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The President French President Emmanuel Macron lost the European elections on 9 May. In an attempt to catch the victorious far right off guard, he emulated his neighbour Pedro Sánchez by dissolving the National Assembly and calling elections within a month that no one expected.
Indeed, the legislative elections put the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) in its place, which, despite its impressive number of votes, came in third place. Unfortunately for Macron, however, the victory went to a new left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front. In other words, voters trusted the left to stop the ultra-conservative threat.
The French model has its peculiarities. As in Mexico, the head of state (president) and the legislative branch (Assembly) are elected separately, but then the president appoints a head of government (prime minister) who must receive the approval of the Assembly.
Macron is president because he received a huge number of borrowed votes with the sole aim of stopping Marine Le Pen. In 2017 he only won 24 percent of the votes in the first round, but he climbed to 66 percent in the second. This is how the veto on the ultras works: the entire parliamentary arch supports, even if it means holding its nose, the option that the citizens choose to confront the RN.
It does not take advanced classes in democracy to understand that, in fair reciprocity, if the left won the July elections, it should be their responsibility to lead a government that, in the same way, should address the French parliamentary reality, in which the left is very far from an absolute majority.
But without further ado, Macron decided to veto La France Insoumise, the main party of the NFP, and to attract the more moderate deputies of the progressive alliance. The precarious coalition has managed to maintain unity, which has led the president to throw in the towel and ignore the election results. He has appointed Michel Bernier, a conservative from Les Républicains, the fourth force in the Assembly, as Prime Minister. He will need the support of his party, the Macronists and the far right.
In other words, Macron, who called elections to curb the far right, has ignored the left’s victory at the polls and has ended up appointing a prime minister who will depend on Le Pen. Macron, a terrible statesman, has shown that he prefers to avoid the left than the far right.
In parallel, two German states of the former GDR have recently made headlines due to the success of the far right. The AfD won in Thuringia and came second in Saxony. In left-wing circles, the emergence of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a splinter party of Die Linke (The Left) named after its own protagonist, has been a topic of conversation. It has beaten its original parent and came third in both regions, despite being far behind the AfD and the conservative CDU.
There are those who want to see in this split a way forward for the left. The path it opens, however, is dangerous. It hits the mark on several fronts that have to do, above all, with the limits of the German left, for example, when it questions foreign policy totems such as NATO or the sending of arms to Ukraine, but attacks the supposed identity politics of what has come to be called, with interest, the left. woke –she calls him left-wing liberalism
– and has no problem in demanding a halt to immigration that he sees as out of control. In other words, he adopts many of the frameworks that have favoured the rise of the extreme right. BSW wants to fully enter into the fight for that rural vote that resents modernity and, in doing so, adopts the basis on which a good part of the AFD’s argument is built. What could go wrong?
BSW is also, perhaps, the reaction of a left tired of losing, looking for an easy answer to the question: How to win? It is an understandable reaction, in a way; feeling constantly like a loser can end up being exasperating and boring.
But this defeatism blinds our vision and dresses up as failures what are often nothing more than stolen victories. We need to work on our self-esteem a little. The left of the 21st century is the child of a thousand defeats and just as many errors, but also of a thousand other unjust and often violently stolen victories. The list is long: from the Spanish Republic to Gaitán and Arbenz; from Allende and Lubumba to Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. And many more.
Without changing the century or the continent, we can start with France in 2024, continue with a Jeremy Corbin whose wings were clipped in his own English Labour Party, or that first Syriza that the European board decided to reduce to rubble as a warning to sailors. Let no one be fooled, the current rise of the extreme right has much more to do with anti-democratic pulses on the part of the establishmentsuch as Greece in 2015 or France this summer, with the fact that the left has decided to extend its discourse and rights to minority groups.
