Win or Protest?

The question “win or protest” may seem incongruous. But it needs asking: Does France Insoumise really want to govern? Or is it happy simply trying to make heard the voice of the forgotten — what was once called the role of a “popular tribune”? Two mindsets seem to coexist both in France Insoumise and its allies in Europe. On the one hand, there is the culture of winners. This is often found among former social democrats who have past familiarity with the ins and outs of power, but also among young cadres with a more technocratic profile. On the other hand, there is a minoritarian ethic more common among far-left activists, who place political conviction above governmental responsibility, and who have little faith that the current political institutions can transform society.

The parties of the so-called populist left are torn between social mobilization and the state, between their origin and their end goal. Their challenge to the current system coexists with electoral participation with the explicit aim of winning office. To reach government, France Insoumise needs to capture the widest possible electorate, which may involve moderating its programmatic offering, cultivating a respectable image, and making certain compromises. However, this is sure to involve some difficulties for a party whose very name speaks to its “rebellious” instincts. By seeking normalization — as dissident MP François Ruffin has been urging since 2021, before ultimately splitting from France Insoumise — it runs the risk of blurring its protest identity, becoming illegible to its own supporters, and alienating the activists most attached to its radical definition. Conversely, by cultivating its subversive profile, France Insoumise risks undermining its electoral chances.

The example of Syriza in Greece, as well as the Latin American governments of the 2000s, proved that the populist left was not confined to the troublemaker role or else becoming a stooge to social democracy. But even winning election is only just the start of the battle. Left-wing-populist governments face the power of finance, resistance from the upper echelons of the civil service, and media and political elites who defend their interests and the status quo. The way the European Troika forced Aléxis Tsípras’s government into submission shows that having a radical program is not enough. The conditions for applying it also need to be met. Without massive popular pressure and the solidarity of at least a few international partners, a left-wing-populist government has every chance of yielding to the adverse pressure from the financial markets.

Common Sense

Inspired by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (or their idea of him), France Insoumise leaders are convinced that politics is a question of “hegemony.” To win election, they must first win the battle of ideas, defeating the stubborn myths about the “end of history,” “there is no alternative,” and the “clash of civilizations.” Hence the energy that France Insoumise invests in social networks and public communication. Hence also its representatives’ routine presence on ostensibly popular TV news channels. Neoliberalism has ravaged our imaginations, pushing each individual to see themselves as an entrepreneur and to see everything as a source of profit. In such a climate, it’s hard for a political force that advocates a value as outdated as mutual aid to get a hearing. Hence the priority of fighting on the level of ideas.

But isn’t the cultural battle lost in advance? What can twenty thousand or so France Insoumise militants — however gifted and determined they may be — do in the face of forty years of neoliberal propaganda? What about the mass conditioning in “competitiveness,” the individualization of working conditions, the disintegration of collective solidarity — or indeed the battalions of lobbyists and professional communicators whose budget is infinitely greater than France Insoumise’s own? Under these conditions, isn’t the role of a political party to address voters as they are, rather than as we’d like them to be? Intellectuals, journalists, teachers, filmmakers, writers, singers, and artists are there to change common sense. Shouldn’t the candidate concentrate on winning the election, even if that demands muting the proposals that might alienate decisive segments of the electorate? In other words: Is it the mission of an electoral force to transform common sense, or to adapt to it?

This dilemma is very real. In the case of Podemos in Spain, it has manifested itself around subjects as inflammatory as Catalan independence and the abolition of the monarchy. For France Insoumise, this dilemma revolves around such thorny issues as leaving the European Union and the treatment of migrants. Left-wing populists have a divisive opinion on these subjects, and regularly divide over whether it’s appropriate to put that opinion forward. Should the call to defy the EU treaties, or the demand to regularize all undocumented workers, be tactically shelved in order to maximize the chances of electoral victory?

National and Transnational

The root of the ills affecting the middle and working classes lies partly at the supranational level. The European and international treaties of recent decades have organized the privatization of public services and the pitting of workers against each other in the name of “competitiveness.” Based on this observation, France Insoumise severely criticizes supranational bodies, be they public (European Union, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund) or private (multinationals, lobbies, rating agencies). To restore sovereignty to the people, France Insoumise advocates a return to the national level.

But national sovereignty is not automatically synonymous with popular sovereignty. While it’s true that the capitalist class is now organized on a global scale, it’s also true that the class struggle continues to be battled out within each nation-state. We shouldn’t forget that national political elites, who try to evade responsibility by referring to pressure from “Brussels,” have themselves organized the hollowing-out of their own powers in favor of distant, unelected bodies. Nor should we forget that French governments began privatizing and introducing austerity without waiting for such practices to be imposed by EU regulations.

France Insoumise is thus waging its battle on two fronts: both the national and transnational. Alliances are being forged at European level, as in 2019, when the “Now the People” platform brought together Podemos, France Insoumise, Bloco de Esquerda, and three Nordic parties to wage a joint campaign against tax evasion. On November 8, 2020, in La Paz, the same parties signed a transcontinental declaration with their allies from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru to warn against the global spread of the far right.

But despite these initiatives, France Insoumise devotes most of its energy to national-level politics. By engaging in the electoral arena, France Insoumise is necessarily subject to this framework. Its preferred mode of action (national elections) is thus out of step with its analysis (of the importance of the transnational level). Can a populist strategy, which has a strong patriotic component, take on a cosmopolitical dimension?

This left-wing “cosmo-populism” already exists in embryonic form and, remarkably, it links cities rather than countries. In September 2015, for example, Barcelona mayor Ada Colau initiated a network of refugee cities in the midst of the migrant crisis. As the European Union’s member states tore each other apart to determine which would bear the burden of the migrant influx, sixty municipalities — often linked to the populist left — demonstrated solidarity in two ways: toward each other (Barcelona, for example, offered to receive migrants who had arrived in Athens) and toward refugees (by offering them accommodation, material aid, and legal support).

Personalized and Democratic

A second set of dilemmas relates more specifically to France Insoumise’s organizational form. It does not see itself as a party, but rather as a movement that its leader has theorized as a “gaseous” (sic) formation. It does not intend to reproduce the shortcomings of traditional parties (such as the Parti Socialiste), deemed too bureaucratic, dominated by notables, and buried in in-fighting. Mélenchon likes to say that he likes to “travel light” (without the hassle of heavy organization), but can France Insoumise travel far? What organizational form should the Left take if it is to be a force for social transformation?

Perhaps the Left lacks not so much ideas as the means (party and union, in particular) to promote them and build a social majority that could rally to them, and more generally politicize society. Parties are in decline, but long-term organized action (in the form of parties that need reinventing) has lost none of its political and structural necessity. The solution, however, cannot be a pure and simple return to the good-old mass party. Society has changed. The demographic, economic, and technological context that shaped parties’ initial emergence is no longer with us.

Our times are marked by the return of strongmen (Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Jair Bolsonaro, but also Emmanuel Macron) and heightened personalization. This is encouraged by technological change (first TV, then the internet) and, in France, by the centrality of the presidential contest — the mother of all electoral battles. In political parties, it is now the individual leader who represents a “brand” that confers notoriety and legitimacy on the collective. What would have become of the Five Star Movement or Podemos without the media visibility of figures like Beppe Grillo or Pablo Iglesias? What is France Insoumise without its leader, Mélenchon? It’s no longer the party that makes the candidate, but vice versa (and France Insoumise was created in 2016 with this in mind).

As Ernesto Laclau theorized in On Populist Reason, the “hyperleader” figure is also supposed to realize and symbolize the unity of a popular mass that is more fragmented and atomized than ever. But these tendencies toward personalization and the importance of leaders are accompanied, at a societal level, by a pressing demand for real democracy, expressed through the series of protests begun in 2011 by the Arab revolutions, or new democratic expectations in political systems. Representative systems are precarious balances between the power of a minority (elected representatives) and the active or passive consent of the majority (voters). This balance, which has held up well for two centuries, seems on the verge of breaking down. The choice is between authoritarianism and democracy. Which way does France Insoumise tip the balance?

The answer that comes most spontaneously is: democracy. Its program aims to make a reality of the much-abused ideal of equality. On a day-to-day basis, France Insoumise activists are involved in almost every battle for social justice. No one can dispute the sincerity of their commitment. Nevertheless, one doubt remains: when we see how Mélenchon controls his movement, its finances, its strategic orientations, and its nominations for elections, we start to hope that he wouldn’t govern his country in the same way. The principles of the Sixth Republic which France Insoumise proposes — a promised constitutional change meant to end the “presidential monarchy” — hardly inspire the way that this movement operates. France Insoumise would surely object that the way that it takes power does not predetermine the way that it intends to exercise it afterward.

The mixed record of their Latin American partners shows just how delicate the issue is. On the one hand, the “socialist governments of the twenty-first century” (Hugo Chávez, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, etc.) have reduced poverty, illiteracy, and inequality. They have also set up polling stations in regions where there were none and encouraged the working classes to register to vote. On the other hand, they have played the charismatic leadership card, whose risks and excesses are well known, and they have not always behaved in an exemplary way with regard to political pluralism. Still, it’s worth remembering that opposition from the Right — supported by the media, economic heavyweights, and Washington — is far more ferocious in Latin America than in France or Europe. Political conflicts are more violent. The history and context are different.

When it was founded, Spain’s Podemos set up grassroots “circles” inspired by the deliberative, self-management practices of the indignados movement. In a similar vein, the France Insoumise local action groups set up during the 2017 presidential election demonstrated an inventiveness and conviviality that rallied more activists than other parties. But in both cases, the excitement of the first year did not last. The party-movement gradually turned into a centralized personal party. If two souls — horizontal and vertical — coexisted at the outset, the latter eventually prevailed. This was a necessary evil, say those who believe that to win power you can’t afford the luxury of deliberating on every subject, and that you have to aim for “effectiveness.” Others retort that by sacrificing democracy on the altar of efficiency, the party has emptied itself of its members and alienated part of its electorate.

There can be no question of setting up a leaderless party. But is it possible to share responsibilities and give the movement a consistency of its own? Since 2023, France Insoumise has granted its local groups with a form of financial autonomy and promised to eventually acquire a local in each of France’s hundred-odd départements. But the movement remains largely devoid of networks within trade unions, associations, and the cultural world.

Agile or Solid

France Insoumise presents itself as a cloud: more “gaseous” than solid, light to the point of appearing evanescent. The organization is unformalized and ever-evolving (a “work in progress”). It grants a high degree of autonomy to the local level: groups are freely formed. There are no intermediate levels, even if département-level circles were created last year. Rules do exist, relating to candidate selection processes, funding, and the establishment of decision-making chains: they define a centralized organizational structure. Behind the “gaseous” form hides a kind of court society (in Norbert Elias’s sense) structured around the leader.

How to strike a balance between organizational flexibility and formalization? The party-movement, conceived as an agile, “action-oriented” structure, has proven capable of remarkable electoral performance in the short term, adapting to a changing environment where there is no single clear front line. However, its long-term resilience is more limited (in particular, its ability to survive major electoral defeats, or a leadership succession). The classic party model is more difficult to maneuver, to govern, and therefore to reform. But it guarantees a form of continuity over time, enabling it to withstand periods of “stormier weather,” crises of a certain scope, as well as electoral defeats and changes of leadership.

Formalizing the rules governing the most contentious aspects of the organization (candidate selection and funding allocation, for example) would help defuse major sources of conflict. On the other hand, maintaining a high degree of informality is undoubtedly essential to guaranteeing the organization’s reactivity in heightened moments of combat (typically, during a presidential campaign) and its openness to broader society.

Unity or Pluralism

This question of formalized organization leads to another dilemma, concerning France Insoumise’s real degree of ideological cohesion. This isn’t a new issue; it runs throughout the history of the Left.

How can we ensure sufficient internal coherence, while leaving room for a degree of pluralism that enables us to bring together a broad base of activists and keep internal political reflection and democracy alive? France Insoumise leaders regularly criticize traditional party democracy based on congresses, votes, and motions, which they know well since many of them engaged in it in the Parti Socialiste. In their view, this feeds a form of organizational narcissism, whereas France Insoumise wants to be “effective” and outward-looking (toward society). Why divide up in endless palaver, playing with “commas” or “splitting hairs,” when France Insoumise already has a detailed, up-to-date program?

Agreement around the program and the leader are surely the two fetishes of this movement, but these two foundations do not settle all possible relevant disagreements. France Insoumise has, indeed, changed its political line on a number of issues (secularism, Islamophobia, Europe) without opening up a pluralist debate on these questions. The existence of internal “sensitivities” is what makes an organization rich. The interplay of currents within the Parti Socialiste was not always dysfunctional or artificial: in the 1970s, it created often high-quality intellectual debate, structured around various magazines and journals, before degenerating into ego battles with no real political substance as the organization became more presidential.

The issue here is the ways that a movement can manage conflicts and rival ambitions, and create mechanisms that ensure cohesion. The selection of candidates — a job currently carried out by an opaque electoral committee — leads to competition that ought to be regulated transparently. France Insoumise says that it values “consensus” as a way of operating, but this is often a way for leaders to legitimize decisions without real deliberation.

But is this approach really “effective” when it fails to retain interesting figures within the organization, who drift away because they are unable to express their minority views in internal forums dedicated to this purpose? Is it effective when the conflicts that clearly do exist in the movement can only be fought out in the media, as we see with France Insoumise’s own dissident MPs (Clémentine Autain, Raquel Garrido, Alexis Corbière, François Ruffin, and Hendrik Davi)? These five MPs were pushed out of France Insoumise in the wake of this summer’s parliamentary elections, and immediately set up their own movement instead.

Sociologist Albert Otto Hirschman famously identified three options open to a dissatisfied member of an organization: exit, voice, or loyalty. Many activists and cadres exit France Insoumise loudly slamming the door behind them, having been unable to make their voices heard. As Charlotte Girard, one of the movement’s historic cadres who left it in 2019, wrote: “You can’t express disagreement.” More generally, there is a very high turnover of activists. This lack of democracy limits France Insoumise’s capacity to aggregate support: a crucial issue for a movement seeking to build a new majority bloc in society. It does little to train militants, whose ideological cohesion is based solely on adherence to its program. Yet, debates over the party line would have the added virtue of educating activists.

Progress has been made, but it is limited. Representative assemblies are regularly convened but have no real powers. Since 2022, France Insoumise has had an identified leadership structure: the “coordination of spaces.” But its membership is co-opted rather than elected. Activists do not always have their say (on the movement’s political orientations, for example) and only vote when consulted on a limited range of decisions.

Institutions Versus Society

France Insoumise seeks both to influence political institutions and to mobilize society. Which integration should be prioritized? These two strategies are not utterly in contradiction. But (to use Erik Olin Wright’s categories) where do we place the cursor between the “symbiotic” (changing the political system from within) and “interstitial” (creating pockets of resistance and autonomy on the edges of the system)?

The absence of a strong party structure and of clear statutes has a major consequence even beyond the ones we have already mentioned: the weight of elected representatives and especially parliamentarians, at the risk of the movement falling into parliamentary “cretinism” (i.e., seeing the social world only through the institutional prism). When France Insoumise had seventeen MPs from 2017 to 2022, the party’s leadership was in fact located within the parliamentary group. This group was especially powerful because the party organization was weak (few permanent staffers and a small budget) and this political group could rely on strong resources (dozens of parliamentary assistants, the communication platform represented via social media by speaking in the National Assembly, etc.) After the 2022 elections, this representation increased significantly (seventy-five MPs). These parliamentarians became the party’s local leaders.

While France Insoumise’s rhetoric is eagerly anti-elitist and calls for the “clearing out” of the “political class,” the logic of political professionalization remains unchallenged. MPs pay a relatively small portion of their allowances to their party (10 percent), and there are no rules limiting the number of terms they may stack up. Mélenchon himself has been a professional politician since 1986. On its list for June’s European elections, half its top ten candidates were incumbents.

Institutional integration is a different matter at the local level. France Insoumise leaders are suspicious of territorial bases of organization and the risk of sliding into complicity with local notables (a factor which also helped turn the Parti Socialiste into an ossified and out-of-touch party). France Insoumise is structured around a digital platform, which, thanks to the high level of intermediation it allows, supposedly allows it to dispense with local roots. In the 2020 local elections, the France Insoumise leaders allocated little attention or resources to these contests. Yet city hall can also be a base for promoting social change, and not necessarily just a matter of joining the ranks of local elites.

Social change can surely not be achieved through institutions and electoralism alone. Yet this electoral rationality (especially at the presidential and parliamentary levels) is very strong in France Insoumise, bringing this organization closer to the “electoral-professional party model” (a term coined by Angelo Panebianco to refer to parties of government). Doesn’t this excessive focus rule out a more bottom-up vision of social change?

The Left undoubtedly needs to organize beyond a purely electoral context. Overinvestment in the electoral arena comes to the detriment of the step-by-step construction of a counterculture, networks of sociability, concrete solidarity — in short, bits and pieces of a counter-society. Instead, all its militant energies are absorbed by winning power through elections. Of course, the Left must not give up on the conquest of power, since it is (partly) decided at the ballot box. But electoral victory will undoubtedly only come at the end of a broader effort of building power.

France Insoumise should be able to contribute to an interstitial strategy, in Wright‘s sense, i.e., to use the driving forces of society to bring about concrete change. But it has neither the organizational means nor the will to do this. Locally, the party is too weak, and few of its financial resources are decentralized. Experiments in community organizing have been proposed, but these are limited in time, underfunded by the organization and geographically isolated. France Insoumise’s militant base is too small to be well-rooted in local society and struggles.

Quality Versus Quantity

Does France Insoumise want to be a party of activists — and can it be this in a context of general decline in partisan commitment? France Insoumise is enshrining a new form of low-cost, “à la carte” activism. Membership, via the digital platform, is just a few clicks away and free of charge (enabling France Insoumise to boast over four hundred thousand members). As a result, these same members have few rights and few duties. A low-intensity commitment is tolerated, but the downside of this flexibility is that militants have little power (it’s risky to give it to a militant base with such a broad perimeter). Its activist base is thus insubstantial and fleeting.

France Insoumise’s organization goes in and out like an accordion. It surely can draw on its militant appeal during presidential-election campaigns. In the 2022 contest, it attracted supporters and activists thanks to an app (Action Populaire) that enabled it immediately to “put them on the campaign trail.” But it struggled to retain them after the presidential election, which was followed by a strong demobilization of grassroots activists.

But France Insoumise leaders can also make do with a low level of activist commitment between presidential elections. This is partly because they rely on social networks, the media, and the parliamentary arena, but also because more permanently engaged activists often have democratic expectations that leaders are not prepared to satisfy. The “tyranny of structurelessness” also has powerful censorious effects. It favors movement cadres who have accumulated militant capital (those from the Parti de gauche, Mélenchon’s party before France Insoumise) and/or who possess a high level of academic capital or time (notably through the overrepresentation of political science students. . .).

Parties can no longer generate the kind of intense loyalties that characterized the mass parties of old. But should they give up recruiting and mobilizing activists? We shouldn’t underestimate society’s appetite for activism. There are examples to follow on the European left, such as the Belgian Workers’ Party (PTB), which has grown from one thousand members in the early 2000s to twenty-four thousand today.

Many parties have put mobilizing members on the back burner, because it is deemed pointless, ineffective, or cumbersome (activists are often considered by leaders to be too radical). If France Insoumise were to democratize and grant its “members” the right to vote (on political documents or electoral nominations), which would make it easier to finance local activities, it would also have to tighten up its membership and subject it to an entrance fee. This is, indeed, what Podemos has finally done — today requiring a financial contribution, which did not exist when the party was founded. It’s risky to give rights to members who can join without some sort of filter.

France Insoumise’s organizational model has shown both its strength and its limitations: it enables it to produce the most credible presidential candidacy on the Left and to wage effective “movement-style” presidential battles. But it struggles to dig deeper trenches, to secure the loyalty and involvement of militants in a more enduring way, or to deeply mold society in general. Yet all these things may be a necessity, if it is ever to achieve its long-hoped-for electoral victory.