Why power eludes the French left
As a result, voters became increasingly unpredictable. “If you had mass political parties, you could have stability in their voting, because the party was an organization that defined important parts of your life,” says Hayat, the political scientist, “and not just what you voted for every five years. .” Now that politics “has been reduced to the ballot paper you put in the ballot box, of course people can sometimes vote for the left, sometimes not,” he says. Even those who broadly identify with the left don’t join parties, Hayat says. This is largely because political identities are now formed and expressed on social media, outside party structures.
This organizational conundrum does not affect all parties equally. “If you want to create stability in voting, you need organizations,” says Hayat. That is, a structured, consistent and useful presence in communities. In France the left is no longer as present. The same goes for Italy, which once had one of the strongest communist parties in Europe and now has a far-right government. And that also applies to the United States, where New Deal politics kept white working-class voters close to the Democratic Party until the 1970s and 1980s. In the absence of such structures, Hayat continues, “you have to be the only party that appeals to a certain emotion that is very strong in the electorate, for example fear.” That is of course the power of the extreme right.
“They take exactly my words,” Roussel said of Marine Le Pen’s party. “Without paying for rights, of course.” But behind it all, Roussel said, their platform is still neoliberal. “The far right may talk about raising salaries, but they would also abolish employer contributions that help finance the social security system,” he said. “I often say to the workers I meet: be on the lookout for the National Rally. It is like a candy that is very sweet when you put it in your mouth. But when you bite into it, it is very bitter. And it can make you sick.”
The unemployment rate in St.-Amand is now, according to some calculations, 23.5 percent. When Roussel took over the PCF five years ago, the party had just won about 1 percent of the vote in the second round of the parliamentary elections. During the 2022 presidential elections, he managed to double that figure – to 2.3 percent in the first round. About 53 percent of those who voted in St.-Amand voted for Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election. But they also voted for Roussel against his far-right opponent in the parliamentary elections; Roussel won his seat by nine points. This is perhaps less a testament to the particularities of his policies than to his multigenerational roots in the region – his father was a journalist for a PCF publication – and to his personality and presence in the community. “Marine Le Pen is against Macron, and I am against Macron,” Roussel told me. “In national elections, people are tired of both left and right, it’s always the same, so they vote on the extreme right. In local elections they vote for people they know, who they like and who treat them well.”
Like the traditional one France’s party system has gone bankrupt, and as political figures bypass it to succeed, “there is a cannibalization of politics by personality,” said Martigny, a professor at the University of Nice. In this sense, the left mirrors the populist style of the far right, in which personality trumps the traditional party machine.