On 23 January sign-ups close for the "Popular Primary" for left candidates for the French presidential election, for which the first round will be 10 April.
Two individuals - one a sometime Green activist, one an "entrepreneur" who had launched and run an NGO aimed at improving understanding and cooperation between people of different backgrounds - set up "Popular Primary" in February 2021. Raising funds online, they now employ 18 full-time-equivalent staff and (as of 17 January) have 250,000 people signed up and making a token payment to take part in the online "primary" on 27-30 January.
In Left Wing Communism (1920), Lenin suggested that the British Communist Party should propose a sort of "primary" to the Labour Party: "let us share parliamentary seats in proportion to the number of votes polled for the Labour Party and for the Communist Party… in a special ballot". But that implied some sort of organised cooperation of the two parties (and, inescapably, the unions) to set up the "special ballot".
This French primary stands above or besides all the parties. The aim is to rally voters behind a single left candidate capable of a good showing on 10 April, but there is little chance that will work. Anne Hidalgo of the Socialist Party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Insoumise, and Yannick Jadot of the Greens will be on the ballot paper, but all have refused to abide by the result, as has Fabien Roussel of the Communist Party (not on the ballot).
So far, the primary has added one new "left" candidate to the range, Christine Taubira, a former Socialist Party minister. She has said she won't stand if she doesn't win the "primary", but if she does, she will.
The background is setbacks for the French left. The Socialist Party used to be the biggest party in France, and won the presidency as recently as 2012, but its candidate Anne Hidalgo is polling just 3% (which also means financial disaster for the party, because it will not receive the state refund of campaign spending paid to candidates which top 5%). Jadot is on 5%, and Roussel on 3%. Mélenchon is on 10%, but that compares badly with his 19.6% in the first round in 2017. He is a former Socialist Party minister who split to the left, had a working alliance with the Communist Party for a while, tends towards nationalistic and populist ideas, and has a "party", France Insoumise, with no actual membership but only e-lists to sign up to.
France was the first country to define politics as "left" and "right", and political opinion there was long fairly evenly split between those poles. But now only 20%, in opinion surveys, classify themselves as "left" (even in the broadest sense), and 37% as "right". The remnants of the "yellow jackets" movement of 2018-9 are distinctly right-wing, and the political effect of the movement, if any, seems to have been to reinforce the right.
Although French labour law imposes many fewer curbs on union action than Britain's, and strikes and demonstrations remain more numerous, the political constituency built over many decades by the Socialist Party and the Communist Party has decayed without the revolutionary Marxist left yet being able to capture the ground abandoned by them.
Philippe Poutou of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste and Nathalie Arthaud of Lutte Ouvrière are standing as revolutionary class-struggle left candidates, but this time mostly to promote their parties and win recruits rather than in hope of a large vote.
