Did a smear campaign block the New Popular Front’s path to power?

The left emerged from the snap elections called by President Macron as the biggest bloc in parliament, but couldn’t form a government – blame the campaign to brand it as irremediably antisemitic.

On 7 July the Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front), a coalition consisting of four leftwing and green parties, won 193 of the French parliament’s 577 seats – a total that exceeded both President Macron’s coalition (166 seats) and the far-right Rassemblement National and its neoliberal, conservative ally, Les Républicains (LR), who took 142. Two months later, Macron appointed as his prime minister Michel Barnier of LR, which won 6.57% of the vote in the first round and secured 47 MPs in the second.

To govern, Barnier will have to rely on the support of the far right, against which all the major parties – except LR – joined forces on 7 July, and also on the parliamentary backing of the president’s Renaissance party, which was the clear loser in the election. This disparity between how French people vote and how they are represented politically has become engrained: Barnier, like his predecessors, will have to adhere to a European roadmap that 54.7% of voters rejected in 2005 in an EU treaty referendum that was later overruled by the French parliament.

This move by Emmanuel Macron was made possible by pushing a lie that has been retailed by much of the political class in France and by all of the mainstream media: that Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his leftwing party La France Insoumise (LFI) are antisemitic. This charge – which is exactly the sort of false claim the French authorities push back on when it emanates from Moscow or Trump Tower – has enabled the government to ostracise the largest leftwing parliamentary group, rehabilitate the far right (which has allegedly made its antisemitism a thing of the past) and thus justify sidelining the coalition that won the most seats in an election that had a much higher turnout (66.7%) than the previous one.

The virulence of the attack on LFI, combined with the absence of any solid corroborating proof, is astonishing. ‘What does Mélenchon’s gang think?’ Philippe Val, the former director of Charlie (...)

Full article: 2 602 words.

Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert

Serge Halimi is advisor to Le Monde diplomatique’s editorial director; Pierre Rimbert is a member of its editorial team.

* Frédéric Lordon is an economist and the author of ’Et la vertu sauvera le monde...’ (Editions Raisons d’Agir, Paris, 2003)

(1) The power of a dominant purchaser to drive down prices for the purchase of goods or services when negotiating with many sellers.

(2) The reference is to the title of Minc’s book, La mondialisation heureuse (The Benefits of Globalisation), Editions Plon, Paris, 1997.

(3) Brandt, Vedette, Thomson, Thermor, De Dietrich, Sauter, Krups and Moulinex.

(4) A term coined by Robert Reich, professor of economics at Brandeis University and former US labour secretary, to describe knowledge workers in an information technology environment.

(5) Moulinex, la mécanique du pire, shown on France 5 television on 1 March 2004.