The second round of the French parliamentary elections on Sunday will determine whether the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) of Marine Le Pen will be able to win enough seats to form a majority government or perhaps do so in coalition with others. Stopping this has become the priority for the French left, which has united in a New Popular Front, recalling that of the original in the 1930s. It consists of La France Insoumise (LFI) led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Socialist Party (PS), the French Communist Party (PCF), Greens and the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA).
To secure the defeat of RN, third placed candidates of the NPF have pulled out in favour of Emmanuel Macron’s bloc of supporters. Left unity against the far-right has thus also meant arms-length unity with the discredited Macron Presidency. While this alliance has placed opposition to RN as the key issue, his defeat has been the stand-out message of the results.
The growth of the Rassemblement National and vote for the New Popular Front demonstrates that the people have given their verdict on Macron’s increasingly arrogant, unpopular and discredited Presidency. By withdrawing in his favour the NPF has accepted fundamental agreement with him, or rather, agreement on fundamentals. The unity achieved means that this encompasses almost all the left, from the utterly discredited Socialist Party to the New Anti-capitalist Party, which proves that its anti-capitalism is purely rhetorical, never mind socialist.
The Left has once again chosen what it considers the lesser evil on the basis that parliamentary elections are the litmus test of politics: that which will ultimately determine your political stance. When the choice has to be made, this Left has decided that there is no such thing as an independent working class politics separate and opposed to all varieties of capitalist political movements. The lesser evil is indeed evil, one that the Left has embraced just as the majority of the French people have rejected it. Marine Le Pen can now argue that only she is implacably opposed to what the majority has also decisively rejected.
Support for the discredited ‘Republicans’ of Macron’s Ensemble is justified by the threat of the far right and the idea that liberal bourgeois politicians are principled and reliable defenders of bourgeois democracy. This means that the Left has embraced the primacy of defence of this democracy, with its dependence on the power of the capitalist state; the influence of money and capital over political decision making; the exclusion of any sort of economic or social democracy; and the acceptance of the capitalist system, with all its inequality, oppression and violence.
Were the Left seeking to protect the limited democratic rights allowed by this democracy, that permit the working class to more freely organise, it would have understood that the weapons required to defeat the far-right lie not simply or mainly in parliamentary elections, but in the organisation and political mobilisation of the workers’ movement. Such a political mobilisation of the working class is opposed by its ‘republican’ allies. If, or when, the choice comes down to a militant working class or the far right these republican defenders of ‘democracy’ will ally with the far right against it.
The Left’s political opportunism, the surrender of political principle for short term advantage, in this case the possible defeat of far-right Rassemblement National, will not make up for its subordination to the republican friends of capitalist democracy and the exposure of the feebleness of its opposition to the discredited and unpopular Macron Presidency. The policy of short term gain fails to recall the observation that the long term for the opportunist is just a long series of short terms. Lesser evil follows lesser evil . . .
The New Popular Front naturally forms its alliance on the basis of supporting the French imperialist contribution to the war in Ukraine, the provision of weapons to Ukraine and of French troops within the war zone – calling them “peacekeepers” changes nothing. Its programme fails to denounce the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, and of course fails to call on French workers to stop the delivery of arms to the Israeli state. As we have said, the political mobilisation of the working class movement is not part of its policy. If it were Macron and Ensemble would be repudiating its assistance. The NPA project of an alliance with bourgeois democracy requires a bourgeois programme.
There is nothing very much new in this New Popular Front, the Left in France has been supporting the lesser evil for a long time, each time delivering another iteration; a lesser evil groundhog day, or déjà vu all over again, as it may be put. Starting with the 2002 Presidential election run-off between right-wing candidate Jacques Chirac and the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Left responded by endorsing Chirac as a defender of democracy against Le Pen. It was such a success we are here again with the Left defending the establishment while the far right adopts the mantle of opposition.
That this policy is a clear failure should by now be obvious, but that would be to mistake the purpose of the policy, which is not to promote independent working class politics but to maintain bourgeois democracy and to be the Republic’s loyal opposition. Such a policy puts this left in opposition to the working class and makes it prey to the contradictions of capitalism, which currently involve imperialist war in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, the militarisation of France and the bill for it to be paid by its workers.
The New Popular Front is unwilling to challenge capitalism, supports imperialist war, restricts itself to vacuous moralising when faced with genocide and will shatter itself when the bill is forced upon French workers. The logic of its position is to join the discredited bourgeois forces inside a government, which would bolster the credentials of Rassemblement National and demoralise its own supporters, as some of its constituent parts have already done. It will no doubt go down singing its lack of regret as it repeats the failed policy of the 1930s original.
Sráid Marx 
Each time a ratchet o the Right, as the Left ends up adopting the “evils” it once opposed, as now the “lesser-evil” to be supported!
We could go back, not to 2002, but to the 1970’s and 1980’s, and the Popular Front of Mitterand, uniting in parliament the SP and CP. By it, the CP was destroyed, as it was tarred with the failures of the SP. Its failures opened the door to the Republicans, just as Wilson/Callaghan’s failures in Britain opened the door to Thatcher.
Eventually, voters got fed up with the Republicans and Tories, but instead of the Left presenting a clear, independent working-class alternative they fell in behind a desire just for “change”, even though it was clear that this “change” was only one of the colour of rosette of those getting the Ministers salaries and perks, not of policy. The same succession could be seen in the US.
Not only did Blair, Clinton, Hollande represent a significant ratchet to the Right of the social-democratic parties, compared to the positions of Wilson, Johnson and Mitterand, but the Left that tagged along as foot soldiers to them in the hope of getting some of the dust shaken from their shoes got dragged along to the Right as well.
You don’t have to go back to the obvious failures of the Popular Fronts of the 1920’s and 30’s, which inevitably opened the door to fascism, as Trotsky describes in relation to Germany and Spain, but it can be seen again over the last 40 years, and last 20 years, not to mention the disaster it led to in Chile in 1973. The nature of all social democratic parties, as catch-all parties, makes them in themselves popular fronts, or as Lenin described the Labour Party, bourgeois workers parties.
The only principled basis that Marxists can operate in such parties, “Entrism”, given their own weakness, and so sectarianism of working outside, is that they at least argue their own programme. As Lenin put it, in Left-Wing Communism,
“The Communist Party should propose the following “compromise” election agreement to the Hendersons and Snowdens: let us jointly fight against the alliance between Lloyd George and the Conservatives; let us share parliamentary seats in proportion to the number of workers’ votes polled for the Labour Party and for the Communist Party (not in elections, but in a special ballot), and let us retain complete freedom of agitation, propaganda and political activity. Of course, without this latter condition, we cannot agree to a bloc, for that would be treachery; the British Communists must demand and get complete freedom to expose the Hendersons and the Snowdens in the same way as (for fifteen years—1903–17) the Russian Bolsheviks demanded and got it in respect of the Russian Hendersons and Snowdens, i.e., the Mensheviks.”
But, one reason the Left today is so weak is that it has not done that, as it has adopted the Pabloite submergence within the stream of that ever rightward moving social democracy, becoming increasingly indistinguishable from it. Starmer is totemic of it. Even the Left that has studiously maintained a sectarian separation from the Labour Party, and other social-democratic parties, has still pursued this crazy course, just adapting its programme in an ever rightward direction, in one set of popular frontist organisations after another.
When the Clinton/Blair “Third Way” inevitably failed, it led to Bush and Cameron/Clegg, the latter being more a continuation, but so also inevitably leading to Johnson/Truss. When Hollande failed, it led to the French Cameron/Clegg – Macron – who has also inevitably failed, opening the door to Le Pen, just as in the US, the democrats could not even allow a Bernie Sanders to stand, and so settled for Clinton II, and then Biden, which opened the door to Trump, separated only by a brief interlude before Trump returns.
You can’t be surprised at this course of events in relation to the social-democrats. They are simply acting in accordance with their bourgeois managerialist politics. Their parties are in themselves cross-class blocs utilising the voting numbers and illusions of the working-class to win elections on bourgeois programmes to promote the interests of the ruling class, and in so doing keep out both the forces of the petty-bourgeoisie, and of Socialism.
But, they have failed even in that. The Republicans in the US, Conservatives in Britain, Gaullists in France etc., as much as the Democrats, Labour and Socialists were really social-democratic in nature, bourgeois managerialists balancing the interests of labour and capital, but always ultimately on the basis of the primacy of the latter. But, as the basis of that failed, the petty-bourgeoisie that has grown in social weight since the 1980’s, by around 50%, asserted itself in those parties where it had always been numerically dominant, i.e. Tories, Republicans etc. Its what has split them apart as their own rotten electoral bloc. New actual petty-bourgeois parties, with their own petty-bourgeois nationalist programmes – UKIP/Brexit Party/Reform, Tea party/Trump Party, Le Pen etc. – have arisen. These are not really new formations, but existing formations that have broken from the constraints of those conservative social-democratic parties in which they tried and failed to operate.
No equivalent on the Left flank of social-democracy has occurred, largely because of the sectarianism, combined with opportunism of the Left, which has grown comfortable in simply swimming in these larger bourgeois currents.
The tendency has also been for these popular fronts to become increasingly themselves Bonapartist in nature. With the failure of French social-democracy under Hollande, the same politics were continued by Macron, who embodied the Popular Front in his person, existing only to oppose Le Pen, with his parliamentary party only being formed by him, after his election!
In the US, the democrats were led into increasing authoritarianism and bureaucratic wrangling to prevent Sanders being on the ticket, and to present Clinton then Biden as he only choice. That has become obvious in the latest manifestation with the walking brain dead Biden wheeled out as he only choice Democrats can make, even though it becomes increasingly obvious that to do so invites a win for Trump, if that was not already sewn up anyway. In Britain, Corbyn had to be removed, and Starmer rules Labour as a modern Bonaparte, backed by private security agencies, whose members are drawn from the ranks of former MI6 operatives!
Where is the independent working-class alternative to this, as the Left has simply called for support for these parties, whose programmes even 40 years ago, they would have been describing as the evil that must be opposed at all costs! Not only support for those parties, but as you say, support for the imperialist wars they have started, support for genocide in Gaza and so on. As Trotsky noted, of such a trajectory,
“Fascism is a form of despair in the petit-bourgeois masses, who carry away with them over the precipice a part of the proletariat as well. Despair as is known, takes hold when all roads of salvation are cut off. The triple bankruptcy of democracy, Social Democracy and the Comintern was the prerequisite for fascism. All three have tied their fate to the fate of imperialism. All three bring nothing to the masses but despair and by this assure the triumph of fascism.”
(Phrases and Reality)