It sums ups the sorry state of the Socialist party in France that they can’t even elect a new leader. After yesterday’s vote by members, the two contenders are this morning both claiming victory.
To be frank, whether it is the pretender Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, or the incumbent Olivier Faure, who emerges victorious is immaterial; the decline of the Socialists will continue, as I’ve been documenting on Coffee House for a number of years.
Put simply, Le Pen won the vote of men and women for whom identity still matters
In 2006 the Socialists boasted a membership of 280,000, a figure that today stands at 41,000. Last week the party’s activists spurned the opportunity to initiate real change by eliminating Hélène Geoffroy in the first round of voting.
A former teacher who was brought up in Guadeloupe, Geoffroy is a rarity among Socialist politicians in that she recognises why the party has been in freefall for the last decade. ‘We only talk to the most affluent, but little to the working classes and rural areas,’ she said recently. Her strategy if elected leader was to reconnect the party with its traditional base by addressing the issues that matter to them, namely ‘security, immigration, Europe, but also the question of work and the ecological transition.’
Clearly, this was too much to stomach for the party’s middle-class members and instead it will be Faure or Mayer-Rossignol leading the party, two grey technocrats who are committed Europhiles and don’t see much wrong with mass immigration.
And the Socialist party wonders why its candidate at last year’s presidential election – Anne Hidalgo – won a grand total of 616,478 votes nationwide.
Marine Le Pen received 8.1 million in the first round, a figure she increased to 13.2 million in the second round. There was no great secret to her success: the leader of the National Rally focused on the issues that mattered to the working class: security, immigration and above all, the cost-of-living crisis. That explains why in the first round she came out top among blue-collar workers aged 25 to 49.
Emmanuel Macron polled best among the affluent and the ageing, and the far-left’s Jean-Luc Melenchon – like Jeremy Corbyn in his day – had most success among the 18-24 generation, particularly the middle-classes in further education.
Put simply, Le Pen won the vote of men and women for whom identity still matters, the ‘Somewheres’, and she has become their voice, if not that of the unions.
Earlier in the week Philippe Martinez, the leader of the far-left CGT Union, declared that none of the National Rally’s 89 MPs would not be welcome in their ranks as they marched on Thursday against Macron’s pension reforms. This was because of their opposition to illegal immigration. ‘We stand with the so-called undocumented workers,’ said Martinez. He wasn’t forthcoming on whether the National Rally’s 13 million voters should also stay at home.
Not that Le Pen had any intention of marching shoulder to shoulder with Martinez or Melenchon. She’s in Senegal this week, ‘visiting our friends’, and none of her MPs were out and about on Thursday.
Le Pen has said her party will vigorously oppose the pension reform bill when it is presented to parliament next month, but she knows she must tread carefully when it comes to street protests. She has styled the National Rally as the party of law and order, in contrast to Melenchon’s virulent anti-police rhetoric and the government’s apparent indifference to spiralling crime.This has not gone unnoticed; in last year’s presidential run-off 72 per cent of gendarmes voted for Le Pen.
Le Pen’s strategy during the strikes is to support them while staying above the fray, though this might become more of a challenge if, as some fear, the protestors start blocking oil refineries.
She wants her party to embody the respectable opposition to the reforms, and let the left speak for the extremists. In recent days trade unionists have called for the homes of Macron’s MPs to be cut off from the grid, and Martinez suggested it might be an idea to pay a visit to the homes of the rich.
On Wednesday one left-wing MP, François Ruffin, was asked in a radio interview if he condemned extremist rhetoric; he sidestepped the question. Normally Ruffin is more candid, one of the very few of his ilk who recognises that the left no longer speaks to the working-class, whom he calls the ‘lost electorate’.
Ruffin is an MP in the Somme department, once a left-wing heartland, but where now eight of the 17 constituencies have National Rally MPs.
Fabien Roussel, the leader of the Communist party, also recognises the crisis at the heart of the left. Last year he acknowledged that much of their ideology has been captured by the ‘gauche caviar’, middle-class progressives who look down on the proletariat.
‘The challenge is to go out and conquer the popular electorate that we have lost,’ he said. ‘I want to work at breaking the wall of abstention, along with that of the far right.’
Yesterday’s protests against Macron’s pension reforms brought over one million people onto the streets, and there will be a second day of strike action on January 31. Some believe that the opposition to the reforms will reinvigorate the left, but they are mistaken. A great many of the men and women who marched yesterday in towns and cities across France loathe what the left has become as much as they loathe Macron.
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