The French left after the presidential election

Submitted by martin on 22 April, 2012 - 8:51

With 99% of the votes counted from the first round (22 April), François Hollande of the Socialist Party looks set for victory in the French presidential election.

He scored 28.6% in the first round. The second round of the election, on 5 May, will be a run-off between Hollande and the right-wing outgoing president, Nicolas Sarkozy. With Sarkozy behind even on the first round, on 27.1%, the odds are that Hollande will win.

Marine Le Pen, of the neo-fascist, anti-immigrant National Front, scored an alarming 18.0%.

On the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon got 11.1% on the first round - less than the 17% he got on some opinion polls, but way ahead of the 5% which polls gave him at the start of the campaign. Mélenchon was the candidate of the Left Front, a coalition of the Communist Party and a number of smaller groups including Mélenchon's own Left Party (a splinter from the Socialist Party).

Philippe Poutou of the NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party) got 1.2%, and Nathalie Arthaud of Lutte Ouvrière, 0.6%. These are poor results compared to the scores of the revolutionary left in 2002 and 2007.

Almost all of Mélenchon's voters will go for Hollande in the second round. According to polls, a large majority of Le Pen's voters will back Sarkozy in the second round, but many will abstain; the 9% who voted for the centre-right candidate François Bayrou will divide fairly evenly between Hollande and Sarkozy, again with many abstentions. These transfers look like giving Hollande victory on 5 May.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a former Socialist Party left-winger, a minister in the last SP-led government, who split away from the SP in 2009 to form his own splinter group, the Parti de Gauche (PdG, Left Party). The PdG is small, but Mélenchon was the candidate not just of the PdG but of the Front de Gauche, or Left Front, an alliance of the PdG and smaller groups with the reduced but still large French Communist Party.

In the last presidential election, the CP got a dismal vote (1.9%) for the perfunctory candidature of a CP apparatchik, Marie-George Buffet. This time not only CP members but the still-large periphery of people influenced by or sympathetic to the CP were mobilised for Mélenchon.

Mélenchon's 11.1% seems to have included many young voters. It signifies that a large chunk of the electorate voted for full reimbursement (rather than partial, under France's "social insurance" system) of health charges, renationalisation of public services, a return to full pension rights at age 60, an increase in the minimum wage, etc., all summed up under the slogans of "a citizens' revolution" and "a Sixth Republic".

This represents a constituency of great importance for the left

There is a downside, however. The total vote to the left of the Socialist Party seems to be up a bit compared to 2007, but down on 2002 and 1995.

The totals for candidates describing themselves as "communist", "socialist", "revolutionary", or "left", to the left of the SP, have been:

1995: CP 8.7%, LO 5.3%, total 14%
2002: LO 5.7%, LCR 4.3%, CP 3.4%, others 0.5%, total 13.9%
2007: LCR 4.1%, CP 1.9%, LO 1.3%, others 1.7%, total 9%
2012: FdG 11.1%, NPA 1.2%, LO 0.6%, total 12.9%

It's difficult to be precise on this, for example because it's difficult to tell whether we should count Green votes (low in 2012 and 2007, but 5.3% in 2002) as to the left of the SP. But the gist is that the increased vote for Mélenchon, compared to recent CP candidates, had as flipside a decreased vote for clearly revolutionary socialist candidates.

This probably doesn't mean that a core electorate who voted LO or NPA in 2007 and 2002 voted Mélenchon this time. Research has shown that a lot of the "far left" vote in France is fairly unstable - many people vote "far left" as a one-off protest - and many Mélenchon voters were young. However, the "far left" dropped back 5.3% on 2007, or 8.7% on 2002, and Mélenchon/ CP advanced 9.2% on 2007, 7.7% on 2002.

The drop in LO and LCR/NPA votes cannot plausibly be attributed to them running new people this time in place of their candidates in 2002 and 2007, Arlette Laguiller from LO and Olivier Besancenot from LCR. Besancenot at the start of his 2002 campaign, when he did a bit better than in 2007, was as unknown as Poutou this time. LO has worked hard since 2007 to establish Natalie Arthaud as the successor to Laguiller, and on the face of it Arthaud should be better able to gather votes than the visibly-aged 72-year-old Laguiller.

There is a big risk of a very destructive split in the NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party, successor to the LCR, Revolutionary Communist League), with a big minority splitting off into the Mélenchon camp, maybe joining the PdG.

Lutte Ouvrière is better geared to resist adversity. It has been telling its members at least since the 2007 election that they should face up to the fact that France is going through a period of working-class depression and they must buckle down and defend unpopular principles through times of adversity. Its candidate Nathalie Arthaud based her campaign not on current political agitation but on being "the only communist candidate", a pitch which LO will have known to be unlikely to draw support except from a declining constituency of diehard CP sympathisers. Still, the 0.6% score certainly won't help LO grow.

In ongoing political activity, the main product of Mélenchon's score looks like being a small revival of the Communist Party and a boost for the PdG. The CP is still a shadow of what it was at the end of the 1970s (600,000 members), but it has stabilised at around 130,000 since the referendum in 2005 on the draft EU constitution, when the CP was able to play a big part in the "no" campaign.

The CP has grown, though not spectacularly, from the Mélenchon campaign, signing up 2,500 new members since 1 January as against 1,200 in the same period last year.

Mélenchon's PdG, whose members had a high profile in his campaign while the CP prudently remained relatively back-stage, has grown from 6,500 members in autumn 2011 to 10,000 today. Although it is a left social-democratic party (and, of course, an electoral party, rather than an activist one like NPA or LO), a number of revolutionary Marxist groupings operate (and are allowed to operate) within it.

The National Front vote, though not as high as some opinion polls suggested, was high, and the NF seems to have done well among working-class and among young voters. The 18% this time compares with 10% in 2007, 18% in 2002, 15% in 1995, 14% in 1988 (and zero in 1981).

Some of the increased vote may be attributed to a more presentable candidate. Marine Le Pen, replacing her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, gave her campaign a smoother, less visibly fascistic, tone.

As with the rise of Golden Dawn in Greece, this shows that popular anger against the crisis can be channelled in far-right and nationalist as well as left-wing and internationalist directions. The far-right can be undercut and defeated only by an effective left.

It may have been inevitable that, in conditions generally still marked by working-class defeats, the revolutionary socialist left could not solidify more than a fraction of the large protest vote it got in 1995, 2002, and 2007. It may have been inevitable that as soon as a plausible candidate from the CP-ish spectrum emerged, they would take most of the protest vote.

In any case the blame for the disarray of the revolutionary socialist left cannot reasonably be put on Mélenchon. That LO has responded to the difficulties by sullen retrenchment, and the NPA by flaking apart, is down to them.

The future depends on how the revolutionary socialist left manages to deal with its current setbacks, regroup, and win over sizeable numbers of those who voted for Mélenchon.



More in English on the left in the 2012 presidential campaign
Reports on LCR congresses, and more, from AWL website
In French
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