By Marlon Ettinger

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing alliance elected 142 MPs to France’s National Assembly on Sunday. In some ways this was a success: the broad left more than doubled its number of MPs and helped strip President Emmanuel Macron of his majority, though it also fell way short of the 289 seats needed to make Mélenchon prime minister. In the last such election five years ago, Mélenchon’s France Insoumise had taken seventeen seats, barely more than the number needed to form an independent group; this time, there were seventy-two, making up half of the overall left-wing bloc.

That alliance of parties is known as Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologiqueet Sociale (NUPES). Formed in May, it brought together forces that have often had significantly divergent agendas. By the terms of their pact, they will collaborate in parliament to pursue the policies in their common program — largely based on the one Mélenchon ran on in April’s presidential election — but maintain their independence where they differ. Among other NUPES forces, the once-mighty Socialist Party won twenty-eight seats on Sunday, the Greens twenty-three, and the French Communist Party twelve.

NUPES’s candidates and program were largely drawn from France Insoumise, with Mélenchon’s 22 percent score in the presidential contest affirming his leadership role on the Left. Yet there are already questions as to how long the alliance can last.

On Monday afternoon, Mélenchon declared that “NUPES should constitute a single group in Parliament.” “Yesterday,” he went on, “I had the impression that that was what Julien Bayou and Olivier Faure had in mind,” referring respectively to the leaders of the Green and Socialist Parties. But there was immediately a chorus of pushback from three key members of the electoral alliance. The president of the Socialist Party during the last session of parliament, Valérie Rabault, tweeted that “the Left is plural, [and] is represented in its diversity in the National Assembly . . . to want to suppress this diversity is an error, and I oppose it.”

The Socialist Party’s spokesman, Pierre Jouvet, went further, saying “there will be a Socialist group.” André Chassaigne, the president of the Communist Party group in the parliament also pushed back, claiming that Mélenchon’s proposal “surprised” him. “It wasn’t in the NUPES accord,” he said. The Green Party spokesman Alain Coulombel rejected Mélenchon in starker terms. First, he said that the party’s political bureau were “unanimously unfavorable” to the proposition of a single group. “There isn’t even any discussion between us on the subject.”

He then criticized Mélenchon for the suggestion, saying that “he isn’t a MP anymore, and it’s he who continues to speak in the name of [France Insoumises] MP? It’s strange, it’s something they need to sort out internally.” Mélenchon chose not to run this election for a local constituency so he could focus on making a national case for himself as prime minister. There is no requirement that the premier should be a member of the National Assembly.

In the first round of the presidential election, these three parties’ candidates had totaled a mere 8.66 percent of the vote. The Socialist Party performed the worst of any of them — with just 1.7 percent, it faced possible elimination as a group in the National Assembly. The Greens also underperformed heavily, and in the last parliament had no deputies in the Assembly. Their rise in this election owed greatly to the NUPES pact, especially in places where La France Insoumise could have seriously contested them in the first round.

In a blog post analyzing the results of the election, Mélenchon acknowledged that having one single group would mean less funding for each individual party, no doubt a concern for the forces in the alliance. “But this is a derisory inconvenience in relation to what’s at stake politically. Because once we declare ourselves a group, there will be no possible doubt that the opposition will be called NUPES.” But for many figures in these parties who opposed the pact from the get-go, now’s the time to pull away from NUPES and a Mélenchon they now see as out of the picture. The election is over, they believe, and they no longer need him.

On Tuesday morning, Macron’s longtime ally François Bayrou, head of the neoliberal-centrist MoDem, held a press conference where he called for a government of national unity. Macron’s alliance had won just 246 deputies on Sunday — losing over a hundred seats — and won’t be able to govern stably on its own.

Later in the day, the reelected Communist Party (PCF) deputy Fabien Roussel, who was this party’s candidate in the presidential election, told reporters that Macron had asked him whether he thought it was a good idea to have a national unity government, and whether he would join one. “We’ve participated in a national unity government before, in ’45, with General de Gaulle,” Roussel said, “so it’s not something that shocks us, to participate with others in the reconstruction of France.”

“But it all depends on the project,” he continued. “We need a major politics of investment, with large reforms.  In ’45 we created social security, eighty years later it’s still around, so it’s this level of ambition we [need] for the country. So, for us if it’s at this high level, we’re ready to participate.”

Roussel’s outward willingness to join a government with Macron came a day after he clarified that the Communist Party would have its own group in the Assembly. Despite winning fewer seats than they need to form an independent group, Roussel said they’d manage it with the support of deputies from France’s overseas territories who have traditionally been a part of PCF-led formations. He emphasized that this would allow them the freedom to vote how they please.

Since the results came in on Sunday evening, Roussel’s media appearances have insistently emphasized the distance between his Communist Party and Mélenchon, counter-posing a vigorous, rural electorate for him with a metropolitan constituency based in the cities for Mélenchon.

Macron’s setbacks in this election — and difficulty cobbling together a majority even with the center-right Republicans — surely have overturned many previous dividing lines. On Monday, several key figures from his party said they weren’t ruling out seeking support for their legislation from Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National. On Sunday it took eighty-nine seats, beating expectations as it elected ten times more MPs than it had in 2017. (IPA Service)

Courtesy: Jacobin

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