by Luke Rotello
Between June 9 and July 1, 2024, two transformative elections were held in France, first for the European Parliament, followed by snap elections for the National Assembly. The decisive victory of the extreme-right Rassemblement National (RN, National Rally) in the European election provoked President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the National Assembly, throwing the future of French democracy into peril. The ensuing three weeks brought progressive forces together at unprecedented scale, producing an anti-fascist mass movement of trade unions, social movements and political parties—including our fraternal comrades in the French Communist Party—under the banner of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP, New Popular Front). Mass street demonstrations, united campaign infrastructure and a limited détente with the pro-Macron bloc brought the country from the brink of a fascist parliamentary majority to an NFP plurality, with the RN relegated to a third-place finish. As our country faces an electoral reckoning with its own fascist movement this November, careful study of the French context will prove instructive to our own Party’s efforts to build unity to defeat the extreme right.
In contrast to the narrow international commitments of the original Front Populaire, the rapid coordination and electoral advance of the NFP has taken place in full view of the political moment emerging in the metropole, in Gaza and in French colonial territories. Developments in the political economy of the European Union laid the foundations of both a continental model of fascism and a multimodal, class-heterogeneous democratic resistance to the existing plutocratic political order. Meanwhile, Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza (all but endorsed by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen) and open revolt against settler colonialism in Kanaky (New Caledonia) cannot be ignored. These competing visions of France—as a society organized in the peaceful internationalist interests of working people, an empty shell, or a fascist ethnostate—are now being articulated in stark terms.
The Popular Front
The original Popular Front in France emerged from a similar condition of political crisis provoked by the extreme right. A period of precarious governance during the global Depression in the early 1930s produced a rising tide of fascist street violence, culminating in the February crisis of 1934. Diagnosing the political condition to be similar to that of Mussolini’s march on Rome, the SFIO (predecessor to the Socialist Party), the Parti Communiste Français (PCF, French Communist Party) and their affiliated trade unions came together for a day-long general strike, marking the start of coordinated anti-fascist organizing and a warming of relations between factions of the working class.
When the Popular Front, consisting of Socialists and Radicals with tacit support from the Communists, was brought to power in 1936, its program was subject to extensive bourgeois pressures at domestic and international levels, and what it did achieve came in the context of mass working-class militancy. A post-election strike wave involving more than a million French workers quickly secured the Matignon agreements, which would become a cornerstone of French labor rights for decades to come. At the same time, the Popular Front vacillated into a position of non-intervention during the Spanish Civil War while largely tabling efforts to reckon with France’s global colonial empire.
The terms of engagement for the New Popular Front have changed dramatically, not only due to the many transformations in political terrain of the Fifth Republic with respect to the Third, but due to the unique juxtaposition of contemporary French fascism with the European Union.
Rise of the Eurofascist right
The European Union derives from a lineage of attempts at economic, political and ideological integration of the capitalist Western European bloc, beginning with the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 and developing in iterative fashion into the contemporary European Union. The formation of the ECSC was strongly influenced by the growth of American influence in Western Europe through the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Association (NATO) and Marshall Plan in 1948. The initial, highly technocratic institutional structures of European capital remained entirely out of democratic reach until the European Parliament was established with elections held in 1979. Its initial, effectively ceremonial design gave way to a somewhat more rigorous democratic format in 1987 in a push to legitimize the Community’s political machinery in tandem with the crystallization of a common European market.
While the international Communist tradition holds the struggle for the expansion of democratic rights as integral to building socialism, this form of democracy was carefully designed for exercise by bourgeois consensus, with little space for dissent by progressive forces. Further, the development of a common market created new avenues for the emergence of transnational finance capital, a political force of its own right accountable only to its own material interests. The rightmost factions of this force have taken shape at the domestic level, colluding with regional allies—agribusiness, Christian fundamentalist leaders and mining companies among others—to develop a transnational political framework of reaction to recruit from other disaffected strata.
As the most reactionary factions of capital have sought further consolidation of their political power through electoral strategy and lobbying at the Eurofederal level, so too have their domestic architectures of anti-migrant violence taken on a distinctly pan-European character. During the 2024 European Parliament campaign, the traditional forces of the right embodied by the European People’s Party (EPP) marked a decisive shift toward collaboration with the far right in calling for the recruitment of thousands of new European border officers. This shift has taken place amid a consolidation of reactionary power in EU countries such as Italy, Hungary and Greece, which have developed murderous anti-migrant policies responsible for thousands of deaths. In conjunction with racist double standards for Ukrainian refugees, these policies have laid the foundation for a Eurofascist political project rooted in imperialist violence, one gleefully articulated by the continental extreme right in the language of “Fortress Europe.”
These policies and the electoral platforms responsible for them were made possible in large part by the rise of the National Rally in elections to European Parliament, and the RN itself did not become electorally relevant until its participation in such an election in 1984. Benefitting from widespread disinterest in a disempowered legislative body, the party turned its campaign into a national showcase, drawing 2.2 million votes after winning just 40,000 in legislative elections three years prior. It has remained a fixture of regional electoral politics ever since, and its first-place result in 2014’s European Parliament elections fomented the structures of a new reactionary international, opening doors for parties such as the Dutch PVV and Swedish SD to legitimize their politics and eventually partake in governing coalitions.
Further, the extreme right’s capacity to realize reactionary capital’s material aims through its activity at the level of the European Parliament has established it as a viable alternative to the neoliberal consensus. The era of the Euro, where austerity can be enforced at the behest of multinational finance capital far from democratic oversight, has proven unsustainable when propped up by depolarized and depoliticized forces of the erstwhile liberal consensus. To establish a mass legitimacy for these institutions and develop a degree of control over the labor market, let alone to subjugate working-class and democratic opposition, requires a truly reactionary project equipped for terroristic rule. As such democratic opposition develops on a continental scale, so too must these fascist projects look beyond their borders and coordinate with fraternal parties of their own, all at the behest of their benefactors. Thus, the rhetorically uncompromising ultranationalists have been compelled to square a circle with the increasingly international ambitions of their faction of the capitalist class.
Democratic resistance
If France was the launch point for a new model of pan-European fascism, it is also the site of some of the most momentous, creative and instructive resistance from working-class and progressive sectors. The European Union’s economic institutions—firmly grounded in the pro-austerity dogma of the neoliberal age—began to crystallize in the early 2000s, necessitating a political framework to justify them to the European public. In 2005, the proposal for a shared constitution was brought to a referendum vote in countries across the EU, with enthusiastic input and support from both the French right and the dominant wing of the center-left. While polling first indicated a landslide victory for the proposal in France, a broad movement for a “No” vote grew from a range of progressive forces, with our fraternal comrades in the PCF taking a central role in organizing and mobilizing disparate constituencies. Their efforts proved decisive, narrowly defeating the constitutional referendum and derailing the process for the rest of the continent. While the Treaty of Lisbon was ratified four years later to fulfill a similar set of objectives, its provisions were comparably limited and lacking in democratic legitimacy—all countries except Ireland put the treaty to legislative votes rather than referenda.
The seeds planted in the 2005 “No” campaign would quickly take root in a new alignment of social forces, with significant downstream effects on the political economy of the financial crisis in Europe. The constitutional referendum fomented a split within the Socialist Party, producing a left-populist current led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon which has since sought to abrogate what it deems to be undemocratic provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon, among other elements of the European Union’s governing structure. With much to be said of the class character, political organization and failures of this political moment of the 2010s, the electoral advances of the Communist-backed Left Front in France would open up political terrain for a mass reckoning with European austerity. Wracked by debt crises and pushed to the brink by the disciplinary intentions of European finance capital, Greece and Spain saw massive democratic upheavals which drew heavily from the French model of resistance. Millions marched, organized and voted in new ways, bringing about new modes of class-heterogeneous democratic radicalism which reflected back upon all levels of French political life.
In sum, these developments would set the stage for an open struggle for power between forces of the neoliberal consensus, the broad democratic left and the extreme right.
Liberal misleadership
While attempting to position themselves as the primary opposition to fascism, the forces of the French liberal bourgeoisie now led by Emmanuel Macron have proven primarily hostile to the working class and its political expression and unwilling to confront the material basis of the fascist movement. Socioeconomic precarity has skyrocketed amid broad trends of deindustrialization and persistent attacks on the French welfare state. The exceedingly powerful position of the French executive—empowered to pass legislation without consultation of the National Assembly by Article 49, Paragraph 3 of the constitution—has been leveraged by successive administrations to grind down the country’s unions and déclassé workers, with notable examples in the passage of the El Khomri law of 2016 and the pension reform of 2023.
Whereas immigrants, especially Muslims, are among the most disproportionately affected by the liquidation of state welfare and demonization by the extreme right, the Macron government has waged its own campaign of stigmatization, and has at times gone so far as to accuse the RN of being “soft on Islam.” This campaign has worked as a two-part gift to the extreme right—it has normalized racist social policy and lent a moderate image to the fascists, creating a political appetite for it, while simultaneously attaching a mainstream vision of anti-fascism to fascist programmatic demands and virulent opposition to working-class political life. As such, where an overwhelming second-round majority for Macron in 2017 reflected an anti-fascist national moment recalling that of 2002, burgeoning apathy, disillusionment and anger have thrown the democratic character of French society into open contention.
Fascism, decay or democracy?
It is in this context that French Communists, socialists, unions and social movements have built unity around the shared programmatic demand of a Sixth Republic, with an emphasis on the abolition of Article 49.3 and empowerment of the National Assembly. Having witnessed the consequences of a runaway executive eroding French democracy and its welfare state, these movements have converged with a shared transformative commitment to not only restoring France’s social foundations, but expanding upon them. Where the Macron government forcibly raised the state-mandated retirement age from 62 to 64, the New Popular Front seeks to bring it down to 60. Where Macron abolished the wealth tax, the Front intends to restore and expand upon it as a basis for funding new social programs.
Such democratic resolve is not unique to the New Popular Front, but has again emerged amid an unprecedented alignment of social forces. As in the time of the Second World War, fascism has been resisted not only at the ballot box but through realization of democratic demands. Though unsuccessful in its push to abolish the French Senate in the aftermath of liberation from Nazi occupation, the workers’ movement has remained oriented to the redistribution of the state’s legislative power. The contemporary rallying cry of a “re-parliamentarization” of French politics may yet play a similar role, seeking to uproot the reactionary movement through an extension of democratic freedoms and social welfare to all members of society while shifting the balance of power toward the working class.
Given the scale of the democratic crisis at hand and the ideological distance between progressive forces, construction of this unity did not take place easily. Numerous constituencies have remained distrusting of the Socialist Party—not least former president François Hollande, responsible for the El Khomri law and elected representative of the NFP—for its role in undermining workers’ rights and precipitating Macronist neoliberal politics. For its part, the center-left is reluctant to collaborate with the left-populist La France Insoumise bloc, which was lifted to a nearly hegemonic position within the broad Left after the 2022 elections, giving center stage to Jean-Luc Mélenchon as a controversial figurehead. For its part, the previous NUPES coalition, formed after Mélenchon’s third-place finish in the 2022 presidential election, formed without direct input from mass organizations and dissolved over differing stances on the genocide in Gaza. The international context that has shaped the compositions, interrelations and identities of these social constituencies remains salient, even more so after the fractured European Parliament election. As the NFP confronts a vacillating and weakened Macron on his administration’s stance on Palestine, the indigenous Kanak people struggle for sovereignty and freedom from settler-colonial exploitation. In addition to renewed democratic unity, the moment demands a unity of working and oppressed people around the world—the very internationalism that the PCF has fought to build throughout its history.
As such, our comrades have maintained a central role in continuing the political operation of the New Popular Front and sustaining its unifying social commitments. After successive internal disagreements over the Front’s nominee for president of the Assembly, the coalition rallied around longtime Communist lawmaker André Chassaigne as a scion of its democratic, social and ecological principles. While falling just short of the liberal bloc after the third round of voting, the coalition’s sustained resolve indicates that this iteration of the Popular Front may prove uniquely durable, with prospects for a meaningful resolution to the democratic crisis that produced it. As always, solidarity with the French Communist Party and its allies, and with the working and oppressed people of France and its colonies. Onward!