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From President Macron downwards, the entirety of France’s centre-Right, Right, and far-Right political classes have revived, in somewhat modernised form, The Red Scare.
What they perceive as an increasingly real threat to the status quo from the Socialists/Greens/Communists/Hard Left France Unbound (and dozens of other ‘fellow-travellers’) in The Left’s latest incarnation, The New Popular Front, is under constant attack, much of it distinctly underhand, for being as extreme and unacceptable as the Far Right National Rally.
It’s unsubtle stuff.
On every possible occasion, the Right refers to Hard-Left dinosaur Jean-Luc Mélenchon (second most feared/disliked politician in France, only a short head behind Racist Zealot Zemmour) as the ‘Leader of the Left’ and Prime Minister in Waiting.
The Left keeps on responding that there’s no Prime-Minister-In-Waiting. The New Popular Front runs the entire Left spectrum (from Seriously Marxist to Seriously Social Democrat). Everyone has agreed that whichever party (in practice either the Hard-Left or Socialists) wins most Parliamentary seats in the Legislative Elections on 30 June and 7 July will be charged with nominating the Prime Minister.
For now, Mélenchon – who’s undoubtedly not given up hope of preferment – reiterates that while he feels ‘capable’ of serving as Prime Minister he is not ‘imposing himself’. Other putative Premiers make clear that they too feel ‘capable’.
This helps shore up the New Popular Front’s party line, further reinforced (Central Praesidium Style from days of yore) by Mélenchon being notably absent from the group photo of 60+ distressingly white (when will France ever learn?) Left politicos, after their 4 days of negotiations produced a manifesto. (That the photo’s backdrop might double as the Prime Minister’s residence was a bonus.) Communist Party leader, Fabien Roussel, tweeted ‘Le nouveau Front populaire est en marche!’ (not bad after the amount of sleep he’d had).
The Guilt-By-Association being ladled on disgracefully thickly by Macron and chums looks increasingly threadbare (yuk – apologies for that mixed metaphor melange) as Socialists and Social Democrats across the political board sign up to the joint programme of 150 measures.
Rightly credited with having produced the Socialist Party’s revival to 14% (and almost joint 2nd with Macron’s Euro-Election list) Antoine Glucksmann vigorously justified his decision to support The New Popular Front (despite fundamental, well-known disagreements with the Hard Left).
‘The only way to prevent National Rally taking power is the New Popular Front’ said Glucksmann, producing some powerfully frightening images on France Inter radio: ‘Close your eyes and imagine: 300 National Rally Deputies in the National Assembly. Jordan Bardella Prime Minister, Mariani as Foreign Minister. Marion Maréchal at Culture or the Family. Ciotti as Interior Minister.’
Further demonstrating the cynical (and wholly untruthful) nature of the criticism aimed from the Right against the New Popular Front is the vigorous endorsement from an even more surprising quarter, ex-President François Hollande.
After condemning Macron’s decision to dissolve Parliament ‘which happened at the worst moment and under the worst circumstances’, Hollande made clear (ahead of the publication of the Left’s programme next day) that he was ‘in favour of the New Popular Front’ because ‘we must do everything possible to ensure that the Far Right does not attain power’.
Urging support for whichever candidate was best placed to defeat the Far Right in any constituency, Hollande said it was ‘essential’ that the union came into being. Reminding us of his ‘differences’ with the Hard Left, he said the circumstances meant he had to go beyond such differences: the only issue was that the Far Right had never been closer to power since the end of the Second World War.
Completing the surprise about Hollande’s generosity towards the New Popular Front, we learned this morning that Hollande would himself stand for Parliament as a candidate in his old constituency. Could this be how Hollande sees himself emerging as the Left’s Prime Minister working in cohabitation with his old chum, successor, and now throroughly detested rival, Macron?
Another unexpected closet supporter of the Left is Aurélien Rousseau. Variously, Macron’s Health Minister and Prime Minister Elizaeth Borne’s chief adviser, he left Macron’s Government because of the Immigration Law changes. He’ll now be the New Popular Front candidate in our neighbouring constituency. It’s previously been a traditional home for the (centre-)Right: in the 2022 election run-off, Macron’s candidate won 59% ofr the vote to Les Républicains’ 41%.
However, those interesting additions to the Socialists’ palette of candidates are more than offset by the news of old-fashioned bully-boy tactics employed (off-stage) by the tyrant who remains Godfather of the Hard Left.
Not only was Mélenchon’s personal favourite son, Quatennens (guilty of wife-beating) re-adopted as a candidate, but three sitting Deputies who’d all got on The Godfather’s wrong side by talking about the succession to Mélenchon, being out of favour for over a year, were all thrown under a bus and not been re-adopted.
The Socialists say they’ll protest against The Man Who Must Be Obeyed’s score-settling.
The New Popular Front programme
The haters, and there are many (and, yes, many certainly have real ground for hate) awaited the details of the Popular Front’s programme to determine its unacceptability.
How much had the hated Mélenchon’s acolytes got their way on key political issues? That would determine the level of opprobrium to be heaped on the Left, and the extent of the legitimate rejection of the ‘democratic’ or ‘republican’ Left for their capitulation to the Hard Left’s cohorts.
Much to the Haters’ Horror, the programme (called a ‘contract’) is a long way from the 2022 version of a wish-list of 650 promises. This has ‘only’ 150 pledges. They’re set out in the form of what’s to be done within 15 days, what will be achieved over the first 100 days.
And in relation to certain touchstone issues, the democratic Socialists (with their Green and Communist partners) ‘won’ against certain harder-Left elements of France Unbound:
- unambiguous support for Ukraine – ‘we will unwaveringly defend the sovereignty and liberty of the Ukrainian people and the integrity of their borders’ and supports ‘the delivery of the necessary weaponry’
- far from Mélenchon’s idiotic statement that there was some ‘vestigial’ antisemitism’ in France, the programme recognises an ‘explosion’ of antisemitism, proposing inter-Ministerial programmes to fight antisemitism, and Islamophobia too [weirdly, for my more republican fellow-citizens, references to Islamophobia are seen as an uncomfortable extension of the arm of the Hard Left]
- on Gaza there’s not only a call for a cease-fire, immediate recognition of the Palestine state, and a rejection of the Israeli Government, and its policies, but demands too for release of the Israeli hostages and condemnation of Hamas’s 7th October attack as a ‘terrorist massacre’ [thus far, France Unbound has never used the word ‘terrorist’ in association with Hamas]
The programme is wide-ranging and costly. And there’s remarkably little which shows how it’s all to be paid for. The Left will:
- reverse Macron’s reforms to both retirement and unemployment benefit
- freeze energy and fuel prices, as well as the price of essential food items
- increase the minimum wage to €1600/month after tax
- raise housing benefit for the poorest by 10%
- reverse Macron’s immigration and asylum changes (which all pandered to, and encouraged support for, the Right and Far Right)
- have class sizes of no more than 19, recruiting tens of thousands of teachers.
To pay for some of these expensive changes, the Left will re-introduce the wealth tax (which Macron replaced by a mansion tax), and get rid of other tax benefits Macron put in place for the better-off and the entrepreneurs.
Gabriel Attal instantly dismissed the programme as costing maybe €286 billion plus a million jobs and will, he said, result in an explosion of France’s debt. Regrtettably France has no real equivalent of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, almost universally accepted in the UK for providing a truly independent, and reliable analysis of proposed taxation changes. So here there’s only rival versions of the truth to be weighed up.
The National Rally Programme
Not much has been written here about the putative cost of the Le Pen/Bardella Far-Right programme. Maybe some will try costing it – it was interesting that Attal was faster talking about the cost of the The Left’s promises, than those of the Far Right.
French politics today 
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