Nearly one in two left-wing voters in France believes the country has too many immigrants. When the same polling company conducted a similar survey five years ago the figure was 27 per cent. The fact it is now 48 per cent demonstrates how the gap has widened between left wing politicians and their electorate when it comes to immigration.
The polling company that carried out the survey headlined their findings ‘The Great Taboo (on the left)’. The refusal of left-wing politicians in France to heed their voters’ anxieties about mass immigration is mirrored across western Europe, except in Denmark, where the left has listened and as a result is in power.
The French left, or specifically Jean Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), has a curious set of values; they hold Marine Le Pen and her 13 million voters in contempt, describing her supporters as ‘fascists’ and refusing to shake the hands of Le Pen and her 88 National Rally MP2s.
But LFI have fewer scruples when it comes to domestic violence. On Tuesday they reintegrated into the party Adrien Quatennens, who was given a four-month suspended prison sentence in December for what his wife called ‘physical and psychological violence’ over a number of years. ‘What shame!’ tweeted the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. ‘Here is the patriarchy. How can we still be here in 2023?’
The decision to rehabilitate Quatennens, once tipped to replace Mélenchon as the leader of the LFI, has created further divisions within the left-wing coalition of LFI, Socialists, Greens and Communists. When the coalition was assembled last year to contest the parliamentary elections Mélenchon was seen as its strongest asset, the only figure on the left capable of rallying the disparate factions. But he’s failed to hold the unity. In a recent interview, Fabien Roussel, the leader of the Communist party, described Mélenchon and his increasingly radical party as ‘out of touch’, and said that ‘we have to talk to the whole left’.
Mélenchon once did. In the summer of 2020, for instance, as the Black Lives Matter movement swept through the West, Mélenchon rubbished one of its key tenets, declaring that: ‘Those who talk of “white privilege” have never seen a poor white.’
Mélenchon no longer talks like that. He has joined the ranks of the radical progressives and has become what the French call an ‘Ecolo-Bobo’ (an ecological bourgeois bohemian).
Perhaps that is why his approval rating has dropped by 4.5 per cent in the last year. Marine Le Pen’s has risen, on the other hand, by 7.5 per cent, to make her the most popular politician in France in 2023. The only other leader to boast a meaningful increase in popularity is Fabien Roussel, up 2.7 per cent.
Half a century ago the French Communist party boasted five million voters and was a serious political force. But in 1972 they entered a left-wing coalition run by François Mitterrand, ‘a Union of the Left’ that ultimately won the Socialist the presidency in 1981 but reduced the Communists to a fringe party.
Many Communists were unhappy with the alliance from the outset, and transferred their allegiance to a new party they considered better represented them than the bourgeois Socialists: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front. Between the 1974 and 1988 presidential elections, the National Front vote went from 200,000 votes to 4.3m.
Fabien Roussel’s father remained loyal to the Communists, taking his young son along to factories in the north of France in the late 1970s to distribute tracts. Most of those factories are long gone and the deindustrialisation of that part of France explains why the Le Pens have found it such fertile territory for their cause.
Coming from the region, Roussel understands the people’s despair and when he talks about his Euroscepticism, his support for nuclear energy and his love of a good steak with a glass of red, he is talking to these people, not the progressives in Paris who want nuclear energy and red meat outlawed.
Last weekend Roussel was re-elected National Secretary of the Communists with a huge majority. In his acceptance speech he accused successive governments of having ‘transformed [France’s] borders into sieves.’ In a subsequent interview he doubled down on this remark, saying that there needed to be ‘firmer’ control of the borders.
Progressives reached for the smelling salts. Typical of the many angry retorts was that of the Green MP Sandrine Rousseau, who raged: ‘The term “sieve borders” is a term coming from the nationalist extreme right. You don’t fight the far right by going to its terrain.’ Roussel provoked a similar reaction in 2020 when he said that ‘Islamism is fascism’.
The hysteria that Roussel provokes demonstrates how out of touch the progressive left is with millions of its traditional voters. ‘He sees himself as the heir of a French left, rooted in the political history and geography of the country,’ wrote Le Figaro of Roussel this week. ‘He rejects this new American left, which is more focused on societal struggles. Roussel is the anti-woke left.’
I have seen this division within the left on the pension reform demos in Paris. The workers marching in their overalls are protesting against the raising of the age of retirement; most of the students, with their blue and pink hair, and their LGBTQI flags, are protesting in the name of progressivism, encapsulated by their banner: ‘Burn Their Old World’.
Roussel has been on TV this week warning about the dangers posed by the far right, by which he means Le Pen. But if she poses a danger than so do the Communists because economically and culturally they have a lot in common.
In particular, both have a visceral opposition to ‘wokeness’, described this week by Le Pen’s National Rally as a ‘danger to civilisation’. The National Rally have launched a cross-party parliamentary group to combat the spread of progressive dogma in French society. For them, as for the Communists, it’s a choice between nuclear energy or Net Zero; Red Meat or Vegan burgers and firmer borders or free movement.
Politics in France is no longer a struggle between the left and the right, it’s a fight between the proles and the progressives, and it’s only just begun.
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