The man who united the French Left (JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER/AFP via Getty Images)
In the hit French television series, Le Baron Noir, unifying the Left is the holy grail of the main protagonist, Philippe Rickwaert. His main obstacle is Michel Vidal, the vain and uncompromising founder of Debout le Peuple, determined to steal the position of leader of the Left from the Socialists.
Running from 2016 to 2020, the irony of Le Baron Noir won’t be lost on anyone in France today. Reality has diverted wildly from fiction. The character of Rickwaert is said to have been based on Julien Dray, a long-time member of parliament for the French Parti Socialiste (PS). His rival Michel Vidal is based on Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (NUPES). But real world truths are stranger than fiction. It is Mélenchon, not the socialists, who has achieved the long-held dream of bringing the French Left together. And it is Mélenchon who has shown the sort of ruthlessness and cunning worthy of Le Baron Noir.
Many had written off the French Left, associating its fortunes with the now defunct Socialist Party. But the decline of the PS has been accompanied by the emergence of a more radical Left, one whose candidate — Mélenchon — came within a few hundred thousand votes of reaching the second round of the French presidential election last April. By contrast, the socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, won less than 2% of the vote, not even one tenth of Mélenchon’s total.
Unlike Corbynism in the United Kingdom and the squad in the Democratic Party in the United States, Mélenchonisme as a political force stands outside of the political mainstream. Its emergence came through the creation of new parties — first the Parti de Gauche in 2008 and then La France Insoumise (LFI) in 2016. There is much in common here with Podemos in Spain. In season three of Le Baron Noir, Vidal travels there in an effort to learn from the successes of a Podemos-style movement. In a further real world twist, Podemos’s efforts to replace the Spanish socialist party, the PSOE, have failed whereas Mélenchon’s bid to do the same in France has been far more successful.
Whether or not NUPES will really challenge Macron’s Ensemble! alliance is uncertain. Mélenchon launched his campaign in these legislative elections with talk of his becoming Prime Minister. After a successful first round where NUPES won a higher percentage of the vote than Ensemble!, it is most likely that NUPES will win enough seats to deprive Macron of an absolute majority in the National Assembly. Much will depend on turnout. At over 52%, abstention in the first round was at a record high, making it harder to predict the outcome in the second round. What is clear is that Mélenchon has managed to get the run off against Macron that he narrowly missed last April: in 278 seats, NUPES and Ensemble! candidates are facing each other in the second round.
Mélenchon’s success raises the question of what NUPES has to do with what R.W Johnson called “the long march of the French Left”. Founded in 1920, the French Communist Party (the PCF) was one of the great mass parties of the Left. Taken as a model for theorising about the nature of mass politics, the PCF was a world unto itself: excluded from power, outdone in its radicalism by the students in 1968, it was nevertheless a constituent part of French working-class culture, both at the workplace and at home. For over 50 years, the French Left was divided between communists, socialists and more radical factions.
Looking for how best to understand today’s NUPES, it would be a mistake to see La France Insoumise as a 21st century reincarnation of the PCF; the ideological and organisational differences are too stark. It would also be wrong to think of NUPES as a present-day version of the 1972 Common Programme, which briefly united the communists and socialists around an agreed set of policies. NUPES is not another step in the long march of the French Left; it is the expression of a much wider unravelling of French politics, which has been playing out on the Right and the Left for the last 30 years.
The demise of the PCF in the Eighties and Nineties left a vacuum in French politics and society. Some PCF voters drifted to the centre, others switched to the Front National as a new home for their anti-establishment protest vote. Mélenchon’s own trajectory is different. A card-carrying member of the Socialist Party for 30 years, he left in 2008 after the party congress revealed how far his ideas were from the mainstream of the party. This century’s populism is the guiding thread of Mélenchonisme, not the connection to the ideologies of the 20th century. LFI’s starting point is not Marxist dialectics or class conflict, but le peuple.
This transformation of the Left began in 2005 and the referendum on the EU’s constitutional treaty held that year in France. The significance of the vote for the EU’s own institutional development was lost on the block’s civil servants and many EU leaders. The Lisbon Treaty, agreed two years later, contained most of what French voters had rejected in the referendum. But the political ramifications of 2005 have been working their way through French politics for the last 15 years.
Mélenchon saw, in 2005, the potential for a new sort of political movement: outside of the French party system, mobilising around ideas of equality and social justice, rooted in disaffection with the country’s main political currents. Something stirred in 2005 and Mélenchon understood it.
Politics is a long game and opportunity finally came with the disastrous socialist presidency of François Hollande. Hollande’s victory owed much to the anti-incumbent sentiment that prevailed in France after five years of Nicolas Sarkozy. Hollande’s principle contribution was to avoid making any slip-ups in the televised debates. This left Hollande weak from the outset and his presidency ended in derision and farce. The image of a soaked François Hollande, struggling through a prepared speech as rain ran down his glasses and face, became a running joke, as did photos of him escaping on a scooter after a night with his mistress. The PS’s fateful performance in the 2017 presidential elections, where its candidate Benoît Hamon won just over 6% of the vote, led to the party’s forced sale of its iconic headquarters on the Rue de Solférino. The LFI was left as the de facto opposition to Emmanuel Macron in the National Assembly.
Since then, the LFI has honed its message and developed its programme. One reason for Mélenchon’s high score in the 2022 presidential election was that he supplemented his earlier populism with an extensive and comprehensive legislative programme. Observers noted that the LFI’s electoral offer was the most sophisticated of all the parties — a total of 694 proposals, from a sixth republic to “rational” anti-terrorist legislation, to a commitment to the demilitarisation of space. Organisationally, LFI bears no correspondence to the mass parties of the 20th century.
Established in 2016 as an election vehicle for the presidential election the following year, its broad range of legislative commitments reflect the diversity and heterogeneity of its electoral base. This runs from the remnants of the PCF’s industrial working class votes to the vast majority of the country’s Muslim population, as well as urbanised intellectuals and France’s many neo-ruralist converts. The LFI is a flexible organisation, in tune with the individualism of the present. There is no membership as such. Groups of activists grow or shrink, in line with the electoral calendar. Much of the activism is self-financed and self-organised. Mélenchon gives his approval to initiatives after the fact rather than issuing orders or instructions. Unsurprisingly, there is a very high turnover of LFI activists.
Today’s union of communists, socialists, ecologists and Mélenchonistes has its roots in the ruptures in French politics in the early 2000s. The failure of Lionel Jospin to reach the second round of the presidential election in 2002 and the referendum of 2005 both opened up the possibility of a new sort of oppositional politics, one disconnected from the country’s traditional ideological moorings. Mélenchon’s populism prefigured a similar approach adopted by the “anti-system” candidate, Emmanuel Macron, in 2017.
The success of LFI is partly due to its efforts not to breathe new life into the language of the old Left, which may explain why it has outperformed Corbynism in the United Kingdom. To think of the legislative elections as a fight between the three parts of the political spectrum — the Right, the Left and the centre — is akin to picking up the map closest to hand without thinking about whether it is the right map in the first place. Mélenchon has replaced the ideological tradition of the Left with a mixture of charisma and sophisticated policymaking.
This is something he shares with his current electoral foe, Emmanuel Macron. If the results of the legislative elections mean that Macron and Mélenchon will have to work together in some way, then the principle obstacle to this will not be the differences between the two men. Rather, it will be what they have in common: their outsized egos.
Christopher Bickerton is a Professor in Modern European Politics at the University of Cambridge.
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Subscribe“The party passed a highly controversial foreign agents law, under which any NGOs or media outlets receiving more than 20% of their funding from overseas would have to register as ‘organizations serving the interests of a foreign power’.”
Actually, could we borrow that? I kind of like it. How about adding a stipulation if more than a quarter of your funding comes from governments, you’re not a “nongovernmental organization” and will be treated as nothing more than a government funded lobbying group? I’m sick of the NGO hustle.
Totally agree. Far from promoting democracy, these NGOs are a cancer, eating away at democracy.
Depending on where you live, odds are that law is already on the books.
It’s just further proof of Putin’s uncanny and all-pervasive power to undermine western civilisation!
The law doesn’t only cover “registration” (which would be entirely appropriate), it also has some pretty sinister clauses that would de facto allow the government to shut down NGOs it does not like. A good example of the perils of commenting on a law you haven’t read.
I would like to read the text,in English. I know, Google.
Since NGOs are typically funded by govts, biting the hands that feed them might not be the brightest move to make.
What about Russian-funded NGOs in Europe or the US?
Like many I thought the law did not sound unreasonable and, personally, I don’t think NGOs should be allowed to get any of their money from governments.
What was missing from this article was any details as to why this law would be bad.
What’s wrong with that? The Open Society has destroyed vast tracts of the US on multiple levels and should have been shut down. Our liberal democracies are very weak and have been hijacked by extremists in the guise of NGOs.
At stake is either Georgia will maintain sovereignty or become a US hegemon puppet sending it’s sons to die so the Victoria Nuland type of NeoCons can feel like this one will be the “game changer” they are looking for in the long list of potential “game changers”.
How many divisions does the EU have?
“Protesters have compared the law to Russian legislation used by the Kremlin to punish dissenters and force opposition non-profits to close.“
Yes, but supporters of these Georgian laws point out that they also draw heavily from, and are very similar to, legislation enacted in…wait for it…the USA. What is it about the threat of foreign NGOs in the US that isn’t the case in Georgia Mr Kranz?
As for Georgia ‘gazing Westwards’ that might seem nice, but then they were gazing Westwards in 2008 when they started their war with Russia (as confirmed by an EU report). If there hadn’t been all the RAND, CSIS and other Neocon nutjob think-tanks blandly discussing using Georgia to ‘overextend’ Russia over the last two decades then I might be more open to the view that these NGOs are all the very best of people doing the very best things for the Georgian population – but the bitter experience of Iraq, Libya, Syria and beyond give us absolutely no reason to be generous to them now.
Can we stop being melodramatic and spread falsehoods?
The EU’s own investigation determined that Georgia started the war in 2008. Then-president Saakashvili, emboldened by G W Bush’s embrace of Georgia, started the shooting, confident the US would ride to his rescue. True to form, the US didn’t, and Russia withdrew after inflicting a painful lesson.
One has to admire Putin’s long reach. The Georgian law is modelled after the US FARA, passed in 1938, and is on the books in the EU as well. It is a very common and common-sense piece of legislation. Why Putin would want one in Georgia is a mystery, since it would reveal the extent of Putin’s pernicious influence in the country. But I’m sure that Putin, master of three-dimensional chess and consummate KGB-trained plotter of the callow West’s downfall, has it all figured out!
In the meantime, draconian censorship laws proliferate in Europe.
I lived in Georgia for six years and wrote my PhD on the country.The author writes that “riding on their shoulders is the fate of millions of others across the Eurasian heartland.” Well, no, it isn’t. What is at stake here is the future political alignment of a beautiful country with high symbolic value that is however very small and has very limited strategic significance.
The strategic value of Georgia (to both Russia and the West) has consistently been overhyped. For example, excluding Abkhazia which is already in the Russian camp, Georgia’s Black Sea shoreline is extremely short. The Caucasus mountains divide it from Russia, so Georgian NATO membership poses far less of a threat to Moscow (literally) than Ukrainian NATO membership does.
Georgia does act as a corridor for transit routes and pipelines, but these all also require active cooperation from Azerbaijan, which has arguably moved far closer to Russia than Georgia in recent years. This does not seem to have endangered any of these projects, whose % contribution to European energy supplies are and will remain miniscule.
(Does anyone remember the years when the West convinced itself that Afghanistan was strategically significant?)
As for the supposed “devastating loss for the cause of global freedom”, let’s zoom out. Georgia’s population is around 4 million. Contrast that with the ongoing slide into authoritarianism by India with its over one billion people.
What happens in Georgia does matter – but largely only to Georgians.
Well put – and refreshing to have such deep and cogent analysis (for a change).
There is a perspective that “meta-data is (often) more useful than data”. Set against this simple observation:
An analysis of ONLY the main article headings and sub-headings on UnHerd stand testament to the emotionally driven, un-anchored and (often) ahistorical perspectives held across the West in general, and the Anglo-sphere “5-Eyes” countries in particular. Oh, the hand wringing!To wit: even just this edition of UnHerd has 2 competing hair-on-fire propositions: Europe’s future will now seemingly be determined either by Hungary or Georgia. Well, which is it?
Whatever the case, Georgia seems to be on the brink of its – second – “Maidan moment”. These idealistic, haute morality, haute politico-couture (yes, I made these up) Western interventions have proven so very…useful…for “target nation states”, haven’t they?
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Agree, the article sounds more like agenda driven western interference and pro NATO expansionism. No wonder Russia gets paranoid, the agenda is the evertighening encirclement and isolation of Russia . Georgia needs to be very careful here, or they will end up in conflict like in Ukraine, in a geopolitical proxy war, the people will suffer, not the outsiders manipulating them.
Neocons gonna neocon…
That comment about India was unnecessary. It’s a silly canard and is not true.
The only ” slide into authoritarianism ” is in fevered and jealous Western MSM fed by Soros.
I hope this platform doesn’t go the same way as The Neocon Times (of London), and The Spectator too for that matter.
All the evidence of this article is that if at all possible, Washington will try to disseminate propaganda via every British media outlet available in terms of controlling the destiny of the post-Soviet bloc.
This is a fundamentally silly, hyperbolic article. It is the foreign funded NGO’s trying to foment a colour revolution that are antidemocratic. Why don’t Georgians have the right to self determination like other countries? The NGO’s possess all the usual western obsessions about trying to spread transgender ideology on behalf of Big Pharma. And attempting to join NATO would be path to self destruction, just like it has been for Ukraine.
If you have been following the news, western media have been covering protests in Georgia over a proposed law which critics say is anti-democratic. The law calls for NGOs and other organizations working in Georgia that receive a certain percentage of foreign funding to be registered as foreign agents. Further it is claimed that this law will somehow benefit Russia.
There are several things to note. The protests are largely funded and supported by foreign agents, specifically American and European NGOs and related organizations. There are western voices – recently Francis Fukuyama! – calling for open and explicit intervention in Georgia ‘to save democracy’.
It must be understood that what ‘democracy’ means in these arguments is a very particular progressive notion of democracy, and that it is the goal of these NGOs and other organisations and the governments and elites behind them to use protest and ultimately financial blackmail to enforce and embed a socially progressive agenda in Georgian society.
The proposed law, by the way, makes no exception for Russian money. Russian funded programs would also be registered. It is important to note how widely – if unevenly – unpopular Russia is in Georgia. Georgians are naturally suspicious of Russia. That Russia is a threat is both very true and in this case a distraction. There is a kind of switch and bait tactic being played by American and European groups in Georgia.
Finally, if you come across someone who thinks that insisting on financial transparency for organizations funded from the abroad is anti-democratic, remind them that American NGOs typically have to report foreign income if they receive funding or generate revenue from sources outside the United States, and must comply with relevant tax laws and regulations, including those related to reporting foreign income to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the United States.
An indeed: an American NGO may be identified as a “foreign agent” under certain circumstances, typically in the context of foreign influence or lobbying laws. Here are a few scenarios where an American NGO might be classified as a foreign agent:
Foreign Funding with Strings Attached: If an American NGO receives significant funding from a foreign government or entity with the expectation that it will promote the interests of that foreign entity, it may be considered a foreign agent. This designation could apply if the NGO is perceived as advancing the agenda of the foreign entity rather than pursuing its own Activities on Behalf of Foreign Interests: If an American NGO engages in activities such as lobbying, public relations, or advocacy on behalf of a foreign government, political party, or organization without proper disclosure, it could be classified as a foreign agent. This might include activities aimed at influencing U.S. policy or public opinion in a manner that aligns with the interests of a foreign entity.Legal Definitions: The term “foreign agent” may also have specific legal definitions and implications under U.S. law, particularly in the context of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). FARA requires individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to register with the U.S. Department of Justice and disclose their activities and relationships
‘Democracy’ aka the rule of Big Money behind the scenes.
Maybe the Western-focused binary is not the way for every other country. Perhaps Georgia sees a benefit in an “and” approach rather than an ‘or.’ Someone is also going to have to explain why the measure about NGOs is controversial. Those organizations are not the touchy-feely do-gooders their supporters claim them to be. Stateside, NGOs are pocketing billions of American taxpayer dollars to facilitate an invasion of the country.
Who writes these article titles ? Russia already has access to the Black Sea.
Probably AI-generated…
The Georgian opposition parties are being funded from outside the country. No western country would allow that. After witnessing the destruction of Ukraine, it must be very clear to a Georgians that a dalliance with NATO would mean the end of their country.
My pattern recognition was triggered by the news of “organic” protests in favour of the EU, further confirmed to hear the place is being flooded with foreign NGO’s.
Georgia isn’t even in Europe, it’s on the Asian side of the Caucasus Mountains.
Nothing wrong with that law whatsoever. It’s not remotely controversial … Georgia must never join NATO … stop antagonising Russia! Stop it!
Russia is not our enemy but the warpig neocons in DC want them to be thought of as such partially to continue to milk the tax base but eventually to bring down Putin in order to access Russian commodities on our terms. Then break the country up. Job done. Game over.
The US will be responsible for 1 million Slavs deaths by the time the Ukraine war is over, they must not be allowed to repeat that in Georgia.