In the aftermath of the French municipal elections last month, only one left-wing party registered concern at a poor result: the embattled Écologistes, who forfeited six of the eight large cities they claimed in the 2020 ‘Green wave’, including Bordeaux. Not for the first time, La France insoumise (LFI) offered a triumphalist reading – ‘remarkable’, a ‘groundswell’ – of a performance that fell short of most expectations. The Parti socialiste (PS), after pointing out that together with allies it still retained seven of France’s ten largest cities – Paris, Lyon and Marseille among them – resumed its perennial internal squabbles over responsibility for those it had lost (Brest, Clermont-Ferrand, Avignon). As for the Parti communiste français (PCF), it bagged Nîmes but saw an erosion of support in working-class strongholds like Vénissieux. The election of its national secretary, Fabien Roussel, as mayor of Saint-Amand-les-Eaux (16,000 inhabitants) chiefly served to cement his candidacy in next year’s presidential race.

Local contests are, it should be said, an unreliable guide to national outcomes. Three years after his capture of the Élysée in 2017, Emmanuel Macron failed to establish a foothold in municipalities large or small; he was nevertheless re-elected two years later. The founder of LFI Jean-Luc Mélenchon secured 22 per cent of the vote in the 2022 presidential election at a time when his party controlled only two small municipalities. Conversely, the Socialists’ municipal strength did nothing to boost its presidential candidate that year, Anne Hidalgo, who scored just 1.75 per cent. Turnout tends to be low in municipal elections (57 per cent this year, compared to 72 per cent in the 2022 presidential election); in more than two-thirds of French communes, which are often very small, races are uncontested; and many candidates do not run on a party ticket. Media attention, meanwhile, focuses on the major metropolitan centres, inflating the strength of the left, including La France insoumise, and downplaying that of the far-right Rassemblement national (RN), which remains far more deeply rooted in rural France. Despite these caveats, the elections yielded some indications, and they are not encouraging.

The atmosphere on the left was already poisonous before the vote. The Socialists had emerged severely weakened from the 2022 presidential election; their deputies owed their seats to a first-round agreement with Mélenchon’s party. That agreement was renewed in the legislative elections of June 2024. But the PS have since decisively broken with the Nouveau Front populaire coalition. Unlike their partners, they have for the past year served as parliamentary props for the right-wing governments appointed by Macron. LFI, meanwhile, lays claim to a monopoly over ‘rupture’, ‘radicalism’ and anti-fascism, treating its former allies with a mixture of contempt and invective (‘stupidity’, ‘noxious impostures’, ‘betrayal’). The improvised coalitions stitched together between the two rounds on 15 and 22 March only made matters worse. They varied widely from city to city, as the PS declined to impose any line on its candidates. Where they believed they could prevail alone – Paris, Marseille, Montpellier – Socialists rejected overtures from LFI, hoping to appeal to centrist voters. Those weakened in the first round, by contrast, accepted alliances with the Insoumis to salvage their municipalities in the run-off, defeat otherwise being assured (Brest, Nantes, Clermont-Ferrand, Avignon).

As if this were not enough to generate confusion, the Socialist right, alongside media darling Raphaël Glucksmann – figurehead of a small centrist party allied with the PS, Place publique – denounced any collaboration with LFI on the grounds that Mélenchon was an antisemitic threat to the republic. Mélenchon himself undercut his comrades on joint lists when, at a rally a few days before the vote, he declared: ‘The Socialists are inveterate fixers. It won’t cost us much to buy them for the second round.’ That quip was predictably replayed time and again in the media during the decisive week. The anathemas exchanged by Socialist and Insoumis leaders made it all but impossible for the left to join forces and wrest cities from the right. In Toulouse, now France’s third-largest city after Marseille, the combined left slate not only fell short of the sum of its parts; it also rallied abstainers against it.

The Socialists naturally attributed their municipal losses to alliances with LFI, which, they claim, alienated voters. For PS chief Olivier Faure, Mélenchon’s party proved to be a ‘dead weight’. LFI replied that without such alliances – which preserved some Socialist strongholds, such as Nantes – the PS defeat would have been even more severe; and that the primary factor was incumbency fatigue with Socialist office-holders (the LFI controlled no major municipalities before the vote). Meanwhile the Communists have sought to stay above the fray, while the Greens are calling for a ceasefire.

The parties of the left – especially the PS and LFI – are now preparing to run against each other in the 2027 presidential election. The Socialists, still without a programme of their own, are banking on one thing: demonization of LFI. They have done much to advance this agenda thus far, joining campaigns against the Insoumis launched by the media, the centre-right and the RN. These attacks have been able to exploit missteps by Mélenchon, from whom no error, no slip of the tongue, is ever forgiven – though the hostility his party arouses among editorialists has now reached such a pitch that hardly any pretext is required to sustain it. Magazine covers depicting a dishevelled, menacing Mélenchon follow one another in quick succession. On a single day, the website of Le Figaro – the principal daily of the conservative bourgeoisie, in theory distinct from far-right pamphleteering – devoted this pair of headlines to municipalities won by his party: ‘Veiled women lecture a Christian customer: in Creil, the communitarian drift that has brought LFI to power’; ‘“He relied on both LFI networks and the Muslim Brotherhood”: in Sarcelles, the new mayor alarms the Jewish community’.  

Now that LFI has taken several cities, including two of over 100,000 inhabitants – Saint-Denis and Roubaix – with large, often Muslim immigrant populations, we can be sure that every minor incident in these locales will be treated as a nuclear meltdown by the media and a radicalized right. This racist hysteria has already begun in Saint-Denis, in response to an announcement by newly elected mayor Bally Bagayoko, of Malian origin, that he would make good on a campaign promise to strip the municipal police of some of their weapons.

Since the outbreak of the Gaza war, it is the charge of antisemitism that is most frequently lobbed at LFI. Virtually the entire media – including outlets putatively of the left or centre-left, such as Le Monde, Libération and Mediapart – have taken an active, almost obsessive part in promoting this smear campaign. On 26 February, a brief aside by Mélenchon, joking about the Russian pronunciation of Epstein’s name in France – intended, he suggested, to imply that Epstein was a liaison for Moscow rather than the Mossad – was seized upon as evidence of bigotry or worse, in an echo of similar accusations once levelled against Jeremy Corbyn. Never mind that in the same hour-and-forty-minute speech Mélenchon had also protested the continued presence in the Senate of a statue of Louis IX (‘Saint Louis’), promulgator of antisemitic decrees.

This alleged infraction sufficed for the PS, who, having initially taken up the charges sparingly, crossed the Rubicon a few days later, under pressure from its right wing along with Glucksmann. On 3 March, in a statement from its national bureau, the Socialists condemned ‘without reservation’ Mélenchon’s ‘conspiratorial caricatures and intolerable antisemitic remarks’, and reaffirmed its refusal of any national agreement with LFI ‘given the troubling drift of its leadership’.

As things stand a divided left has little prospect of victory, and not much more even were it united. In election after election – presidential, legislative, European – it has stalled at between 30 and 35 per cent of the vote. That places its collective score roughly level with that of the Rassemblement national (RN) alone, without taking into account auxiliary formations on the far right such as Reconquête and Debout la France. What, then, does the collective left propose to do over the coming year to prevent the far right – Jordan Bardella or Marine Le Pen – from taking power? The answer is: very little. Other priorities seem to prevail.

In France, only the top two candidates proceed to the second round; at present, that means the RN and one rival. If a left party does manage to reach the second round – not impossible, if the centrist bloc fractures – what are its prospects? Mélenchon is counting on what he himself calls ‘magic’: ‘We are the leading force on the left, full stop. Therefore the presidential candidacy will be Insoumise. […] Faced, in the second round, with a choice between the Rassemblement national and an Insoumis candidate, we believe this country will prove sufficiently anti-racist, sufficiently republican not to vote for the RN. That is our wager. And we think we will win.’ LFI’s ‘New France’ strategy rests on the assumption that a committed left minority can prevail by activating a reservoir of non-voters – the ‘fourth bloc’ – disaffected from electoral politics, disproportionately young and of immigrant background. In a conjuncture shaped by international crisis, predictions are hazardous, but given that this bet did not come off in the local elections, faith on the left in such ‘magic’ next April is less widespread than fear of a rout.

The Socialists bear a heavy share of responsibility for the disarray. A decade after the debacle of Hollande’s presidency, they appear to have forgotten the damage it did to the left and the role the Insoumis played in redressing it. The risk of a replay is plain. Without a programme, without clear ideas, the PS drifts from one election to the next, intent above all on preserving its apparatus and local baronies. Marking its distance from LFI through charges of antisemitism, communitarianism and extremism may be the prelude to a fallback strategy of allying with the centre and sections of the ‘respectable’ right. Thierry Pech, director of the social-liberal think tank Terra Nova, has recently endorsed this option: ‘Many voters who had abandoned the left for Macronism are now returning as the central bloc disintegrates. They do so all the more readily when assured that no agreement with Jean-Luc Mélenchon is conceivable. In other words, the present trend implies a clear break with LFI.’

This ‘trend’ would suit economic elites and the media. It would bring together parties united by support for rearmament, alignment with the Western bloc, European federalism, backing for Ukraine, hostility to ‘populism’ and rejection of the ‘extremes’. That is not negligible. Nor would such a formation lack sociological coherence. Yet in a European environment where the programmes of the SPD and the Labour Party are being rejected in Germany and Britain, and in a French context that neither mourns Hollande-style social liberalism nor hopes for a continuation of Macronism without the immensely unpopular Macron, the ‘trend’ envisaged by Pech has limited appeal. It is doubtful whether a bourgeois coalition of this kind – recalling the ‘Third Force’ of the early Cold War (1947–58), when the political establishment made common cause to bar the Communists and Gaullists from power – could contain the demand for change, now more effectively channelled by the far right than the left.

What alternative remains is, for the moment, unclear. Even allowing for the French left’s long practice in speaking out of both sides of its mouth as circumstances dictate, it is difficult to foresee a tactical rapprochement between the PS and LFI in time for next spring’s election. The likeliest outcome is that both are eliminated in the first round or that one advances to the second in so weakened a position as to make victory unattainable. Exclusion from the second round would not in itself be unprecedented – the left was absent in 2017 and 2022 – but this time it would occur in a context where the far right, steadily strengthened over Macron’s two terms, stands a real chance of taking power.

Read on: Serge Halimi, ‘Condition of France’, NLR 144.