Portside

In the spring of 2023 a protest movement against French President Emmanuel Macron’s drive to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64 flooded the country’s streets. “Emmanuel Macron, oh dumbass, we’re coming to your house to get you!” chanted crowds of strikers; from sanitation to railway, to office workers; during weeks of strikes. Nevertheless, Macron prevailed, using a constitutional provision to bypass a vote in the National Assembly. 

These same demonstrators rejoiced just over a year later on Sunday, July 7, when the leftist coalition beat Marine Le Pen’s far-right and Macron’s centrist coalitions in France’s snap parliamentary elections. 

“Fifty-two percent of the votes for the Popular Front came from the low-income neighborhoods!”

Macron shocked many in early June when he dissolved the French legislature and called new elections. He hoped to strengthen his party’s advantage over the far-right National Rally party and was counting on left parties to remain divided which, in France’s two-stage voting process, would push their supporters to vote for centrist candidates in the second round of voting. 

Instead, the left quickly united into a four-party alliance, the New Popular Front, and finished a strong second in the first round of the election — trailing the openly fascist National Rally but well ahead of Macron’s centrist coalition. In the days that followed, the left and center formed an uneasy alliance with 200 parliamentary candidates from their ranks withdrawing from races in which they had finished in third place in the opening round. This was in order to prevent the far right from gaining a parliamentary majority that would allow them to govern France for the first time since the early 1940s when it collaborated with the Nazi occupation. 

The strategy worked spectacularly with the New Popular Front winning the most deputies (182) in the 577-seat parliament followed by Macron’s coalition (168 seats) with National Rally lagging in third (143 seats) after many thought they would win a decisive majority. Compared to the previous 2022 parliamentary elections, the left gained 49 seats, the center lost 82 and the far right gained 54. France Insoumise, the most militant of the four parties in the NPF, also won the most seats of any party in their coalition. 

Tens of thousands of New Popular Front supporters who gathered in public squares to watch the election results were stunned by their victory and burst into anti-fascist chants. The New Popular Front drew its inspiration from the Popular Front government of the mid-1930s, a coalition of several socialist parties that passed sweeping social and economic reforms before collapsing in the run-up to World War II. 

For the present-day French left, this marked the first time it had won a political battle against Macron since he took office in 2017.

“When we heard the coalition won, I cried. You can’t know the joy that there was in Paris. All of Paris shouted. We thought [the far-right] was going to win,” Farida Belabbas, cofounder of a radical queer community space in Paris called La Fleche d’Or, told The Indypendent. 

“Fifty-two percent of the votes for the Popular Front came from the low-income neighborhoods!” boasted a young Arab-French organizer at the Fleche d’Or as she spoke to a roaring crowd just after the election results were announced. 

“All the leftists at the Fleche d’Or jumped on their bikes and rushed to Place de la République. There were fireworks. It was great. There was joy! You could see it on everyone’s faces. This is history. The people won. We retook the streets. We are reclaiming our power,” says Belabbas, who is the daughter of an Algerian revolutionary who fought in that country’s war of independence against France. 

The New Popular Front’s platform includes lowering the retirement age back down to 60 (where it was before Republican President Nicolas Sarkozy initially raised it in 2010), scrapping Macron’s pension reforms, raising the minimum wage by 14%, and freezing the price of basic necessities such as food and fuel. It aims to cover the costs of children’s education (including meals, transportation and extracurricular activities). This would all be funded by increasing taxes on the rich. 

The front has also promised to recognize Palestine as a state and to push for an arms embargo against Israel. 

The New Popular Front — which in addition to the main left-wing and green parties also included the support of several trade-union and anti-racist groups — agreed to a single joint slate of candidates going into the first round of the elections, making the French left the strongest and main challenger to the fascists.

It’s as if a new people of France has been born with the second round of the legislative elections, and they all know it.

The ability of the left-green coalition to prevail in the second round was largely due to the fact that the banlieue — the impoverished neighborhoods dotted with large housing blocks on the periphery of Paris — came out to vote in their favor. They did so despite the fact that the banlieue is more separated than ever from Paris: “It is now quite difficult to cross the highways and enter or exit the banlieue,” said Belabbas. Yet, “it’s the first time the youth of the banlieue voted! And it was decisive.”

It is these mostly non-white people from Paris’ low-income neighborhoods that are worst discriminated against by the far-right and that have been worst affected my Macron’s neoliberal, often anti-democratic reforms: During his presidency, Macron has implemented a little-before-used loophole in the French constitution called 49.3 that enables him to pass through laws without an assembly vote. He used it to push through the retirement reform, to make class sizes bigger in the French education system, to change the law so that only French citizens don’t have to pay for health care, to conservatively reform unemployment benefits and to cut taxes on the wealthy. 

“We won all of these rights through political struggles, and now he’s throwing them away,” said Belabbas. “The seven years of Macron has profoundly broken France. We’re seeing a destruction of the social-welfare state.”

• • •

Ahead of the French elections, the New Popular Front was strengthened as its parties and supporters hosted demonstrations in the streets attended by masses — worker, student, pro-immigrant, anti-racist and anti-imperialist groups, and anyone else that wanted to defeat the fascists and centrists — as well as by community assemblies and canvassing events.

In the seven days between the first and second round of the elections, not only did people begin to demonstrate every day, but the various leftist factions, including those from the banlieue, made an extra effort to organize and speak to the Black, Arab, immigrant and low-income people of the banlieue.  

This was not the first time that those marginalized people were facing an election against the far-right, but it was the first time that they came out to vote in such high numbers. 

“You cannot underestimate the role Palestine played in the elections,” says Belabbas. “The Israeli far-right has power in the politics of France. And [Palestine] is an issue that hits straight to the heart for the people in this country coming from the post-colonial world. There are many Algerian descendents in France, and for us Algeriens, Palestine, it’s the same fight we fought against France.” 

The only French party that has spoken against Israel is France Insoumise, and it won, pointed out Belabbas. 

Before Macron’s June 10 announcement that he would dissolve the French Parliament, triggering snap elections, weekly pro-Palestine protests had already been taking to the streets in cities around the country. After the announcement, those weekly protests grew into pro-NFP protests.

“We wish for a France that is more accepting and more open,” said Osama Afaneh, a Palestinian refugee living in France. He wore a red kuffiyeh draped over his shoulders (technically illegal to wear at a political demonstration in France), at a mass protest in Paris on June 15. “This is coming together after weeks and weeks of protest for Palestine. Every Saturday since October we’ve been protesting.”

“I hope we see a more left-wing government in France that does recognize the state of Palestine with the borders from ‘67,” continued Afaneh. “Today is the first time actually that all the unions are coming together, and a lot of organizations that we have not seen protesting for Palestine in the past weeks are seeing themselves as a part of the leftist movement.”

That day hundreds of thousands of protesters demonstrated around the country — 250,000 according to the French police and 640,000 according to the General Confederation of Labor. In Paris, calls for justice in Palestine remained loud among the protesters’ demands, and from many parts of the demonstration erupted chants demanding the retirement age be lowered back to 60. 

“Retirement! At 60! We fought to win it and we’ll fight to keep it!” shouted the Parisians.

“It’s a very important moment for democracy in France, because it’s very dangerous for a lot of us foreigners coming to live in France feeling less safe. I am very hopeful — just seeing today, thousands of people coming together,” said Afaneh.  

After the march ended in Place de la Nation, a protest faction led by Urgence Palestine, a prominent leftist pro-Palestine organization, continued to demonstrate even though the protest was no longer permitted. People gathered around the group’s co-founder, Omar Talsoumi, as his voice thundered into the microphone.

“Is the question we ask ourselves today whether this extraordinary crowd is here because we are sick of our France, sick because we are scared of what France might become?” posed Talsoumi. “Or are we here because already, now, right now, the biggest demand, the most indispensable right and the most sacred duty is to rise up against this system?” The crowd cheered. 

“We are going to exploit all the necessary means against colonialism, against racism, against facism. And facism isn’t just something that is threatening to emerge tomorrow. Facism, racism and colonialism are already here! They’re already in power!” 

Talsoumi ended his speech by chanting, “From Gaza to Paris!” and the crowd cried back, “Resistance! Resistance!”

See footage from the June 15 protest in Paris.

Ahead of the elections, leftist organizers around France also hurried to put together people’s assemblies and other forms of community gatherings where speakers from leftist political parties and groups encouraged attendees not only to vote in the upcoming elections, but to continue to push for their demands through all various means of protest. 

At an assembly in Paris on June 13, where even the overflow room was so packed that people waited outside to be let in, a speaker from the far-left organization Revolution Permanente encouraged participants to do more than just vote. 

“I live in the banlieue, and life is hard,” she explained, listing hurdles such as the difficulty of finding a good education for her children. 

“The minimum thing we can do is vote,” she said, “but we also need to form our own parties and have our own demands, and not just demand for reform from politicians. … We need to organize wherever we are — at school, at work, in the neighborhood, on the streets.” 

Amid the flurry of organizing coming out of the banlieue in recent months, a group of young media makers from there (often the children of immigrants/refugees) has begun to print its own anti-imperialist, independent  publication, nous. (us.). It is a project connected to Paroles d’Honneur (Words of Honor), a political media group founded in 2017 out of the banlieue dedicated to a “new perspective on current events by making the voices of post-colonial immigrant neighborhoods heard.”

At the protest on July 15, youth sold the second issue of the new 120-page magazine for 10 euros. “Terroriste: C’est celui qui dit qui est!” (Terrorist: Those who say it are it!) was printed on the cover below a photo of a young Arab person wearing a kuffiyeh with bombs raining down behind them. 

• • •

With France’s parliament deeply divided, it remains to be seen how a new government will take shape. The New Popular Front holds the most seats but is well short of a majority. Jean-Luc Melénchon, as the leader of the largest party within the NPF coalition, has argued he should be the next prime minister, but the more moderate parties in the NPF — the Socialists, the Communists and the Greens — have refused to back him.

For the NPF to achieve a majority of votes, it would need support from Macron’s centrist coalition. Macron, meanwhile, has other options. On July 18, his coalition got enough support from the far right to re-elect Macron ally Yael Braun-Pivet as speaker of the National Assembly over Communist Party deputy Andre Chassiagne, the candidate of the New Popular Front, by a vote of 220-207.

Meanwhile, support for Melénchon’s platform of radical wealth redistribution is running high among the young, multi-racial left based in the banlieue, which has been re-energized by months of protests and now an election victory. 

“We are together! And we continue to construct, day after day, in our neighborhoods, our high schools, our universities, street par street, the anti-colonial and anti-racist front of which France is in need,” says Omar Talsoumi of Urgence Palestine. 

Melénchon made a victory speech on the floor of the French Parliament on July 7 and then headed to the Stalingrad metro stop not far from the banlieue. 

“And who was there?” said Belabbas, “Arabs, Black people, the immigrants. They rejoiced! These people eat sometimes only once a day, their life is hard, you have to understand. I’ve seen misery on the faces of the young, the old, but this day I saw a great joy. They are quite aware that the banlieue voted. It’s as if a new people of France has been born with the second round of the legislative elections, and they all know it. They won’t let it be stolen; they know very well this is just the beginning.”

Quotes have been translated to English by Amba Guerguerian.

Amba Guerguerian is Associate Editor of the Indypendent

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