Emmanuel Macron’s Bid to Divide the Left Is Paying Off
One year since the New Popular Front won a surprise election victory, France’s left looks more divided than ever. This month’s Socialist congress showed how much the party is at loggerheads with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise.
Emmanuel Macron speaking in Le Bourget, north of Paris, on June 20, 2025. (Benoit Tessier / AFP via Getty Images)
Monday, June 9, marked one year since Emmanuel Macron’s surprise move to call snap elections to the National Assembly. It was a perilous move for the second-term president — ending four weeks later with a hung parliament in which his own camp was reduced to a minority. The debate on what actually pushed Macron to call the vote continues apace.
Yet one thing is already abundantly clear: Macron’s gamble only fueled France’s slow-burning political crisis. Today parliament is even more fractured than it was before the contest, split between a splintered left-wing alliance, a retreating centrist-conservative bloc, and a rising far right. A steady clip of opinion polls show a wider falloff of public trust in the country’s political institutions.
Macron has tried to save face by focusing on foreign affairs — while leaning on minority, center-right coalition governments to shore up his domestic agenda. His first avatar was Michel Barnier, who briefly became prime minister in September 2024. Already by December, Barnier’s government fell to a no-confidence vote. A rehashed administration, this time fronted by longtime Macron ally François Bayrou, eked through a budget just a few weeks later. But its political hands have been tied, only surviving thanks to the good graces of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), which boasts a growing list of policy victories.
Yet Macron may have the last laugh, on one point at least. If the June 2024 dissolution of the National Assembly was part of a grand plan, then one key aim was surely to keep France’s fractious left-wing parties divided. Instead, ahead of last summer’s election the four main parties of the Left — La France Insoumise (LFI), the Parti Socialiste (PS), Les Écologistes, and the Parti Communiste (PCF) — united in a matter of days under the banner of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP). They distributed the country’s 577 constituencies among themselves and ran on a program of wealth redistribution and investment in public services. The result was as much of a success as could be hoped for. By a close margin, the NFP emerged as the largest bloc in parliament, dousing expectations of a victory for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and giving the Left a credible claim to govern.
Twelve months later, however, the Nouveau Front Populaire is on life support. Relations between its leading parties — namely, France Insoumise and the Parti Socialiste — are already at rock bottom. France’s left-wing field has seen abrupt turns back toward unity before. But for now at least, the mood music from key party leaders seems to be a resounding “never again.”
They are “no longer a partner,” said LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon as early as this January, in response to the PS’s decision to abstain from a no-confidence motion against Bayrou. “We’ll not run with Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the [2027] presidential elections and there’ll be no national pact in [next year’s] municipal elections with [France Insoumise],” commented Olivier Faure on June 12, fresh from his reelection as PS first secretary.
From the beginning, there were considerable tensions in the NFP, itself a reconstituted version of the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (NUPES) front formed before the 2022 parliamentary elections. The NUPES had all but collapsed following the onset of the latest Israel-Gaza war in October 2023, with tensions over the conflict straining ties on the Left ever since.
The PS, Les Écologistes, and the PCF long took issue with LFI’s strong-arm tactics — best expressed in a June 2024 purge of prominent party figures shortly after the formation of the NFP. More right-wing elements of the PS insisted after the alliance’s first-place finish in last summer’s elections that their party should shift back toward the Macronists and broker a governing pact with the center.
It was a taste of things to come. Throughout this fall and winter, LFI’s continual calls for no-confidence votes against the Macron-aligned governments troubled its allies, who saw the full-frontal opposition to these minority governments as part of a long-shot strategy to force Macron’s resignation and a snap presidential election. At other times, it feels as if France Insoumise’s erstwhile NFP allies are engaged in overwrought efforts to locate signs of antisemitism in each and every one of its positions.
At the start of this year, the Parti Socialiste broke from the NFP’s united opposition front by refusing to no-confidence Bayrou, even if the new premier’s budget bore a striking resemblance to the one they had voted down in December. In what looks like a test-run of next year’s local elections, France Insoumise bucked NFP unity to run a solo candidacy in a Paris-area mayoral by-election in February, which saw the victory of the right-wing candidate.
Perhaps the erosion of the NFP was inevitable, despite the tangible exhaustion in the left-wing base with the internecine conflicts pitting the various party apparatuses against each other. There have been just too many conflicting strategic priorities.
Irreconcilable
That the NFP exists little elsewhere than on paper was again confirmed this past weekend at the Parti Socialiste’s congress, which signaled the party’s drift away from any alliance, including its chief rival France Insoumise. The congress comes on the heels of a razor-thin leadership vote on June 5, when the Parti Socialiste’s rank and file voted to reelect first secretary Faure over contender Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol. Held between June 13 and 15 in the eastern city of Nancy, the congress established the political composition of the leadership structures that will set the party line in the years to come.
From the standpoint of left-wing unity, Faure’s reelection is surely the least bad outcome. Since his election as party leader in 2018, Faure has positioned himself as wanting to reverse the PS’s rightward drift, reconnect with the party’s erstwhile progressive base, and bury the hatchet of the so-called “irreconcilable lefts” — the infamous description by former PS prime minister Manuel Valls (now back in government as Bayrou’s overseas territories minister) of the entrenched enmity between the center left and the Mélenchonists.
But Faure’s ability — and desire — to contain his internal opposition, which is itself virulently opposed to France Insoumise, is a thing of the past. Though reelected, the first secretary is considerably weakened against the PS right, which fell only a few hundred votes short of ousting the incumbent. In fact, Faure won reelection only after largely acceding to the anti-LFI line. Faure’s slim compensation is his call for a “Left-without-LFI” front, whether in the form of common tickets with Les Écologistes and the PCF in next year’s municipal elections, or in a broad-left primary, excluding Mélenchon, to be held before the 2027 presidential contest.
Given his weak hold on the party apparatus, Faure will have to constantly placate PS figures who are even less alliance-minded, with many calling for the party to double-down on its pivot back to the center.
Raphaël Glucksmann, the leader of the minor centrist formation Place Publique who led the PS electoral list in the 2024 European parliament elections, is held up by many in the PS right as an example to follow. Their close third-place finish in that EU contest, following just behind Macron’s own list, is cited by Faure’s internal critics as proof that there’s now a considerable electoral base for the party to go it alone.
A leading anti-Mélenchonist on the broader left, Glucksmann is categorical in his opposition to a pact that would put the center in a junior position. In a lengthy interview with Le Monde published in May, he rejected any talk of a primary, with or without France Insoumise. For Glucksmann, a primary is ultimately pointless because the election will inevitably see two candidacies on the Left: it’s time that the center stop shying away from that battle and try to finish off Mélenchon once and for all.
France Insoumise, which remains the largest left-wing force in the National Assembly, has not made the work of left-wing unity any easier. Its frequent communication excesses, such as the publication this spring of a caricatural poster decried by many as drawing on antisemitic tropes, provide easy ammunition to Glucksmann and his acolytes. It will tolerate no talk of submitting Mélenchon — its presumed candidate — to a left-wing presidential primary before 2027. The party operates under the assumption that a plurality of voters on the Left support it, which may well be true. To its eyes, a primary could amount to a back-door maneuver to undermine his candidacy.
If a siege mentality sometimes seems to prevail in France Insoumise, this has its mirror in the Parti Socialiste’s willingness to relay the broader political establishment’s hysteria for all things Mélenchon. Faure seemed to acknowledge as much at the PS congress in Nancy, when he urged his party to move beyond PS right-wingers’ fixation on the Mélenchonists: “So long as their sole obsession is France Insoumise, they’re only underscoring the psychological domination that the radical left has over them.”
Indeed, one of the fundamental developments in French politics in recent years is the degree to which France Insoumise has been cast beyond the pale. The latest example was the publication last month of the investigative tell-all book La Meute, which decried Mélenchon’s party as a sectarian force in which no internal criticism is tolerated. To France Insoumise loyalists, the book gave a megaphone to ousted opposition figures eager to project it as a proto-totalitarian sect devoted to its longtime leader. Such claims are music to Glucksmann’s ears, but not a realistic picture of the full obstacles to left-wing unity — or of the sources of France Insoumise’s intractable distrust toward its centrist counterparts.
We can only hope that the parties of the NFP will be jolted back to common sense, just as they were last summer. Starting in July, Macron will be constitutionally authorized to dissolve parliament — something he could well be tempted to do given the fraying left-wing alliance, in the long-shot hope of clawing back a political mandate for the end of his second term. That possibility won’t be seriously tested until a vote on a 2026 budget this autumn, however. But the prospect of national elections in 2026 and 2027 is not yet pushing the left-wing parties toward unity. It may be lost on party top brass, but left-wing voters know that division likely means disaster.