Eight months ahead of the April 2022 presidential election, France’s political situation is alarming. As civil liberties recede under neoliberal president Emmanuel Macron, the preferred themes of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally continue to set the national conversation — with obsessions over immigration, identity, and security dominating the airwaves. But it’s not like everyone is enthused by this: in fact, turnout in June’s regional elections hit among the lowest levels ever recorded for a national vote since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.

Faced with this situation, the Left is deeply fragmented. La France Insoumise (LFI), Europe Ecology–The Greens (EELV), the French Communist Party (PCF), and the Socialist Party (PS) are all on track to run separate presidential candidates in next spring’s contest — with polls at this stage suggesting that none will secure above 10 percent of the vote. The prospects of various alliances have been floated, but no deal has emerged yet.

To get more of a sense of the Left’s predicaments, Jacobin’s Cole Stangler sat down with Benoît Hamon, who was the Socialist presidential candidate in 2017. A former education minister pushed out of François Hollande’s cabinet in 2014, Hamon won the Socialist primary on a platform calling for a universal basic income and a tax on automation. After winning just 6 percent of the vote in that race, which saw many Socialist power brokers jump ship and back Macron, Hamon left the PS and founded Génération.s, a small party that allied itself with Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 movement in the 2019 European elections. A staunch critic of Macron, Hamon has become an increasingly vocal proponent of left-wing unity. In June, he was reelected to the regional council of greater Paris on a ticket backed by all four major left parties.