Parable of the Parakeets

On​ 21 April 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen became the first leader of a far-right party to reach the run-off of a French presidential election. France was astonished. For two weeks, daily anti-fascist demonstrations took place in cities and the mainstream media called on voters to re-elect the conservative Jacques Chirac. But the upsetting result proved a false alarm. Left-wing sympathisers held their nose to vote for Chirac, who won the run-off with a Soviet-like 82 per cent of the vote. Le Pen’s score rose by just one point between the first and the second round, from 17 per cent to 18 per cent. When his daughter, Marine Le Pen, reached the second round in 2022, she scored 41 per cent.

The earthquake of 21 April 2002 resulted from the dispersal of left-wing votes rather than a surge of support for the far right. Lionel Jospin, the sitting prime minister and leader of the centre-left Parti socialiste (PS), obtained only 16 per cent of the vote because eight other left-wing or Green candidates garnered 29 per cent between them. Most surprising was the excellent showing of two of the three Trotskyist candidates. Arlette Laguiller, of Lutte ouvrière (the Workers’ Struggle), with 5.7 per cent of the vote, and Olivier Besancenot, of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, with 4.3 per cent, both did better than the candidate of the ex-Stalinist Parti communiste français (PCF), who polled only 3.4 per cent. The day might be remembered as a milestone in the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, but it also marked a decisive stage in the disintegration of the French left, with the humiliation of its two main pillars since the end of the Second World War, the PCF and the PS.

From 1945 until the late 1970s, the PCF had dominated left-wing politics in France. Polling between 20 and 25 per cent at legislative elections, it could rely on a dense network of societies and charities aimed at supporting working-class families; in 1980 it still had 500,000 members. Its leadership cultivated closer relations with the Soviet Union than the leaders of the Italian and Spanish Communist Parties chose to. In 1979 Georges Marchais, general secretary of the PCF from 1972 until 1994, still described the experience of communism in Central and Eastern Europe as ‘generally positive’ and supported the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan.

This ideological rigidity helped the reformist PS gain leadership of the left after 1980. Discredited by its hostility to decolonisation during the Algerian War of Independence, the old Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (French Section of the Workers’ International) had changed its name to the Parti socialiste in 1969. Two years later it merged with several smaller centre-left parties and selected as its leader François Mitterrand, a stalwart opponent of General de Gaulle, but otherwise a pragmatist who paid lip service to the party’s official goal of a ‘rupture with capitalism’. Under Mitterrand’s leadership, the PS prospered. In the 1981 presidential election Mitterrand soundly beat the PCF candidate, Marchais, in the first round, and prevailed over the haughty centrist Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the run-off. The PS won an absolute majority in the legislative election a few weeks later and dominated French politics for the next twenty years. For those born, like me, in the late 1970s it seemed to be the natural party of government.

The guilt instilled by the result of 21 April 2002 helped the PS retain a significant role for another decade. Relentless warnings about the dangers of dispersing left-wing votes and exasperation with the hyperactive inefficacy of Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency (2007-12) enabled the party’s leader, François Hollande, to become president in 2012. Yet Hollande proved so unpopular that, very unusually, he didn’t run for a second term. At the 2017 presidential election, the PS candidate, Benoît Hamon, obtained only 6 per cent of the vote. At the 2022 election, its candidate, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, was obliterated, with less than 2 per cent. In France there are no natural parties of government.

The collapse of the PS vote enabled Emmanuel Macron to win the 2017 and 2022 elections. A former adviser to and minister under Hollande, Macron never espoused a socialist enthusiasm for economic redistribution. In 2012 he mocked Hollande’s proposal to create a new income tax band for those earning more than a million euros a year as an attempt to turn France into ‘Cuba without the sun’. Yet his perceived closeness to the PS helped him siphon off millions of moderate socialist voters, who, combined with centrist voters, delivered a convincing win over the conservative François Fillon in the first round of the 2017 election, and a thumping victory, with 66 per cent of the vote, against Le Pen in the run-off. Five years later, Macron’s unabashed free-market policies lost him votes on the centre left, but he made up for it by capturing a significant fraction of the conservative vote. Many left-wing voters nonetheless refused to endorse him in the run-off and he was returned with a reduced majority of 58 per cent.

The disintegration of the PS also created space for the emergence of a new radical left-wing movement. Who would take over the 15 per cent or so of voters who opted for the far left in 2002 and voted PS for tactical reasons in 2007 and 2012? Enter Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the second major beneficiary of the PS’s collapse. A member of the secretive Organisation communiste internationaliste, another Trotskyist party, in his twenties, he joined the ascendant PS in the late 1970s. He gradually asserted himself as one of the leaders of the party’s left wing, and served as a junior minister under Jospin, from 2000 until 2002. Mélenchon rose to national prominence as a leading advocate of the ‘No’ vote in the 2005 referendum on the ratification of the proposed EU constitution. Despite the support of most mainstream parties for ‘Yes’, ‘No’ prevailed with 55 per cent of the vote. Three years after the 2002 election, the result underscored the inability of traditional parties to control or reflect large sections of public opinion.

After a failed attempt to impose a progressive turn on the PS, Mélenchon left it to found the Parti de gauche in 2009. The venture was inspired by the German party Die Linke, a 2007 merger of the former East German Communist Party with the left-wing faction of the Social Democratic Party. In 2012 Mélenchon made his first bid for the French presidency, as the joint candidate of the Parti de gauche and the PCF. He polled a creditable 11 per cent, but the coalition obtained disappointing results at subsequent national and local elections and the Parti de gauche failed to become a significant force.

In the run-up to the 2017 presidential election, Mélenchon sought to attract new support by embracing a more radical brand of left-wing politics. A new movement, La France insoumise, was founded in 2016, loosely uniting the Parti de gauche with other radical groups. LFI is not a traditional party with leaders elected by fee-paying members; Mélenchon himself described it as a ‘gaseous’ movement. Ordinary members can join for free in just a few clicks online. A majority of participants in LFI’s representative assembly, which meets once a year, are drawn by lots among members. The assembly then elects by acclamation 24 members of a ‘national co-ordination’, including a chief co-ordinator. By all accounts, this loose organisation ensures more spontaneity and a greater freedom of discussion, at least at the local level, than in traditional parties. But the absence of a secret ballot enables Mélenchon and his closest lieutenants to keep the movement on a tight leash. In practice, they make all the decisions.

LFI’s platform also marks a shift to a different kind of radical politics. Until the early 2010s, Mélenchon and his allies contented themselves with upholding an uncompromising old-left agenda. Demands focused on the preservation of national sovereignty and economic redistribution in favour of workers, while social liberalism was viewed with suspicion. In contrast, LFI emphasises radical solutions to the global ecological crisis, including degrowth, and holds, by French standards, extremely progressive views on race and gender. Among other things, Mélenchon has become less keen on defending laïcité, France’s stringent conception of secularism. Since 2016 he has repeatedly warned against the instrumentalisation of laïcité as a tool of legal discrimination against Muslims, and his adversaries frequently accuse him of embracing communitarianism in order to attract Muslim voters.

Following his radical turn, Mélenchon went on to obtain 20 per cent of the vote at the 2017 election and 22 per cent in 2022. Both times he was just 1 percentage point behind Le Pen – narrowly failing to qualify for the run-off – and nearly 15 per cent ahead of the next most popular left-of-centre candidate. These results turned Mélenchon into the de facto leader of the left. Other left-wing parties frequently complain about LFI’s confrontational style and provocative stances, not least its relentless denunciation of the atrocities committed by Israel. Mélenchon’s opponents and even some of his socialist allies have called him an antisemite. Such accusations blow out of proportion a few clumsy attacks by LFI on Israel and its French supporters. They mostly seek to undermine co-operation between Mélenchon’s party and the centre left, but so far to little avail. When Macron called a snap election to try to take advantage of divisions within the left in 2024, LFI’s partners in the Nouveau Front populaire – including the Communists, the Greens and the rump Parti socialiste – closed ranks and left-wing parties went on to increase their number of MPs from 148 to 180 in a hopelessly hung parliament.

Mélenchon’s rise to prominence since 2015 has often been compared to the contemporaneous if more ephemeral success of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the United States. There is an undeniable resemblance between the sudden propelling to stardom of these three old hands of the radical left, especially among young progressives. But to the extent that LFI looks to foreign models, it usually invokes the Five Star Movement in Italy, for its canny use of new media, or Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, for their radical hostility to neoliberal capitalism. Mélenchon’s parents were European settlers of Spanish and Italian descent in Algeria. Mélenchon himself grew up in a mostly Spanish-speaking environment in the Tangier International Zone, an enclave under European jurisdiction within the Franco-Spanish protectorate of Morocco, until he moved to France with his mother in 1962, aged eleven. Still a fluent Spanish speaker, he often also summons the example of Latin American left-wing movements as inspiration. He paid homage to Hugo Chávez after his death in 2013: ‘What Chávez represents never dies. It is the immortal ideal of the revolution’s humanistic hope.’

Adducing as evidence his sympathy for Latin American strongmen or his youthful membership of a Trotskyist organisation notorious for its undemocratic methods, Mélenchon’s adversaries charge him with authoritarian tendencies. Last May two centre-left journalists published a vitriolic pamphlet, La Meute (‘The Wolfpack’), which portrayed LFI as a one-man cult, where dissidents are quickly slandered and expelled. There is some truth to these accusations. LFI is a machine mostly designed to serve Mélenchon’s ambitions. Its national co-ordinators have so far been thirty-something mediocrities whose chief merit seems to be absolute loyalty to the movement’s informal leader. But much the same accusations could be levelled at Renaissance, the political machine that serves Macron’s interests, or Le Pen’s Rassemblement national.

Such ‘gaseous’ one-man or one-woman cults correspond better than traditional parties with what voters now want. In his bestselling L’Archipel français: une nation multiple et divisée (2019), the political analyst Jérôme Fourquet drew attention to the extreme fragmentation of French society as a result of the decline of Catholicism and communism since the 1970s, along with social segregation and fast-growing ethnic diversity. These centrifugal forces, Fourquet argued, underlie the collapse of traditional parties, while rampant individualism favours the emergence of looser movements designed to further the interests of a single leader.

While Macron brought together the supporters and Le Pen the adversaries of neoliberal globalisation, Mélenchon forged a more fragile coalition of the various groups who want a different kind of globalisation: traditional radicals in the shrinking Communist strongholds of the industrial north or rural south; a young, highly educated precariat in the cities; and second or third-generation immigrants in segregated suburbs. Between 2017 and 2022, Mélenchon lost older votes in formerly Communist regions. But in Paris his share of the vote rose from 20 per cent to 30 per cent. In the poor and ethnically diverse suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis, it rose from 35 per cent to 49 per cent. Mélenchon also more than doubled his share of the vote in mostly non-white overseas départements such as Martinique and Guadeloupe.

On the evening​ of the first round in 2022, Mélenchon expressed sorrow that he had failed to qualify for the run-off, but also pride in achieving such an unprecedented result for the radical left. He ended his speech with the words ‘Faites mieux!’, at once a boast and a dare. The phrase serves as the title of a book published in France in September 2023 and now available in English translation under the title Now, the People! Like most books by prominent politicians, it is rich in high-minded principles and silent on electoral calculations. Yet it teaches us a few things about the sort of anti-capitalist revolution the new radical left envisages in our postmodern, crisis-ridden age.

A few passages are beyond parody. To illustrate how the new hyper-connectedness may facilitate revolutionary action, Mélenchon reminisces about lying in a hammock next to a mango tree in Colombia and observing dozens of parakeets spontaneously collaborating to evade a sparrowhawk. In this parable, the parakeets are the exploited revolutionaries and it is their ability to communicate with one another invisibly and inaudibly that fills Mélenchon with optimism about the new possibilities of revolution from below. The parable overlooks the fact that capitalist sparrowhawks, too, can use hyper-connectedness to co-ordinate exploitation, surveillance and repression.

Although Mélenchon claims that Marxism still constitutes ‘the basis for the new theoretical framework’ it expounds, disciples of Marx and Engels will frown at the book’s repudiation of historical materialism or its contention that the new revolutionary struggle pits environmental science, rather than labour, against capital. In reality, Mélenchon’s manifesto is notable for its embrace of a spiritual conception of anti-capitalist revolution. Abandoning the classics of materialism, he draws mostly on an eclectic range of writers – such as Seneca, the Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Martinican cultural theorist Édouard Glissant – to denounce, often eloquently, the moral turpitudes of capitalist productivism.

There are nonetheless traces of Mélenchon’s youthful Trotskyism in his millenarian conviction that global revolution is imminent. The seriousness of environmental crises rejuvenates this old expectation: ‘We have to make far-reaching changes within short deadlines. For the first time since the earliest critiques of capitalism, the debate between reform and revolution has been rendered obsolete.’ Mélenchon’s enthusiasm for the revolutionary potential of global urbanisation – only ‘urbanites’, he claims, can become ‘citizens’ – also echoes Trotsky’s emphasis on the pre-eminent role of the urban proletariat in revolutionary processes. Perhaps the most Trotskyist aspect of Mélenchon’s thought is his defence of constant rebellion against the capitalist order, a throwback to the notion of permanent revolution.

An even more profound influence is the French revolutionary tradition, tinged with national messianism. Mélenchon’s real hero is not Chávez but Robespierre, whose demanding conception of public morals he extolled in an earlier work, De la vertu (2017). In Now, the People, Mélenchon counters accusations of populism with a quotation from a speech Robespierre made at the Club des Jacobins in 1792: ‘I am of the people, I have never been anything but that, I want to be nothing but that; I despise anyone who purports to be something more.’ Mélenchon’s breakdown of the revolutionary process into ‘instituent’, ‘destituent’ and ‘constituent’ phases closely mirrors the ternary sequence still instilled in French schoolchildren when they study this foundational phase of national history: Enlightenment in the 18th century, crisis of the Ancien Régime in the 1780s and emergence of the Constituent Assembly in 1789.

Combined with his abandonment of Marxist materialism, this attachment to memories of France’s great revolution often make Mélenchon’s ideas resemble those of Romantic writers and utopian socialists in the early 19th century. His egalitarian lyricism recalls that of the historian Jules Michelet in Le Peuple (1846), while his detestation of capitalist greed and emphasis on the satisfaction of natural human needs wouldn’t be out of place in the writings of Charles Fourier. His cult of Robespierre and condoning of political violence echo the views of professional revolutionists such as Philippe Buonarroti and Auguste Blanqui. Mélenchon openly calls on France to remember and dare to re-enact its glorious revolutionary tradition: ‘Throughout history,’ Now, the People begins, ‘France has often given the starkest expression to the trends running through a given era,’ while the last chapter’s final paragraph asserts that France remains ‘a power with a universalist calling’.

Mélenchon’s prose is stirring if not always convincing. It gives the reader more to think about than the bland defence of neoliberal technocracy by centrist supporters of Macron or the rabid denunciation of extra-European immigration by right-wing nationalists. Yet there are many evasions, not least on the issue of migration. Mélenchon acknowledges in passing the existence of Islamophobia, but simplistically blames it on the efforts of ‘the oligarchy’ to divide ‘the people’, as per ‘the strategy of “the clash of civilisations” pushed by Samuel Huntington and consultancies from the United States’. Like most French people, I enjoy holding the US responsible for modern France’s problems. But Mélenchon, who grew up in North Africa in the dying days of French empire and frequently boasts about his awareness of history, must know that the systematic villainisation of Muslims is in large part a product of France’s colonial past and a perversion of what he calls its universalist calling, rather than an American import.

Can LFI seize power? On current trends, its electoral prospects aren’t as promising as those of the Rassemblement national. Mélenchon rather seems to be betting on an abrupt collapse of centrism that will leave his brand of radicalism as the sole non-racist alternative to right-wing nationalism. This makes him an authentic revolutionist, but it is a dangerous gamble. The hopes of 19th-century French revolutionaries ended in bitter or bloody disappointment: the fear of chaos encouraged moderates to compromise and ally with reactionaries. Mélenchon’s inflammatory rhetoric runs a similar risk of facilitating a rapprochement between the battered pro-Macron centre and the ascendant far right.

The ongoing crisis in France confirms aspects of Mélenchon’s diagnosis. France’s neo-Blairite experiment keeps slowly imploding. From the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 until this year, no president had ever appointed more than three prime ministers in a single term; on 9 September, Macron nominated the fourth prime minister of his second term, which still has a year and a half to run. With the support of LFI, several social media accounts, using the slogan ‘bloquons tout!’ (‘let’s block everything!’), called for the systematic disruption of roads and transport hubs on 10 September, though the police easily deterred most efforts. A strike against projected budget cuts in the public sector on 18 September was more effective, but hardly extraordinary by French standards.

A sense that some sort of political upheaval is imminent nonetheless pervades everyday life. In private, the managers of my university and the headteachers of my children’s schools admit that they now ignore government instructions, because no one knows who will hold the reins in a few months’ time. The rump Parti socialiste, whose MPs could give the government a lifeline in parliament, understandably hesitates to board a sinking ship. Such a decrepitude of central government power usually precedes revolutions or coups. So which will it be, if the PS doesn’t opt for its own extinction? I would prefer a progressive, peaceful revolution. But in opinion polls Le Pen still enjoys a commanding lead, the traditional conservatives have bounced back after taking a right-wing turn and the ever more divided left languishes. The police, the army, business organisations and the well-to-do loathe Mélenchon. A counter-revolution appears far more probable.