The left is displaying some dissonance over the strategy to adopt in the face of Michel Barnier. Launched into a new cycle of consultations this week, with a view to forming his government, the new Prime Minister will meet the Communists on Tuesday. They are the only ones on the left of the political spectrum to have accepted a meeting with the new occupant of Matignon before his general policy statement. “To see what he has in his belly”, according to the formula of Fabien Roussel, the national secretary of the PCF. The Greens preferred to wait for the appointment of the new executive, “to avoid any ambiguity” about a possible participation, indicated Marine Tondelier. On the side of the rebellious, Manuel Bompard, the coordinator of LFI, indicated last week that he had not received any invitation.
As for the socialists, they simply refused to meet the new occupant of Matignon, a position that is not really unanimous within the party: “It is a unilateral decision, which comes from the First Secretary. Boris Vallaud [le président du groupe PS à l’Assemblée nationale, ndlr]was presented with a fait accompli,” stormed a parliamentarian to Public Sénat.
Removed from power despite its narrow victory in the early legislative elections, the left can console itself by contemplating the wide political space offered by the arrival of a Prime Minister from the ranks of the LR, and who benefits from the clemency of the National Rally. However, the New Popular Front (NFP), torn by strategic divergences, but also the animosity of some towards others, struggles to display a clear line, despite a concern for unity, essential to succeed in counterbalancing the weight of the central bloc and the right.
“The NFP alliance will be stronger than that of Nupes”
“Everyone responded to Michel Barnier's invitation in their own way, everyone has their own philosophy on this type of meeting, but the substance remains coherent,” assures Guillaume Gontard, the president of the environmentalist group in the Senate. “We have a common program and expectations. Unity is there, preserved,” emphasizes the elected official. Upon arrival, discussions or not with the Prime Minister, all the left-wing forces should fall back on their feet via a motion of censure that all the political groups of the NFP have already announced that they want to sign. “Unless Michel Barnier renounces 50 years of political life in the service of the right and ultra-liberalism, which would be a huge surprise…”, smiles Senator Ian Brossat, spokesperson for the PCF.
“Generally speaking, I think that the NFP alliance will be stronger than that of NUPES. The differences are less marked, the balance of power has changed, we are no longer crushed by a hegemonic group,” continues the communist, targeting, without naming them, the rebels, now closely followed by a PS which has gone from 31 to 66 deputies.
The proposal to impeach Emmanuel Macron initiated by LFI
But if unanimous opposition to a government that is set to be very right-wing seems to be a given, other parliamentary obstacles are looming on the horizon, likely to shake up the cohesion of the left. Starting with the proposed resolution to dismiss the President of the Republic, tabled by Mathilde Panot, the leader of the Insoumis group. The Bureau of the National Assembly is examining the admissibility of this text on Tuesday, which, if necessary, will be referred to the Law Commission. Olivier Faure and Marine Tondelier have distanced themselves from this initiative. In the Senate, Patrick Kanner, the leader of the Socialist elected representatives, had even described it as a “constitutional incongruity”. But now, with the left now in the majority within the bureau – 12 seats out of 22 – the NFP has the power to allow this text to follow its parliamentary path or not.
At the risk of creating a precedent; to date, the only attempt to dismiss the Fifth Republic, brought by the right against François Hollande in 2016, had been deemed inadmissible. “I can tell you that the beam is working very hard within the PS,” confides a socialist heavyweight. “Between those who refuse to let this text pass the Bureau, and those who would be tempted to go further…”
“We discussed it in a group meeting, and we are rather in favour of this resolution proposal passing the Bureau stage,” explains Génération.s MP Sophie Taillé-Polian, who sits with the environmentalists. “Impeachment is not a good prospect to give people. I don't think we should look towards a new presidential election to resolve a crisis caused by hyper-presidentialisation. Nevertheless, we think it would be good to have a debate in the chamber on the role of the president, knowing that this mechanism has very little chance of succeeding.”
The RN's trap on the repeal of pension reform
On October 31, other debates are likely to shake up the NFP, this time directly under the eye of the cameras: those of the parliamentary niche of the RN, which has chosen to include on the agenda a bill on the repeal of the pension reform. Should the left, which fought against raising the legal retirement age to 64, support a text drafted by the far right? Some elected officials, such as Sandrine Rousseau, Green MP for Paris, refuse to do so. “We must stop letting the far right impose our agenda on us. The left has no lessons to learn from the RN, which has constantly changed its position on pensions. I would be in favor of not taking part in this vote, and using the next parliamentary niche of the NFP to submit our own proposal for repeal. Our approach will be more credible than that of the far right,” explains Guillaume Gontard.
The communists, for their part, are not ruling anything out. “When we say that we want to do everything to ensure that this unfair pension reform carried out behind the backs of the French is repealed, we must be consistent, and therefore we must do everything to ensure that it is repealed,” explained Fabien Roussel on the sidelines of the Fête de l'Humanité in Brétigny-sur-Orge. “When we vote on a bill, we vote for a text, not for those who support it,” added Ian Brossat.
The rebels are more nuanced on the subject: “I don't know how this text will come about, or in what manner it will come about. Until now, we have never voted for an RN text, and I have no desire to give them a political victory,” Mathilde Panot, the president of the rebel group in the National Assembly, admitted on France 3. As for the socialists, they too have not yet made up their minds, a manager told us, adding: “Obviously this text is a trap for the left!”
For the moment, the exchanges between the two sides are not always the most fluid. Even if the main leaders of the NFP meet regularly, it is not uncommon for certain positions to be announced to the partners on the occasion of an awkward – or opportune – statement in the press. “Among the ecologists, we think that an intergroup must be quickly reestablished in the National Assembly [celui qui avait été créé du temps de la Nupes n’a pas survécu aux divergences sur le conflit israélo-palestinien, ndlr]so that we do not stop chasing the statements of one and the other. It is essential to have a regular working framework, in addition to meetings between parties,” argues Sophie Taillé-Polian.
The Mélenchon/Ruffin divorce
But beyond positions on parliamentary issues, the left will also have to agree on its electoral strategy if it wants to maintain its unity until the end of the five-year term, or at least until the next election. On this point, it is on the LFI side that the disagreements have been the strongest in recent days. This weekend, the 2024 edition of the Fête de l'Humanité confirmed the break between François Ruffin and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the founder of La France Insoumise, over a fundamental disagreement. The former denounced, in a book and then a long interview with Nouvel Obs, the communitarian positions of the latter. Statements that triggered the ire of the Insoumis lieutenants, who now accuse François Ruffin of sweeping “the anti-racist fight under the carpet”.
The Somme MP believes that La France insoumise, focused on the vote of young people and suburbs, has partly cut itself off from a working-class and rural electorate, which has fallen into the hands of the National Rally, and calls for maintaining the link with these voters. There is “an immense common ground between the France of the towns and the France of the towers, and a path to unite them” hammered home François Rufin on the stage of the Agora this weekend. The director of Merci Patron! did not fail to be heckled, notably by the new Insoumis MP Raphaël Arnault.
“The left must not abandon its DNA in the fight against racism. To think today that the far-right vote is only a social vote and does not implicitly reflect the divisions in society based on skin colour and religion, I think that this is a diagnostic error that leads to political errors,” commented MEP Manon Aubry, this Monday morning on franceinfo. “I do not think that the shift of certain categories of voters towards the National Rally is a one-way ticket. But I do not deny the difficulty that this problem represents. When the left was in the majority in France, it won in most of the constituencies that are now won by the RN. We cannot wash our hands of our responsibilities,” commented Ian Brossat.
“François Rufin says from the inside, since he is a stakeholder in LFI, what we have been saying for a long time from the outside, that is to say that there is a sectarian, brutal, communitarian drift and above all a minority strategy on the part of La France insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon,” reacted François Hollande to the microphone of the Grand Jury RTL-Le Figaro-Public Sénat. The former socialist president calls on his political family to resume “the leadership of the left” by “asserting themselves on each subject as socialists, rather than seeking unity for the sake of unity with positions that are not ours on the left.”
“We cannot yet claim to exercise any kind of hegemony on the left with a party in political reconstruction,” mocks a socialist leader who is very critical of the line of rapprochement with LFI. At this stage, however, he excludes the possibility of an emancipation. “We feel that between Mélenchon and Roussel, it is not joyful, but Marine Tondelier has positions that are closer to those of the rebellious than to ours, and we cannot do without the greens.”
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