Another view on the 2024 French Legislative Elections

In the first words of his Tempest interview, The French elections and the defeat of the far right, Sylvestre Jaffard acknowledges,

The main reason [for the parliamentary setback to the right] was not people voting differently. It was the fact that the rules are very different for the elections to the European parliament and for the national parliament.

This is refreshing, since most Left coverage of the election has focused on the fact that the neofascist Rassemblement National (RN) came in third in number of seats in the National Assembly, not that it again came in first in the number of votes.

The interview presents the view of Jafford’s organization, the NPA-l’Anticapitaliste (NPA-A). The NPA-A is one of four main fragments of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA), formed in 2009 and has been splintered over the years since.

The NPA-A and another NPA fragment, Ensemble! (the exclamation point distinguishing it from the Ensemble of French President Emmanuel Macron), participated in the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) and supported its candidates, mostly from parties with long histories of serving French neoliberal imperialism.

Two other NPA fragments, the NPA-Révolutionnaire (NPA-R) and Révolution Permanente (RP), refused to participate in the NFP, running their own candidates in the first round of the elections. The NPA-R ran thirty candidates, while RP ran one. Lutte Ouvrière (LO), never part of the NPA, ran 550.

I agree with the choice of the NPA-R, RP, and LO to run their own candidates in the first round of the elections, but I think they should have urged those who voted for them in the first round to vote for candidates of the NFP in the second round. They did not.

The NPA-R advocated voting for candidates of the La France Insoumise (LFI, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon) and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), but not for candidates of the other NFP parties, the Parti Socialiste (PS) and Les Écologistes (Greens). RP advocated a boycott. LO said that voters should do as they pleased.

Jaffard explains the political controversy, as he sees it:

Other organizations stood aside from the NFP, such as Lutte Ouvrière, the NPA-Révolutionnaire, Révolution Permanente. The arguments vary a little, but to my mind they share the same basic weaknesses: the RN is seen mainly as just another version of bourgeois politics and there is no immediate fascist danger.

Many social democrats and some revolutionary socialists advocate voting for Kamala Harris and the Democrats to counter what they see as the fascist danger posed by Donald Trump and the Republicans. The parallel is a good reason to look more deeply into the claims and counterclaims about France.

Results of the 2024 French legislative elections

Left enthusiasts for the results of the French elections rightly celebrate the electoral defeat of the RN and the placement of the NFP ahead of Ensemble, Macron’s governing coalition. However, Marxists need to confront the problem that the elections open no way forward for the working class.

Popular vote

Left enthusiasts focus on the number of seats the four main electoral blocs won. The popular vote is more revealing. Here’s a summary of the results, in order of the popular vote:

Rassemblement National (RN)

10,647,914 votes (33.21%) 1st round

10,109,044 votes (37.06%) 2nd round

142 seats

Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP)

9,042,485 votes (28.21%) 1st round

7,039,429 votes (25.80%) 2nd round

180 seats

Ensemble

6,820,446 votes (21.28%) 1st round

6,691,619 votes (24.53%) 2nd round

159 seats

Les Républicains (LR, the traditional center-right)

2,106,166 votes (6.57%) 1st round

1,474,650 votes (5.41%) 2nd round

39 seats

Compared with the results of the participating parties in the two rounds of the 2022 legislative elections, the RN gained 12.92 million votes, the NFP gained 3.69 million votes, Ensemble lost 0.35 million votes, and LR lost 0.5 million votes.

The main story is the RN’s advance, not an NFP victory.

Parliamentary impasse

The results show the electoral strength of the RN and the NFP, but neither has enough deputies and allies to form a government. Only Ensemble has a path to forming a government.

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal tendered his resignation after Ensemble lost its working majority in the National Assembly. President Macron asked Attal to stay on until a new government could be formed.

On September 5, Macron named LR’s Michel Barnier as prime minister. Barnier can’t form a coalition government with a majority in the National Assembly, but he could form a minority government supported by Ensemble and LR and survive if the RN chooses not to join an NFP-initiated vote of no confidence.

This arrangement would further normalize the RN, a price Macron and Barnier seem willing to pay. It would also be unstable, since the RN seeks to position itself as anti-establishment, and sooner or later would have to oppose the government.

Macron hopes for a more stable solution by detaching the PS and the Greens from the NFP with the offer of ministerial positions in the government. This could work. The previous incarnation of the NFP bloc, the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (NUPES), came together for the 2022 elections and fell apart in October 2023 when the PS declared a “moratorium” on participation over the refusal of NUPES to condemn Hamas.

Ensemble, allied with the PS, the Greens, and LR, would have a majority in the National Assembly. Macron could use the presence of LR to reject demands from the PS and the Greens, and vice versa.

With or without a new parliamentary majority, the 2024 elections are likely to mean a continuation of Macron’s anti-working-class policies, unless those policies are countered with mass action.

Nouveau Front Populaire

The NFP is now in its fourth incarnation. In 1981, François Mitterrand of the PS was elected president with second-round support from the PCF and the Greens.Mitterrand ran on a platform of resisting the neoliberal turn of Britain under Margaret Thatcher and the United States under Ronald Reagan. Instead, his fifteen-year presidency saw France swept by the neoliberal tide.

The bloc’s second incarnation was the Gauche Plurielle, which governed France from 1997 to 2002. Again, its political leadership promised resistance to neoliberalism and failed to deliver.

The bloc’s parties were in electoral exile until the 2022 legislative elections, when NUPES came in second, behind Ensemble. NUPES fell apart in 2023 and re-formed as the NFP in 2024.

The NFP does not challenge French capitalism and imperialism. A surprise victory and a reprieve from the RN, an article by NPA-A leader Léon Crémieux published in International Viewpoint, summarizes the NFP platform as follows:

The NFP said that if it were able to form a government, its first decisions would be to raise the minimum wage (SMIC) from 1,400 to 1,600 Euros net, increase civil servants’ wages by 10 percent, index wages to prices, repeal the pension reform and increased retirement age of 64 imposed by Macron a year ago, introduce a freeze on essential prices, and increase housing benefit by 10 percent. This would obviously be a positive step.

A positive step, yes. If the NFP were able to form a government, which it isn’t, and if it implemented its program, which its predecessors’ record suggests is doubtful.

The victory in the elections is that 63–67 percent of voters rejected the RN, and 26–28 percent voted for candidates they perceived as anti-neoliberal, not any practical results likely to come from the NFP vote. Marxists should say this.

The  Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA)

The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), the French section of the FI, transformed itself into the NPA in 2009 to try to close the gap between its relatively small membership and its large vote in elections. The LCR had only a few thousand members, yet in the first round of the 2002 presidential election Olivier Besancenot, its candidate, garnered 1.2 million votes (4.25 percent). In the first round of the 2007 presidential election, Besancenot won 1.5 million votes (4.1 percent).

The NPA launched in 2009 with 9,200 members, but it fell short of the LCR’s election results and quickly began to lose members. It suffered a series of splits, as various components sought greener pastures.

Gauche Anticapitaliste (GA), now Ensemble!, split from the NPA in 2012 to join the Front de Gauche (FG), a predecessor of the NFP.

The Courante Communiste Révolutionnaire (CCR), now RP, split from the NPA in 2021 for essentially sectarian reasons. Its leadership saw that the NPA left would win a majority and decided to split, rather than be a minority in a left-led NPA.

The NPA-A and the NPA-R split from each other in 2022, each taking about half the organization. The NPA-A wanted to draw closer to Mélenchon’s NUPES/NFP project, and the NPA-R wanted to maintain the NPA’s traditional independence.

Ensemble!, the NPA-A, and the NPA-R include members of the Fourth International (FI). RP is the French section of the Fracción Trotskista – Cuarta Internacional (FT-CI), whose U.S. affiliate is Left Voice.

Marxist electoral policy

Marxists have supported running candidates in capitalist elections from the beginning of our movement. As Karl Marx and Frederick Engels explained in the 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League:

Here the proletariat must take care: 1) that by sharp practices local authorities and government commissioners do not, under any pretext whatsoever, exclude any section of workers; 2) that workers’ candidates are nominated everywhere in opposition to bourgeois-democratic candidates. As far as possible they should be League members and their election should be pursued by all possible means. Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.

As the 1850 Address further explains, revolutionaries should run on what the Third and Fourth Internationals called transitional demands.

The Communist International developed these policies in its Theses on the Communist Parties and Parliamentarism, adopted by the Second Congress, August 1920; On Tactics and The Organizational Structure of the Communist Parties, the Methods and Content of Their Work: Theses, adopted by the Third Congress, July 1921; Theses on Comintern Tactics, adopted by the Fourth Congress, December 1922; and Theses On The United Front, adopted by the Executive Committee, December 1922.

In the French elections, a platform of transitional demands would start from immediate demands like raising wages and lowering the retirement age, and extend to demands challenging French capitalism and imperialism, including nationalizations, open borders, abolishing NATO, French demilitarization, and freedom for Kanaky (New Caledonia). The anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist demands would be largely educational for now, but they would show the way forward to workers’ power and a workers’ government.

The documents cited above deal with situations in which a communist party can run its own candidates. Where it can’t or decides not to for tactical reasons, the historic Marxist policy has been to give critical support to other parties to move the political situation forward. The most famous explication of this policy is V. I. Lenin’s in the chapter “‘Left-Wing’ Communism in Great Britain” from Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. I’ll quote at some length from this, because the boycott position is strong in parts of the far Left, including in both France and the United States.

[T]he fact that most British workers still follow the lead of the British Kerenskys or Scheidemanns and have not yet had experience of a government composed of these people—an experience which was necessary in Russia and Germany so as to secure the mass transition of the workers to communism—undoubtedly indicates that the British Communists should participate in parliamentary action, that they should, from within parliament, help the masses of the workers see the results of a Henderson and Snowden government in practice, and that they should help the Hendersons and Snowdens defeat the united forces of Lloyd George and Churchill…

I will put it more concretely… The Communist Party should propose the following “compromise” election agreement to the Hendersons and Snowdens: let us jointly fight against the alliance between Lloyd George and the Conservatives; let us share parliamentary seats in proportion to the number of workers’ votes polled for the Labour Party and for the Communist Party (not in elections, but in a special ballot), and let us retain complete freedom of agitation, propaganda and political activity…

If the Hendersons and the Snowdens accept a bloc on these terms, we shall be the gainers, because the number of parliamentary seats is of no importance to us; we are not out for seats… We shall be the gainers, because we shall carry our agitation among the masses at a time when Lloyd George himself has “incensed” them, and we shall not only be helping the Labour Party to establish its government sooner, but shall also be helping the masses sooner to understand the communist propaganda that we shall carry on against the Hendersons, without any reticence or omission.

2024 French legislative elections

As a general policy, revolutionary socialists should run their own candidates, if they can, and critically support the candidates of working-class or radical petty-bourgeois parties, if they can’t run their own. In theory, this was the policy of the NPA until its terminal split in 2022.

In the 2024 French legislative elections, the strength of the RN was no reason to abandon this policy. The RN couldn’t win a majority in the National Assembly, and presenting an anti-capitalist political alternative was more important than marginally increasing the NFP’s first-round vote.

Revolutionary socialists should have supported the NPA-R, RP, and LO candidates in the first round of the elections, saying clearly they would support the candidates of the NFP in the second round. The latter both to help block the RN from gaining a majority in the National Assembly and to reach the workers and youth who support the NFP.

With the elections over, revolutionaries should turn to the trade unions and the movements to build the mass resistance needed to reverse the continuing rightward drift of capitalist politics. That’s also the best way to limit the appeal of the RN.

The legislative elections were an opportunity for revolutionaries to explain their politics and to expose, not only the parties of the right and center, but also, in different terms, the reformist parties of the NFP. The main fight is now in the streets and on the picket lines.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”