World News: The French Political Left Vanishes

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Category: World News - Europe

Published on Tuesday, 06 February 2024 09:57

Written by Olivier Longhi

The absence of a credible discourse within the French left partly explains the disaffection of a political movement confined to the rank of parliamentary auxiliary and locked into a systematic sterile opposition to the President of the Republic.

History will remember, if it allows itself the luxury, that the first motion of censure tabled against the Attal government was rejected by the National Assembly. A drop in the bucket in the parliamentary peregrinations of the national representation.

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What is more worrying, however, both from a political point of view and from the point of view of democratic plurality, is that this motion tabled by the four left-wing groups has failed to worry a government whose liberal orientations are now no more than an open secret.

Two questions are now acutely asked as 2027 slowly but surely approaches: where is the French left and where is the French left? Carried at arm's length by Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise, which however does not manage to embody all the aspirations and sensitivities of the left, what was described in the past as a progressive formation is, absolute paradox, in retreat and on the back foot since the first election of Emmanuel Macron as President of the Republic.

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Missed Turn

There are many reasons that can explain this disaffection, starting with the systematic siphoning off carried out by the En Marche and Renaissance parliamentary groups, which are even struggling today, without moving them, to offer a left wing to their movements.

For a long time a party of government, the French left, which missed the turn to social democracy in the mid-eighties, is now paying for its blindness on many subjects (education, wages,...), preferring to concentrate on the fight against inequalities, the deepening of which it has not been able to hinder, leaving the social question to the National Rally.

Blindness but also dogmatism incompatible with social and economic reality in the face of a globalization that called for flexibility and adaptation and not firmness and clumsiness, the El Khomry law, passed under the presidency of François Hollande, perfectly embodying these errors or blindness.

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Symbiosis

So the initial questions come back to the table. And it is clear that the results are not very flattering. Discredited in public opinion, poorly relayed within it, difficult to read in its discourse articulated more around a repetitive anti-Macronism than a set of proposals in symbiosis with the history of the left and the social expectations of public opinion, the French left, which must also suffer the excesses of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, drags its misery in a political landscape dominated by an aggressive and savage liberalism.

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Moreover, if this same liberalism, which smacks of archaism nauseating in some respects, occupies so much space, it is more because of the left's failure to occupy the field with relevance than because of the natural hegemony of contemporary liberal movements.

The road to redemption therefore seems very long for a political movement whose offer to date boils down to LFI leaving the Socialist Party, the Left Radicals, and the Communist Party far from everything. Including the world in which they live.

Bio: Olivier Longhi has extensive experience in European history. A seasoned journalist with fifteen years of experience, he is currently professor of history and geography in the Toulouse region of France. He has held a variety of publishing positions, including Head of Agency and Chief of Publishing. A journalist, recognized blogger, editor, and editorial project manager, he has trained and managed editorial teams, worked as a journalist for various local radio stations, a press and publishing consultant, and a communications consultant.