Elephantine

The internal battles to which Oziol refers pitch the left-wing leadership of the Parti Socialiste against a right-wing faction — comprised primarily of senators, the former president François Hollande, and local mayors — who wish to break the NFP and chart a separate course. Current party leader Faure holds broad-left unity to be a key strategic goal. In early October, Hollande called for a new figure to lead the party and to open it up to people like Glucksmann, the liberal-hawk MEP who, while not a party member, headed its list in June’s European elections.

Former president Hollande told Jacobin at his recent book signing in London that

the Parti Socialiste should change direction in the proper sense of the term . . . which is to stay loyal to its ideals and to the idea of unity. The union of the Left is always a factor that has allowed for victory, but it should follow the orientation of social democracy because the radical left cannot win nor pull in the Left in its entirety. . . . This is what the new prime minister in the UK [Keir Starmer] did to win power: he was able to address his own party, get rid of those on the Left who held too radical positions, reassure the centrist electorate, and put forward a program which could convince them.”

Hollande and his colleagues regularly make these kinds of statements, attacking La France Insoumise but also the Parti Socialiste leadership for allying with them. One particular point of contention for the Hollandeists was the fact that after this summer’s fragmented election result, Macron was apparently considering Bernard Cazeneuve, a figure from Hollande’s faction, for prime minister, likely as part of some broad “centrist” or “national-unity” coalition. David Assouline, a member of the party’s national bureau, was furious at his colleagues for refusing to agree in writing that they would not, on principle, block the nomination of Cazeneuve.

For the pro-Faure faction, this was simply a trap. Sarah Kerrich-Bernard, the national secretary of the party, told Jacobin:

It’s not that we didn’t support Bernard Cazeneuve; what we said is that what matters is the project. Cazeneuve was the only politician on the Left who did not support the NFP. In any case, Olivier Faure did not say that he didn’t support Cazeneuve, he said that if Cazeneuve was willing to defend the NFP with certain symbolic measures — for example the cancellation of the retirement reform, which was forced through by Emmanuel Macron last year — we would have supported him. . . .

Cazeneuve met Macron and he made him understand that he wanted to partially repeal the pension reform, and he was ruled out immediately. So, Macron was playing with us, trying to make us believe that he might have named a prime minister coming from the Left, but even from July, it was Michel Barnier he had in mind. Macron thinks that France is on the Right and so he must make an alliance with the Right. It was in bad faith, a trap to divide us.

Kerrich-Bernard added that the attacks from her “internal adversaries” were in “bad faith” and that they continue pushing this line “because when you say bad things about your own party it gets picked up and creates buzz.” One of the demands of the Hollandeist faction is for a new party congress in which the membership would vote on whether to adopt a new line and leadership. Kerrich-Bernard believes that even in this case, her faction would remain in control: “They [Hollande and co.] have much more of a base among the leadership than among party activists.”

On the undesirability of a return to prominence of the Hollande faction, the Fauristes and France Insoumise are agreed. Oziol told Jacobin:

This is very old now: it was already the battle between François Hollande and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2012 to 2017. We have the return of Hollande, who was practically chased out of office, who couldn’t even run again in 2017, instead leading to Macron . . . and the political chaos we have now. This isn’t the kind of revival you’d hope for.

In France Insoumise, we have been fighting for a program of rupture, basically breaking away from [neoliberalism], capitalism, and the far right. We are proposing an alternative of social, ecological, and democratic measures such as changing the constitution. We have insisted on such a program because we knew that the risk was this sort of battle over the political line.

In the Parti Socialiste, Kerrich-Bernard wants to keep the left-wing alliance together. She doubts the wisdom of Hollande’s advice:

Today the NFP is the main political force in France on the Left and the PS should stay in it. . . . We must not return to the line of François Hollande, which is neoliberal and excessively open to the market . . . Francois Hollande or Raphaël Glucksmann will not clear the first round [of the 2027 presidential election] because they are not sufficiently on the Left: they are too centrist. The voters on the Left want to vote for the Left, not the center, and the centrist voters will vote for the Macronist candidate, they’re not going to vote for Hollande or Glucksmann.

Yet some Socialists are utterly at odds with her on this. Members of Hollande’s faction such as Jérôme Guedj (who refused to join the NFP) and Arthur Delaporte have recently signaled that they will not vote for France Insoumise’s text proposing to return the retirement age to sixty.

As far as the pro-Faure faction is concerned, the strategy is clear: run a common NFP candidate that is left-wing enough to clear the first round of the presidential election in 2027, but moderate enough to attract centrist voters in the second round. Hollande disagreed, pointing to Benoît Hamon, who ran a further-left Socialist presidential campaign in 2017 and scored just 6 percent. The former president told Jacobin: “The PS should be the first force on the Left and retain its independent thinking . . . in order to impose a coherence and a cohesiveness which is currently lacking. Every time we put ourselves under the influence of the far left, we cannot convince people.”

2027 Challenge

France Insoumise insists in its own way on reaching out beyond the NFP coalition. Economists Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini argue that French politics is structured by conflict between three social blocs that are politically represented by the NFP, the Macronist/Gaullist bloc, and the far right. France Insoumise’s approach is spelled out in a text that adapts this analysis to argue that the only way the Left can assemble the coalition it needs is to activate the members of the “fourth bloc,” i.e., abstentionists who have not yet chosen to adhere to one of the three others.

Polling shows that the social values and material interests of this group are relatively closer to the voters of the left bloc — and France Insoumise argues that they can only be activated through a consistent message of rupture with the political system that they have dropped out of and the economic system they feel let down by. The union of the Left is necessary to add credibility and numbers to the coalition in favor of rupture.

Oziol told Jacobin that

if [the Socialists] decide to step away from the agreement, then they have to say it clearly and explain why they are doing so, and it means that there will not be a joint candidate next time. For instance, Raphaël Glucksmann, with his party Place Publique has been very clear that he does not want an alliance with France Insoumise anymore. We point it out every time that the PS takes a step away from the agreement, because it is the dissolution of what we agreed to [in June].

Asked whether the NFP could survive, Hollande concurred with Oziol’s speculation that there could be more than one candidate in 2027: “If there were legislative elections tomorrow, yes, it would be necessary to reconstitute it, perhaps with a different balance of power. But if it was for a presidential election, there would be two candidates, one of the reformist left and one of the radical left.”

Two candidates would not necessarily mean a final break in the NFP. The “Elephants” of the Parti Socialiste never supported the previous NUPES alliance in 2022 and several of them ran as dissidents against the NFP in 2024. The question remains as to how the soft left represented by the Fauristes, the Greens, and the Communists (PCF) would react if a split occurred.

PCF leader Fabien Roussel says he would not enter another election allied with France Insoumise, claiming that had he not joined the NFP, he would have kept his seat this time. His vote share had increased markedly between 2017 and 2022 when he joined NUPES, whereas in 2024 it dipped by 3 percent. However, even if he had retained his previous total, he would still have been beaten by the wave of support for the far right, which saw him eliminated in the first round — rendering his counterfactual implausible.

Styling himself as “the communist who dares to say no to Jean-Luc Mélenchon,” in 2022 Roussel himself ran for president rather than support Mélenchon, as the PCF had in both 2012 and 2017. While Roussel rallied only 2.3 percent support, the combined France Insoumise–PCF vote would have seen Mélenchon beat Le Pen into the runoff.

Kerrich-Bernard said that the pro-NFP faction of the Parti Socialiste wants the joint candidate chosen in a primary of the Left “conducted with maximum possible transparency” while stressing that “Mélenchon cannot be the candidate.” France Insoumise’s Manuel Bompard has criticized primaries as divisive and insists that a left-wing primary that dictates who can and cannot participate is “not serious.” When asked if it was just Mélenchon they opposed or any potential France Insoumise candidate, Kerrich-Bernard said that “the point of equilibrium” could be found in François Ruffin or Clémentine Autain “and others.”

Ruffin and Autain are each former La France Insoumise MPs but parted ways with it during this summer’s parliamentary election campaign, after news came to light that they had been planning a new formation and two of their close collaborators were expelled from France Insoumise. The relationship between France Insoumise and Ruffin in particular has turned sour since his departure, and many of its grassroots members would be unhappy being asked to back Ruffin.

Part of the reason for the Left’s on-off alliances is the electoral system itself. In parliamentary elections, based on coming first in local constituencies, the left-wing parties don’t stand a chance if they aren’t united — thus demanding pacts like NUPES and NFP. In presidential elections, however, the individual party leaders aim above all to beat each other, to become the candidate with the necessary “dynamic” to become the tactical vote and drain the others’ support.

While ahead of the last presidential race in 2022, there was an attempt to force a primary on the left-wing parties, it failed miserably. Instead, they each ran rival candidates, with the Greens, PCF, and Socialists each scoring in the low single figures while Mélenchon took 22 percent. Still, even if NFP breaks up, there is no guarantee that they will all part ways, and rumors are currently swirling that there could be a France Insoumise–Green alliance for city hall elections in 2026. In a period of intense turmoil, events could reshuffle the deck and undo or recreate alliances in any number of ways. However, the incentive for unity from the perspective of any individual party on the Left is weak.

This instability could have immediate effects. The Barnier government is struggling to pass its austerity budget, and Le Pen is weighing collapsing the government. In this context, the differences between the Left’s two poles of attraction — the Parti Socialiste and France Insoumise — are more obvious than ever.

Mélenchon wants to unseat the president, arguing that “the impeachment of Macron is a necessity” and that this is “the only means to return power to the electorate and resolve the political crisis that the president created [by calling snap elections in June].” Hollande insists that there should be no presidential election, so as not to spook the markets, and wants to find a prime minister that can command a majority. This opens the door to the Parti Socialiste supporting the Macron bloc in a revival of something along the lines of the earlier Cazeneuve proposal.

Despite sometimes warm talk of unity, the power struggle on the Left continues unabated. The next presidential election offers the perfect opportunity for the smaller parties to try and improve their standing. They’re already jockeying for position, ready for when that day comes.