Like with the Yellow Vests – the French left comes through for the West

– From the 2018 book Dans la tête des gilets jaunes

And now you have France Insoumise leading a surprise leftist coalition victory in France’s snap parliamentary elections, and possibly being awarded the post of prime minister.

Perhaps I can no longer use the local dictum: France is a Latin country run by a north European government?

It’s fair to say that, after the Covid pause, Yellow Vestism – if not any actual Yellow Vests – prevailed last night. The National Rally fell to third, with the Macronistas proving that placing second truly is interchangeable with death sometimes.

More accurate, however, is celebrating the fact that the French left has once again proven to be the most leftist in the pre-1991 West. Yes, Labor won power in the UK just a few days ago, but nobody can compare Labor’s platform with that of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed).

Facing a far-right threat – and Macron is, I must remind, far-right in terms of economics, democracy, foreign policy, etc – the French people stood up to the would-be dictators and bullies.

Enjoy the victory, fellow leftists! There might be a genuine leftist French prime minister for the first time in nearly 100 years! The New Popular Front leftist coalition is based on the 1936 win of the original Popular Front, which made Leon Blum was the last true leftist (not far-leftist) to run the country.

Now don’t dwell on how that turned out just yet! Enjoy the victory, as they sure did in Paris. At the New Popular Front’s voting day headquarters at Place Stalingrad they were cheering and getting cars to honk their horns until after 1 am. Everybody I spoke with was ecstatic; every Muslim genuinely relived.

How it happened

Well, of course the Western MSM is going to downplay the electoral chances of any leftist victory….

In the end, the left’s win was easily predictable. It always seems that way in hindsight, of course, but it is easily explainable.

Round one results were 38% for the National Rally, 28% for the New Popular Front and 20% for Macron. Consider that many French use round one as a “protest vote” – not voting for the same candidate in the second round even when that candidate is still available – and the National Rally and New Popular Front appear much closer.

Now add in something little-known outside of France: the “Republican front”, which was truly the only unanimous victor yesterday. This is the label for the electoral tactic where the centrists and leftists band together to draw votes away from the far-right by dropping out of a (generally) 3-person 2nd round race if they don’t have a real chance to win. Some of their voters don’t choose the far-right, even if they are voting for a party they don’t like, and has been a real tool to keep the National Rally from winning for decades. Last night the National Rally called it an “alliance of dishonor”, but that’s nonsense – voters have a right to vote against someone rather than for someone, and it happens all the time in Western democracies. Out of 577 seats the Republican Front was applied in 218 constituencies, so it was a big factor in dropping the National Rally’s 2nd round total.

Throw in the fact of a long-standing rejection of handing domestic power to the National Front – they won a total of just 14 seats in Parliament from 1988 until 2022, when they won 17% of the vote; in 2016 they held just 0.4% of all French elected offices – and you can see why they didn’t leap all the way to gaining absolute majority.

Very few polls predicted that was even possible – most expected they would only win a plurality, which instead the New Popular Front won. Final 2nd round results: New Popular Front 32% of seats in the National Assembly, Macron’s party got 28% of seats, while the National Rally and its allies took 25% of seats.

Until 2022 the National Front was truly the definition of a paper tiger, domestically. Their popularity rested on the reality that Western media is almost always owned by right-wing conservatives and the true safety valve which is European Parliament. The National Front/Rally had won the most seats there three elections in a row. That fact made Macron’s reason for calling for snap elections – he wanted a “clarification” after the National Rally won the June EU elections – so very disingenuous. Their win there was no seismic shock at all, and certainly not a reason to suddenly declare invalid the public’s votes from 2022.

Macron got his comeuppance – finally.

The death of dictator Macron

I’m just using the language of people I talked to yesterday, and I am referring to people not at any political rally – calling Macron a “dictator” is common in France. As an objective reporter: how could anyone say he doesn’t deserve it? He says he won’t resign, and who says he’ll now stop using the “49.3” executive decree to force into law whatever he wants?

Macron actually called the snap elections because he truly did hope to give power to the National Rally. This was admitted by Macron père last week:

“It’s better for France to experience it for two years than for five. If the RN shows in two years that it’s perfectly incapable of governing, we can hope that it won’t go any further. That’s what my son told me two months before the European elections.”

Macron wanted to hand the National Rally a poisoned chalice – the fact that the next three years are going to witness the West forced to bear even more disasters on top of their current disasters of Gaza, Ukraine, the permanently disfiguring effects of record inflation, the return of Trumpism, continued post-Covid cultural and political disunity and disorder, etc. – so that they’d be discredited and unpopular by the time of the next elections in 2027.

But now: why would they be blamed when they’re only in 3rd place? Macron “gambled” – as the MSM blithely writes – with the real, legal, 2022 votes of the entire nation and he completely failed everyone, most of all himself.

The only real certainty is that Macronism is dead – may it never return! My personal contempt for the man – after witnessing what was truly a dictatorial response to the Yellow Vest protests – cannot be expressed fully. I have no desire to waste more ink on this guy. All I can say is: he had an opportunity to be spectacularly popular in French history… if only he didn’t think like Emmanuel Macron.

The bad news… which you postpone thinking about until later

Unfortunately, the left is primed to constantly hear the most common criticism of the French left and the Western left in general: that they are too “incompetent” to govern.

Get ready to hear that about France for the next calendar year (another election isn’t constitutionally permissible for the next 365 days). Having the post of prime minister – even if all the Western disasters ceased this minute – in a hung parliament means the certain ineffectiveness and incapacity for results will be hung on them.

That is such a certainty because the French system is not at all designed for coalition building and there is no history of it.

Every major party said on the day after the election that they won’t join in any coalition whatsoever. Macronistas view the left and the far-right as the same (stupidly); the left hates Macronistas and the National Rally (correctly); the National Rally hates anyone who isn’t White, Christian, French, as well as the left and Macronistas. Animosity in Western politics is normal, but the point is that no one is going to get past it for the good of France even when their policies converge. You now have three almost equally-sized blocs – the French system is designed to function with a parliament and presidency of the same party, and they don’t have it. Put it this way: the traditional conservatives are the group say they are going to move out of the country.

So Macron’s plan completely backfired in almost every way: the National Front will not be totally blamed for any chaos, and even boosted their representation in Parliament from 17 to 25%; Macronism has gone from a 61% supermajority in 2017 to just 29% of seats, and they will get a lot of blame for upcoming ineffective government no matter how much they try to deflect; the Left has more power than in 100 years and the chance – or at least the pulpit – to make a case for winning the presidency and parliament in 2027.

One certainty: you can cue the MSM and high finance war on the New Popular Front, as they do with any newly-elected leftist government. If that government still succeeds then they move on to sanctions and war.

There’s also the issue of the fake-leftists, who are so rampant in the West….

The New Popular Front is composed like this: Out of 180 seats 75 are held by France Unbowed, 65 for the Socialist Party (huge comeback), 33 for the Ecologists and 20 for the Communists and other far-leftists.

The math is clear: It’s completely fair to say that the New Popular Front is actually a right-wing leftist coalition, and not a “hard-left” one, as is being endlessly repeated in MSM media coverage.

For any issue of anti-imperialism and leftist economics throw out plenty of Greens and Socialists, of course. France Unbowed is what many refer to as a “real” left  – like what existed in the West prior to the USSR’s elites decision to implode and dissolve.

This is not at all a “united front” – a joining together of society’s leftist struggles – but a “popular front” – an electoral alliance. Huge distinction.

The Yellow Vests famously refused the type of class-collaborationist model which a popular front is based on. “The Radicals (Western Liberal Democratic reformists) are the democratic party of French imperialism – any other definition is a lie,” wrote Trotsky when analysing 1930s France. It’s true.

And Trotsky was totally right when he predicted that the National Front would underdeliver on its economic policies and fail to stop the fascists from coming to power. Blum is the French Chamberlain and just as poorly-remembered.

But nobody likes Trotskyists for a reason: to them everything is destined to fail except for Trotskyism. Well, they don’t have a crystal ball.

I could write more in-depth here about the failures of all experiences with poplar fronts – and I did predict the failure of pretty much the exact same popular font electoral alliance in the 2022 legislative elections in my book on the Yellow Vests. But today is not the day for that. 2024 is not 1936, and to say otherwise is to deny the reality of today.

There is no revolutionary party in France or the West: reformism is the only game in town, and that’s just the reality of what’s possible here. Look at Mexico: AMLO and Morena needed just one full term in office to convince the people in one of the world’s regional powers to hand them not just power but supermajorities across the board. Macron has gifted the French left a real opportunity: a platform to make their case, with unprecedented amplitude, to the French public that they should be handed power in 2027.

The working-class, the working-poor, the average person, the average family – they detest the inequality-cementing economic policies and guaranteed warmongering of Western liberal democracy. The social programs of the left (like Morena offered to Mexico for the first time in their history) couldn’t be more necessary amid the record inflation in France. You have perhaps noticed I don’t use “far-right” to describe the National Rally – they aren’t far-right in terms of economics (or some foreign policy), because even if they want to be racist in how they hand them out they are openly pro-redistribution/anti-austerity for the vast majority of (White) France; all of France’s parties are Islamophobic to a real degree, anyway- because they are more likely to vote with the left’s economic policies than any Macronista sitting in Parliament.

The opportunity to show progress, to win over, to make a claim, to continue to discredit the traditional policies of Western Liberal Democracy – it’s here, truly. And that is worth celebrating today!

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Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Mexico, South Korea, Switzerland, Tunisia and elsewhere. His latest book is France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese. Any reposting or republication of any of these articles is approved and appreciated. He tweets at @RaminMazaheri2 and writes at substack.com/@raminmazaheri