and set limits on energy prices. There are also a few radical measures compatible with socialist equality, including setting a maximum inheritance and a maximum wage differential within firms.
My layman’s assessment of the whole package is that it would be analogous to Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan but smaller, more coherent, and more suffused with classical leftwing values (analogous rather than directly akin because, of course, much of what Biden proposed already exists in Europe). On the whole “L’Avenir en commun” is a reasonably forward-looking social democratic agenda for momentous, non-revolutionary change in French society. On the necessary measure of assessment for all large-scale social agendas, whether the positive aspects outweigh the ill-informed, the actively damaging, and the self-defeating, it passes with flying colors. I am not alone in this sentiment. The president of MEDEF, the national employer’s union and a bastion of French market liberalism, declared in a televised debate with Mélenchon that despite his “deep disagreements” with the leftist leader, he was clearly “ready to govern, with a solid and coherent program.”
Mélenchon’s policy agenda is perhaps not even the most important reason he deserved praise: vitally important in light of the task of defeating the far-right in the runoff is the fact that Mélenchon has been an unambiguous and passionate defender of France’s ethnic diversity. While firmly upholding the French tradition of laïcité or secularism, he has also consistently spoken up on behalf of the Muslim minority. In that he is practically alone: France’s Muslims have long been under siege not from the open white supremacism of Éric Zemmour and the heavy-handed authoritarianism of Macron but also from the laïcité-obsessed center-left, whose normalization of Islamophobia in the name of the separation of church and state would shock most Americans. For his part, Mélenchon has opined lyrically on the value of créolisation, glorifying the fact that France is a melting-pot society even as public talk of multiculturalism or ethnic affinity has long been taboo.
The most aspirational part of the “L’Avenir en commun,” the very first of its 694 proposals, is a call for a new constitutional convention to establish a Sixth Republic. Mélenchon envisions a greatly weakened Presidency and the institutionalization of direct democracy, but plans to leave the actual details to a popular consultation along the lines of the recent process in Chile. The moment is ripe for such a drastic step. The present constitution is the haphazard bequest of the Crisis of May 1958, when a military takeover was prevented only by the triumphant return of General de Gaulle as France’s strongman savior. Reflecting that provenance, the document is rife with ambiguities, contradictions, and, unsurprisingly, provisions for near-unlimited Presidential powers under the state of exception. Those latent authoritarian tendencies have becoming abundantly clear as France has been governed for four of the last six years under a dubious emergency decree, justified first by terrorism under François Hollande’s Socialist government and then by the pandemic under Macron’s explicitly monarchal one. In the wake of the Yellow Vests protests and with abstentionism and political dissatisfaction at an all time high, the thought of a Sixth Republic is not a fanciful one. All the same, the political and logistical barriers to such a move would be so large as to make it unlikely even with Presidential support.
So: Mélenchon is a flawed individual who could nonetheless have been a potentially transformative President, the first such figure on the left since Mitterrand. While the choice between Macron and Le Pen is certainly not a false one, contra the unreasoned assertions of some on the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon offered a true political break with Macronism that was as attractive as Le Pen’s alternative is odious.
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If the second-round choice between center and far-right came with a familiar sense of alienation, the realization of what transpired to produce that choice should inspire a (sadly just as familiar) feeling of horror. For it is clear that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, having been discounted throughout the campaign period even as he received a late boost in the polls, failed to advance to the runoff solely because of divisions on the political left. The left’s unhappy choice was not imposed on them, but was rather self-inflicted.
To one side were the Communists, who insisted on running their own quixotic, patriotism-centric campaign despite having supported Mélenchon in the last two elections. Had the Communists remained within Mélenchon’s movement and brought with them their small, fiercely loyal electorate, that alone would have pushed the left past Le Pen. To the other side were the Greens and the venerable, utterly abject Socialists, who just five years ago held the Presidency and the Legislature. Their candidate Anne Hidalgo sank to a shudder-inducing 1.75%. Had the Socialist and Green voters also switched to Mélenchon, he would have surpassed not only Le Pen but also Macron, winning the first round.
The situation recalls the 2002 election, in which seven separate minor leftist candidates siphoned off more than a quarter of the vote. That left Socialist Lionel Jospin on 16%, 20,000 votes short of second place. Thus with a 40% plurality in the first round, the left went unrepresented in the final choice for President. The result, a run-off between the incumbent Jacques Chirac and the shock second place finisher, the fascist Jean Marie Le Pen, legitimated the far-right in French politics and prefigured the rise of Le Pen’s daughter and political heir, Marine.
Of course, that was the era of two-party dominance in French politics, when failure by either the social democratic left or the Gaulist right to reach final contention was a catastrophe by default. Today, the traditional right and especially the left are in shambles, replaced by the new polarity of neoliberal center and neofascist right. No one expected any candidate of the left to make the runoff in 2022, but all knew that the only one with a chance was not the Socialist Anne Hidalgo but the ex-Socialist dissident, Jean Luc-Mélenchon. The predominant mood now is therefore not the catastrophic shattering of expectations that accompanied Jospin’s failure, but rather the sense of extraordinary missed opportunity the likes of which may not soon recur.
The uniqueness of this moment consisted not in the unexpected strength of one leftist candidate, which was not fully evident until election night, but in the months-old division of the right stemming from the candidacy of the Pétainist Éric Zemmour. Zemmour, a journalist and France’s most visible advocate of the Great Replacement thesis, presented the left with a golden opportunity and an ironic one, given that in choosing to splinter the movement over clashing egos and ideological purity tests, Zemmour was aping the worst habits of the left. Zemmour ran to Le Pen’s right in meaningful ways, notably questions of historical revisionism and the welfare state. But their important points of divergence were purely rhetorical and stylistic in nature: his faux-intellectual demeanor contrasting with her faux-blue collar one, he leaning ever further into his internet-provocateur persona while she affected a more statesmanlike demeanor. On political matters they were practically indistinguishable, much closer to each other than were any of the separate candidates of the left.
To judge from recent elections, the far-right commands between a quarter and a third of the voting public. The left almost certainly commands less than that. As long as that remains so, and provided the center remains a coherent force in French politics after Macron, the left will be structurally incapable of improving its fortunes: even healing its divisions will not be enough if a unity candidate can only muster third place behind the center and the far-right. Unless, of course, the right happens to divide itself. There is no guarantee it will ever do so again, at least not without first winning power. The left had six months between Zemmour’s entry and the first round of voting to realize the scale of the opportunity he had presented them and put together a united front. Instead, they all went on running separately. And still, one came achingly close to making the runoff. But third is as good as last in a system where only the top two reach the decisive round.
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I am aware that the simple exercise of adding up all the voters of a given ideological classification is not a reflection of the real world. If all the leftwing candidates had indeed coalesced around Mélenchon, the result would have been less than the sum of the parts: a certain percentage of Socialist and Green voters would have found him too radical and defected to Macron, while some Communist and Trotskyite voters would have abstained for the opposite reason. Some of Mélenchon’s own supporters might have been disenchanted by the moderating compromises such a fusion candidacy would no doubt have entailed. The phenomenon of vote splitting, while universally infuriating and occasionally decisive (as in the installation of George W. Bush), is not the indefatigable metaphysical force some make it out to be. My own unscientific analysis is that adding more candidates with similar ideological programs tends to result in each getting a smaller slice of a larger pie, while removing candidates reduces vote splitting but also depresses overall turnout for all the candidates of that particular ideology. This is because voters are gormless. A new candidate generates excitement and draws in voters who wouldn’t otherwise have noticed there was an election on. If that candidate then drops out, many of their low-engagement supporters drop out with them.
In imagining counterfactuals like a single candidate for the left in the recent French election, one needs to account for the diminishing marginal retention of voters as their candidates are agglomerated to one another. For example, it has been demonstrated that enough Bernie Sanders supporters either abstained in the general election or switched to Trump to cost Clinton the victory, if the alternative was all of them voting for Clinton. But it has not been demonstrated that any of those people were ever going to vote for Clinton. Vote splitting only applies to voters that could have gone to any of a given set of candidates; it does not apply to voters who were only ever going to support one candidate. Sanders may have appeared to be only splitting the vote, but he was also momentarily swelling the overall Democratic vote merely by his presence. Once he was no longer a candidate, the Democrats’ (now Clinton’s) electorate returned somewhat to its natural size. The same is surely true, at least to an extent, of the various minor leftwing candidates who might have dropped out to consolidate around Mélenchon: they were not just hurting Mélenchon but also helping the left’s overall score.
I first came to this analysis after the two Spanish general elections of 2015 and 2016, respectively. In 2015, the upstart leftwing Podemos party debuted on 20%, two points shy of third place. Many observed at the time that Izquierda Unida, an established leftist party whose program was all but indistinguishable from Podemos’, had stayed in the race and captured enough voters to make up the difference between third and second place. Many blamed them for splitting the vote and costing Podemos an historic result that would have made them the country’s official opposition. When another election was called six months later, Podemos, always among the most grounded, least histrionic of Europe’s left parties, wisely formed an alliance with Izquierda Unida. In the end, the alliance received a million votes fewer than its combined total from the previous election. Evidently, the excitement surrounding the two leftist parties had been just that: excitement for two parties, not one compromised unity ticket.
The best example of this phenomenon may have actually just played out in France: not on the left but on the right. Simply adding Éric Zemmour’s first round total to Le Pen’s would give her 30% of the vote. That seems to indicate that she would have easily won the first round had he never run. Yet at no point in the last year did she ever poll as high as 30%, including in the many months before Zemmour entered the race, when she was Macron’s sole presumptive challenger. Moreover, and perhaps most important of all, like with Bernie Sanders and Pablo Iglesias, the charismatic leader of Podemos, much of Zemmour’s appeal was tied to his personality. Without the man, his more pragmatic supporters could have been expected to vote for the ideologically similar Le Pen, but the more hardline (or just non-reading) ones would have stayed home or spoilt their ballots in the absence of their godhead.
All of this is true, but for the purposes of considering Mélenchon, it may also be moot. For he could afford a great deal of diminished retention in the event that he had absorbed other candidates: his deficit to second place was only one percentage point, or roughly 400,000 votes. Even if only the Communist Fabien Roussel had dropped out, just half of his voters would have been enough to push Mélenchon past the threshold provided the rest did anything other than vote for Le Pen. For the Green Yannick Jadot, a mere quarter of his support would have sufficed. Either of these candidates could have pushed the left into the second round by making an autonomous choice contingent on no other person’s action. And because each had it fully in his own power, each is fully responsible for the result. The blame for the French left’s failure in 2022 is overdetermined: multiple people possess all of it. At the very least for the Communists, who have spent decades cooperating with parties more moderate than Mélenchon’s and who actually backed him in the last two elections, the choice to run independently was bizarre and indefensible. If it means their final death as a political force, it will be deserved.
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What I am describing applies only to the matter of merging blocs of voters into one. It does not address the much thornier political issue of candidates stepping aside to support someone better placed to win. And the irony here is that, had Mélenchon been in the position of stepping aside, there is little doubt he would have behaved just as selfishly as his rivals actually did. Mélenchon’s own ego can border on the demagogic and he has an intense mistrust of other figures on the left. His relationship with the Socialists, of which he was a high-ranking member for decades, is particularly thorny. (Such prodigal-son connections are often the most tempestuous: witness Oskar Lafontaine and the German SPD or Yanis Varoufakis and Greek SYRIZA.) In the last legislative elections, Mélenchon’s refusal to cooperate with other parties was widely considered a contributor to the left’s disastrous overall result.
Earlier in the campaign, when the left’s fortunes looked bleakest, there actually was an attempt at unification via a “people’s primary” to select a common representative. In truth, the primary was nothing more than a vehicle for Christiane Taubira, the former Justice Minister under Socialist President Hollande, to enter the race. But that was not necessarily to the proposal’s discredit: with the left paralyzed by so many competing personalities refusing to cede to one another, it was reasonable to think the impasse could only be broken by the introduction of a compromise candidate from outside. The eloquent and charismatic Taubira, a respected éminence of the left whose favorability ratings among its voters surpassed even Mélenchon’s, was a logical choice to be that compromise candidate. But in the event, every other candidate refused to compete in her primary, dooming it to illegitimacy. Mélenchon, who might have been confident of his chances of victory, presumably refused because he felt it was a process he could not control, to say nothing of the possibility of humiliation in case he did lose to Taubira. As to the other candidates—to paraphrase Orwell, if you saw how they acted in the general election, it isn’t hard to imagine how they acted in a primary.
This is perhaps the most critical and infuriating point of all: in addition to his ideological unpleasantries, which are several, even if they are more than outweighed by the good, Mélenchon has no moral high ground to stand on when it comes to the failure of the other candidates to support him. He is not less blinkered or stubborn than his rivals, and no one seriously thinks he would have acted better in their shoes. And yet, he had one thing they did not: the credible claim to be the leader of the left, with by far the largest base of support and the only half-chance of achieving the Presidency. For this fact alone he ought to have been given every reward, however undeservingly: the complete endorsement of the other candidates following their withdrawals, the tactical support of the whole left-leaning electorate, and the clear-eyed, if regrettable, retreat of would-be unifiers like Christiane Taubira.
We shouldn’t judge Mélenchon too harshly: pragmatism is on his side. Given France’s unproportional top-two electoral system, Mélenchon had a right to demand the submission of the unviable candidates of the left. Since it was abundantly clear none of them would advance out of the first round, by staying in they were effectively stating either their indifference to whether or not a candidate of the left made it into the runoff, or their complete confidence that Mélenchon had no chance of doing so anyway, or both. Mélenchon would be right to condemn them as such. And more to the point, would it really have involved such a hardship on the part of the other candidates to withdraw? Is it really better for the Communist Party, so long the handmaidens of Stalinist counterrevolution, to be once again responsible for blocking the left’s path to power? Was it worthwhile for Greens to cement their reputation as shills for the center, “neoliberals with windmills” as their German compatriots have come to be known, just to prove they could command one twentieth of the vote? And are the Socialists, the party of Mitterand, of Michel Rocard, of Léon Blum, and of Jean Jaurès, so proud that they prefer a public execution to a quiet death away from prying eyes? Might it not have been better for the party’s future (if it has one at all) to ally with the one leftwing candidate who had a chance of victory, rather than registering incontrovertible evidence of its demise for all to see? Or at least to offer to make such an alliance?
The most damning fact is that at every point in the Presidential race dating back a year, the total score of the left in opinion polling was always higher than any other individual candidate. It was always evident that, if the numerous candidates of the left were one, that person’s support would be enough to enter the second round if not to win outright. That was true even when Mélenchon, who was always the highest-performing representative, was languishing in fifth place behind the center, the right, the far right, and the other far right—such was the scale of the left’s division. The best chance for French socialism in 40 years may have been its last for the foreseeable future.