Understanding the Right and Far-Right

In the first round of this election, the numbers of votes received by the different candidates show a consolidation of the reconfigured political field that came out of the 2017 presidential election. It is often pointed out that the April 10 vote is divided into three ‘blocs’ of comparable sizes. The broad right (from Macron to Pécresse, including Lassalle) weighed in with about 12.6 million votes; the far-right (Le Pen, Zemmour, Dupont-Aignan) collected about 11.4; and finally the left (carried by six candidates from Mélenchon to Jadot, Roussell, Hidalgo, Poutou and Arthaud) counted around the same amount with 11.2 million.

This breakdown does leave aside nuances that exist within each bloc, and would require further analysis of the composition of the different electorates. But it does indicate major trends, which reveal developments since 2017, while shedding light on the political (and not just electoral) prospects after April 10. Let’s start with the worst part of it all: the far-right has garnered more than 1.5 million more votes than it did in the first round of 2017. A national electoral victory is within its reach in the short term. Many dikes have broken in the working classes, even as they remain the only ones capable of defending equality against racism, democracy against authoritarianism, and social justice against the ruthlessness of capital, including its neo-fascist temptations.

Alongside the traditional electorates of the radical and extreme right, Le Pen and Zemmour capture an ever-growing part of the ‘rejection’ of current French society by the exploited and oppressed. This shows the strength of the racist politics that structure our society from the top of the state, as well as the weakness of anti-fascist and anti-racist ideas and actions in recent years, in spite of a number of promising initiatives. It also shows the difficulties of the left—including its most radical components—in these areas. All of this means that the extreme right is in the second round for the second time in a row, without any immediate mass reaction, unlike in 2002.

So, what can we do in the face of this threat from the extreme right? The amount of ground we need to gain back is staggering. Today, we can convince some people to defeat Le Pen by using their ballot for Macron; but others, we must acknowledge, will at best be dissuaded from voting Le Pen. Much blame for this can be laid on the way Macron and his bloc have behaved as ‘pyromaniac firemen’, a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice for the extreme right. Examples of this include their ‘anti-separatist’ law, generalised repression and authoritarianism, unabashed government lies and dishonesty, draining of democratic life including during these elections, and all of it conducted in support of wildly and violently antisocial policies.

Much of the media should take a share of this blame, too, but will for now seek to put the responsibility on Mélenchon and his electorate’s broad rejection of this second round. Denouncing the mortal danger of Le Pen to millions of disillusioned people across France is only possible if we also resolutely position ourselves as opponents of Macron’s agenda. Otherwise, the opposition to Le Pen will be discredited in the longer term. Only through this strategy can we convincingly explain that this second round is about choosing another enemy than Le Pen while we still can.

Mobilisations would be the best tool to rapidly transform the consciousness of the people, but in the current context they are unlikely to be as strong as in 2002. We must draw conclusions from the way protests are being prevented, starting with the role of the police in stifling the struggles of the youth who took to the streets in such large numbers twenty years ago against Jean-Marie Le Pen. A few years ago, a police intervention in a university was a scandal, but today we are far too resigned to preventive closures of buildings surrounded by large numbers of riot police officers and vehicles, as happened in the Sorbonne once again last week. All this only confirms that we must, now more than ever, commit ourselves to making the anti-fascist, anti-racist and anti-authoritarian struggle an absolute priority.

And what about the political bloc that has governed for the past five years? If Macron has managed to replicate the 2017 runoff, as he hoped, it is because this broad right remains the largest of the three blocs. But the right, with Macron at the helm, has also lost more than 3.5 million votes. In 2017, of the four leading candidates separated by small gaps, two (Macron and Fillon) were from the right. Macron is well positioned to win again despite his record, and has received more votes as a single candidate, this much is true; but the entire right-wing bloc with Macron at its head has lost several million votes.

The fact that a centre-left electorate had placed its hopes in Macron five years ago, and has been disappointed since, is not enough to explain it. This support was, at the time, one of the strengths of the right, which can count on more limited support from the population after five years under Macron. This diminished result for the forces of the establishment, insufficient as it is, can be considered a credit for all of the electoral, political, and social struggles of the last five years. It must help us to escape the despairing illusion that the Macronist bloc has been all-powerful, and will remain invincible in the years to come.

A Resurgent Left

Let us now turn to the left and the bloc which we have constructed in recent times. The consolidation of the 2017 shifts means the marginalisation of the centre-left has been confirmed: Anne Hidalgo of the Parti Socialiste and Yannick Jadot of the Greens got about as many (or rather, as few) votes this year as Hamon himself did for the PS in 2017. Only a decade ago, the centre-left had a president and they seemed convinced that more centrist campaigns would provide them with a greater chance of success than Hamon. This proved spectacularly wrong. Their votes are perhaps mostly those of people disappointed after voting for Macron in 2017 (which was also a way for PS voters to disavow the ‘excessively left’ Hamon). Hamon’s votes may have gone to Mélenchon this year, just as a share of the PCF or Green electorates chose Mélenchon over their parties’ candidates. In any case, there has been no recovery in the vote for the main centre-left formation and its ecologist counterpart. The deep and lasting weakness of the PS and the Greens is confirmed.

At the other end of the spectrum, Arthaud and Poutou did not do any better than in 2017 either. Their stable results indicate that any votes they might have lost to ‘utilitarian’ or ‘strategic’ voting (what we call in France the ‘vote utile’) for Mélenchon had already been lost in 2017, even when his hopes to reach the second round were not as high. The course of the campaign also showed, unfortunately, that the campaigns of small Trotskyist-inspired organisations had even less of a chance than in 2017 of having access to a real platform to spread socialist ideas. All of this was far from unpredictable and contributed to the left’s defeat; other roads might have been taken, and should be taken in the future.

Yet the left as a whole garnered 1.2 million more votes than in 2017. The progress is therefore to be measured between the Mélenchon campaign with the support of the Communist Party (PCF) in 2017, and the sum of Mélenchon and the Communist candidate Fabien Roussel’s votes in 2022. On April 10, the Mélenchon campaign received ten times more votes than Roussel (and three times more than the centre-left of the PS and Greens). Disappointment and anger have met this situation where the left is progressing but still too divided to pass the first round. However, another much considered scenario would have been even more discouraging, the one with a real breakthrough for the PCF and Mélenchon losing many votes.

The Roussel gamble by the PCF, with various forms of media support coming mostly from the right, contributed to preventing Mélenchon from reaching the second round, opening the way to the repeat of a Macron versus Le Pen. But it did not demonstrate that the more radical line adopted by Mélenchon in recent years and in his campaign (notably on racism and Islamophobia, or environmental issues, with a specific dimension linked to the challenges of the pandemic) was less popular—on the contrary! It is therefore a radical critique of Macron’s record, on all fronts, that has garnered the most votes.

This nightmare second round, opposing the racist candidate par excellence with an incumbent who has used and will continue to use state racism to maintain himself (even if it means bringing us ever closer to the fascist abyss), only confirms the importance of anti-racist politics. This is a reward for the dirty work carried out by critics of ‘Islamogauchism’. Their nauseating ideas are hegemonic on the right and not yet completely eliminated from the left, as evidenced by the Roussel campaign. His was a mistaken and politically harmful campaign in three ways at once: in substance, it fed dangerous positions and injustices; electorally, it fared worse than Mélenchon’s genuinely anti-racist campaign; and, in the final analysis, it played a major role in preventing Mélenchon from reaching the second round and blocking the Macron versus Le Pen repeat.

But there are concerns for the Popular Union, too. The geography of the vote suggests a certain decline in the Mélenchon vote in small towns, in ‘peripheral’ areas (the ‘France of the Yellow Vests’), where the vote for the far right is strong; however, this is far from a collapse. And we can rejoice that April 10 saw an advancing left largely dominated by an anti-racist campaign, whose anti-system profile lays a good foundation for an anti-racist and anti-fascist re-conquest of the working classes as a whole—one of our main tasks, and indeed a vital one, for the years to come.

We would be in a much worse position, both for beating Le Pen at the ballot box and for our social and political struggles as a whole, if the election results indicated a regression, a dispersion or a moderation of our camp. The opinion polls tend to refute the idea that the share of tactical voting for Mélenchon was exceptionally high. Moreover, those who claim the contrary are often rather eager to turn the page on these results. If we see them in a better light, despite the imperfect political coherence that was expressed on April 10, we should look for ways to strengthen this convergence and make it last.

The Possibilities for the Left

Of course, Mélenchon is far from having gathered an absolute majority of voters (not to mention the total registered voters). That said, even if he had made it to the second round, even if he had been in a position to win, the number of Mélenchon ballots would not necessarily represent a majority of the adult population. They are a strong minority of the exploited and oppressed, united on a fairly radical political basis; this force can move mountains if it gains confidence and draws more and more people into action.

Yet one of the great strategic problems of the period in which we have been living for decades is a crisis of this confidence in the self-liberation of the exploited and oppressed. Contrary to the best part of the twentieth century, in which the workers’ movement and socialist ideas could count on mass support, we lack a common political horizon, visible everywhere in society, for its radical transformation. The consequences are immense because such a horizon could unleash more powerful social struggles.

It could compensate for people’s fear of the risks and costs of a struggle with the realistic hope of changing the world together. It could help struggles spread to the entire society, threatening the established order to the point of extracting significant concessions. These concessions are the victories that we have been longing for, and that are sometimes said to be what we need to restore confidence in such a horizon. But we can also see the lack of major victories as being a consequence of the absence of a common horizon, which contributes to the fact that when one sector of the population mobilises (Yellow Vests, strikers for pensions, or non-white youth from working-class neighbourhoods, for example), the others do not identify with the struggle enough to join it, and the movement never gathers enough forces in simultaneous action to wrest away concessions in the current difficult context.

From this point of view, the heterogeneous character of Mélenchon’s electorate takes on a new and important meaning. The rallying of voters closer to Poutou, Arthaud, and abstention, the success of Mélenchon among non-white populations in working-class neighbourhoods, the support of sectors of the Communist Party that disagreed with the Roussel campaign, these all amount to varied and important dynamics. This rather unprecedented convergence has often been brought up, to the point of being the subject of numerous comments and jokes, such as a meme posted on the Facebook page “Neurchi de Red”, presenting the Mélenchon vote as the latest Marvel superhero movie, entitled “Votez Méluche” (using one of Mélenchon’s popular nicknames), and dubbed ‘the most ambitious crossover film of the decade’ according to a fake quote from TV magazine Télérama.

In the same way that Mélenchon and his movement have been able to (and will be able to) support struggles that go beyond the framework of what is institutionally acceptable today, notably on issues related to ‘violent’ tactics, police violence, and racism, many participants in these struggles, without necessarily being that close to the France Insoumise or Popular Union activist base at the beginning, or even to electoral politics (even in a tactical way), were able to vote for Mélenchon this year.

Everything that can prolong these rapprochements and keep them alive will make a real contribution to the rebuilding of a common political horizon, which will encourage the struggles and favour the victories of tomorrow. The defeats or limits of our biggest struggles of the last few years have found an electoral outlet, itself narrowly defeated but encouraging, and which in turn must have repercussions on our struggles in ways that remain to be organised.

Different sectors of the social movements and of the population have come together and have gathered a mass vote. Differences of ideas and practices of struggle can and must continue to be expressed. But it is very important and promising that we have been able to recognise ourselves as belonging to the same political side. We have experienced our strength in numbers, as well as basic comradely solidarity, in ways that we have had little opportunity to do in the two years of the pandemic. A single political horizon cannot be reconstituted without these moments of class convergence, which encourage and call for other moments of convergence in social struggles.

The Path Forward

The first way to prolong this unity is to organise it in protests on as wide as possible a basis without delay. This would first allow us to express our rejection of this second round and to direct it in a way to widen the rejection of Le Pen. As we have seen with the case of the student mobilisations, and insofar as mass anti-fascism remains to be rebuilt, we know that this will be difficult.

Soon, the question of the legislative elections will also arise. The institutional arrangement of those elections will not allow the Popular Union to easily achieve the same success as it did in the presidential election. Faced with weakened left-wing incumbents, who like their parties are torn between Macron and Mélenchon, the latter’s organisation must find ways of maintaining its political profile and gaining a greater number of seats, while at the same time pushing back the right and the far right.

However, to keep the political momentum alive, we need to explore things that are neither entirely about social mobilisations nor entirely about elections. This will require all of the networks, organisations, media, and other forms of mediation between left political projects and ideas, and the broad social base that has begun to reconstitute itself around them. In this respect, creativity is necessary. A modest example is the launch of the Spectre podcast platform, an independent project first imagined within the journal Contretemps (where this text was originally published), and based on the idea that to take some power back, our struggles must also take the floor back by going on air together.

We can devise new projects of written publications, cycles of public debates and conferences, neighbourhood projects, or other spaces of debate that will enrich and tighten our political networks. Multiple forms of mediation can be useful, provided they are sustainable and give a more active role to a growing number of the exploited and oppressed engaging in struggles. Beyond this diversity of possible means, one of the central debates is the question of the party or organisation that would be best suited to turn the political convergence of the Mélenchon vote into long-lasting unity and collective action.

It is often stressed that La France Insoumise, Mélenchon’s chief political force, is not really a party, and that its functioning is not that of an organisation controlled by its members. It must be recognised that this structuring has undoubtedly contributed to some of its greatest successes, especially in the presidential elections. But it has also contributed to their limitations: underperformance in all the other elections, and dispersion of activist networks that could have been consolidated to mobilise in many ways over the last five years.

The criticism must be constructive. We must hold together our democratic principles, our support for participation and self-organising with the reality that La France Insoumise’s somewhat undemocratic nature has in fact been able to bring into focus a radical left political horizon on a mass scale, which is also a democratic end par excellence. There is an opportunity in the French political configuration that Sanders and Corbyn did not have: the opportunity to move towards a broad political party that would at the same time be much more independent from the ruling classes than the Democratic or Labour parties.

More generally, it is necessary that the working classes get back into politics on a mass scale. If progress is made towards a transformation of La France Insoumise, or even a new political organisation, our political side will be equipped with new powerful means of collective action against the main obstacle in its way in its confrontation with capital, that is to say the reinforcement of the support to the extreme right.

The anti-fascist struggle will have to make a qualitative and quantitative leap compared to the last few years, in order to beat back widespread racist politics, and the confusion fed by the conspiracy theorists taking advantage of the anti-democratic practices of the government. All social movement structures will have a role to play in this and will themselves be battlefields in this fight, but a political organisation capable of nurturing grassroots anti-fascist campaigns on the same basis as the Mélenchon 2022 campaign could play a decisive role.

After today, regardless of the result, we must fight against the far right in a sustained way, and remove all obstacles to this fight: loosen the police stranglehold, marginalise racist positions on the left, rebuild a mass anti-fascist movement irrigating the whole society. We must make it known that Macronism is retreating in order to take the offensive again against the chief representatives of big capital.

We must strengthen and multiply the networks, spaces, publications, public events allowing to regroup politically. And finally, we must advance towards more democratic forms of mass political organisation regrouping the radical left, in a social and political united front approach. We have the Mélenchon momentum today—it is time to use it to create a broader horizon of social transformation.