The Inability to Build a French Common Left Front

Palais de l’Élysée, official residence of the President of France (Flickr)

By Sophia George (SFS ‘23)

Despite Christiane Taubira’s clear win in a late January “people’s primary” created in an attempt to unite the French left, the results will not make a significant difference in the landscape of the 2022 French presidential elections. Even with the primary’s large turnout, the rise of personalist candidates and right-wing groups has made any rallying of a united left Front difficult.

People’s Primary and the French Left

After a four-day period that finished on January 30 2022, a “people’s primary” selected Christiane Taubira, a former justice minister who served under the government of President François Hollande from 2012 to 2016, as the “favorite” presidential candidate to represent France’s left wing.

Of a total of 467,000 people signed-up to participate in the online vote, close to 393,000 citizens ultimately voted in the primary. Young grassroots political activists, including “environmentalists, feminists, and anti-racism groups,” spearheaded this event in an attempt to rally a French left that has faced major difficulty in unifying its electorate in a landscape currently dominated by right-wing parties. The primary’s substantial participation made it the largest primary in the 2022 presidential election cycle, which will see its first round of official voting in April.

In French presidential elections, there are a maximum of two rounds of direct voting: if no single candidate receives over 50% of total votes in the first round, the top two performing candidates face off in a second round where the candidate with a simple majority of votes will ultimately win. In the 2022 election cycle, the first round will commence on April 10, and the second round, if needed, will begin April 24.

Christiane Taubira, former justice minister under the government of President François Hollande from 2012 to 2016 and the winner of the Left’s unofficial people’s primary in 2022 (Flickr)

In the primary vote, participants graded candidates on a “five-point scale,” from “lacking” to “very good.” The primary listed seven officially-named candidates: Christiane Taubira, Yannick Jadot (Greens), Jean-Luc Mélenchon (of La France Insoumise), Euro MP Pierre Larrouturou, Anne Hidalgo (Socialist candidate and current mayor of Paris), and others. In the aftermath of the voting, Taubira secured a clear win with a final grade of “good +,” contrasting with Jadot’s “fairly good +,” Mélenchon’s “fairly good –,” and Hidalgo’s embarrassing “passable +.”

After the results were finalized, Taubira took to the stage and delivered a speech at the Point Éphémère artistic center in Paris. She called for a united Left front, remarking, “we want a united left, a strong left,” and declaring that “we have a good road ahead of us…We don’t have the right to give up.”

However, many of Taubira’s rivals decided to neglect the results altogether, bringing into question whether the primary’s outcome will have any official impact on the elections at all. Jadot called the popular primary a “nonstarter,” while Mélenchon dismissed it as “obscure” and “a farce.” Hidalgo, facing a surprising blow to her campaign in the final results, argued that instead of being a “rallying moment for the entire left,” the primary “turned out to be just another candidacy.” In the meantime, polls still predict that, just as in 2017, not a single candidate on the Left will make it past the first round of the presidential election, despite the preponderance of left-wing candidates on the contemporary political scene.

Rise of Personality Politics

Thus, the primary’s results only confirm the continuation of the cycle of disunity on the French Left. Instead of paving the way for a candidate that could potentially unite the Left, the people’s primary continued to emphasize the French Left’s disunity since 2017, when, for the first time in the French Fifth Republic’s history, a candidate who didn’t belong to either the Republican or Socialist parties won the presidency. 

For decades, the conservatives—now known as the Republicans— and the Socialists dominated French politics, each taking turns winning presidential elections. While smaller parties such as the right-wing National Rally have been around since the 1960s, they were always regarded as fringe movements; the National Rally didn’t make it to the second round of the presidential election (where the two first-place candidates from the first round face off) until 2002. However, trends since the 2017 election cycle—where National Rally candidate Le Pen advanced into the second round to face Emmanuel Macron—have demonstrated that previously fringe parties as well as brand new parties led by charismatic personalities are here to stay.

Marine Le Pen, president of Le Rassemblement National (The National Rally) since 2011 and currently a leading candidate in the presidential race (Flickr)

The 2017 presidential election demonstrated an electorate increasingly focused on personalities rather than established parties. In that election, neither the Republicans nor the Socialists proved capable of fielding a candidate who made it to the second round of elections. 

This year, with Socialist candidate Hidalgo polling at a mere 2% and relatively newly-decided Republican candidate Pécresse at 15%, according to current POLITICO polls, neither will face off against Macron and his likely right-wing contender, Le Pen. For the second straight election, the electoral inferiority of the traditional parties in the face of fringe and emergent personalities is apparent.

Pierre Rosanvallon, a professor of modern political history at the Collège de France, attributes the decline of the Republican and Socialist Parties to the emergence of strong non-establishment personalities. He argues that supporters of the National Rally are, in fact, a “supporter’s club of Marine Le Pen,” having nothing to do with her specific party and more to do with devotion to her specifically. He even alludes to the National Rally’s dynastic nature, with current president Marine having replaced her father Jean-Marie. Current French President Emmanuel Macron fits this personality narrative as well, too, having created his own party En Marche! (Onward!) in 2016 just ahead of the 2017 elections and stirring enthusiasm among many voters with his charismatic, youthful demeanor.

On the French Right, this form of personality politics comes in the form of primarily populist, anti-immigrant, and Eurosceptic far right parties. Eric Zémmour, an author and controversial political pundit, officially declared his candidacy in November of 2021 and rapidly rose in popularity by building on the similar vein of anti-immigrant sentiment that Marine Le Pen relied upon in the last election cycle. Like Macron, Zémmour launched his own party Reconquête (Reconquest) ahead of the elections and is currently polling short of only Macron, Le Pen, and Pécresse.

French Far-Right Ideology

With a European Union already facing internal skepticism and the Russian-Ukraine crisis changing politics on the continent, the plethora of far-right personalities in France will be able to deal a great blow to EU unity if they gain control of the second most populous EU member state. While Marine Le Pen has attempted to dial-down her hostility to the EU in order to appeal to more centrist voters this election cycle, her 2017 campaign centered largely around distrust of the European Union, even going so far to suggest that France should disavow the euro currency and return to the franc. Sensing potential in her destruction of the EU framework, Russian donors  even channeled 10.8 million dollars into her 2017 campaign in hopes of securing a valuable ally in one of the EU’s key member states.

Furthermore, a presidency under any far-right candidate will endanger relations with the French immigrant community. Since a 1905 Concordat, France has long-since pursued a policy of secularism or “laïcité,” emphasizing the separation between church and state. Over the years, the Fifth Republic has been grappling with how to properly address the tension between religious freedom and state neutrality. Exacerbated by the 2015 European migration crisis, many immigrants coming into France arrived from Arab nations (due in large part to France’s colonialism in the Middle East) with largely Muslim populations. Far-right candidates, and even mainstream right and centrist officials as well, have weaponized the immigration crisis as posing a threat to French citizens and the success of the French republic. Eric Zémmour himself launched his campaign in tandem with the release of his most recent book, La France N’a Pas Dit Son Dernier Mot (France Has Not Said Its Last Word), which warned of a great “replacement.” Like what Marine Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen faced in regards to Holocaust denial, Zémmour himself was even found guilty of hate speech in mid-January of 2022 when he “described unaccompanied migrant children as ‘thieves,’ ‘rapists,’ and ‘murderers.’”

Eric Zemmour, far-right wing founder and leader of political party Reconquête!, launched in 2021. (Wikimedia)

Despite a Left-sponsored primary with the most registered voters so far in the 2022 presidential election cycle, the rise of personality politics, a political arena crowded by far-right wing populist groups, and left-wing candidates’ own disregard for the primary for self-interested purposes make it unlikely that any left-wing candidate will make it past the first round of voting. If the French Left cannot field a candidate this election cycle, their failure to do so in 2017 will no longer seem like an aberration. Yet again, the French electorate will have to choose between a centrist and a rightist, continuing to push left-wing agendas and influence into the peripheries of French politics.