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.