The French Left’s Long March to the Right
- Seth Ackerman
Le Monde Diplomatique’s Serge Halimi dissects the collective suicide of France’s center-left — and how its new far left can pick up the pieces.
Christian Perry-Giraud / Flickr
The historic collapse of France’s Socialist Party is one of the most spectacular upheavals in recent European politics. To understand the roots of the implosion, Daniel Zamora of the Belgian magazine Lava spoke with one of the French left’s sharpest political analysts, Le Monde Diplomatique editorial director Serge Halimi. In this interview, Halimi dissects the disastrous presidency of François Hollande, the nature of President Emmanuel Macron’s “new center,” and what made Léon Blum’s Popular Front government of the 1930s so unique.
Daniel Zamora
In your 1993 book Quand la gauche essayait (When the Left Used to Try), you offered a detailed analysis of the various moments when the Left was in power in France (1924, 1936, 1944, 1981). Your last chapter, even then, was titled “The Final Fall,” about the betrayals of the Mitterrand presidency. Where do we stand today?
Serge Halimi
In 1993, when the first edition of my book came out, the Socialist Party (the Parti Socialiste, or PS) had just experienced the worst electoral disaster in its history. It was a deserved rebuke, in my opinion, even though it brought the return of a pretty awful bourgeois and reactionary Right, led by prime minister Édouard Balladur. At the time, I wasn’t buying it when the Socialist Party — after pursuing right-wing economic and social policies — sought to mobilize left-wing voters by warning in its posters, “Help, the Right is coming back!”.
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