Why is Mélenchon silent about Macron's secret discussions with French neo-fascists?

In the last legislative elections, millions of French people voted for the candidates of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front (NFP) or for the candidates of President Emmanuel Macron’s party supported by the NFP, in order to prevent a neo-fascist electoral victory. With these elections leading to a parliament without an absolute majority, it became clear that the NFP’s alliance with Macron betrayed the aspirations of workers and young people.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, at the Palais de la Musique et des Congrès in Strasbourg, January 19, 2022. (Photo by Thomas Bresson / CC BY 4.0)

The NFP came out on top in the election, but Macron refuses to appoint Mélenchon as prime minister. Instead, as the daily newspaper reports Release Macron government officials are in secret negotiations with the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) over the government crisis. Macron himself attended the NATO summit in Washington to discuss military escalation and plans for missile strikes on Russian cities, funded by austerity measures against workers, such as last year’s pension cuts.

Mélenchon has kept a deafening silence on the secret talks between Macron and the RN. Instead of attacking Macron’s collaboration with the RN on the policies of war and austerity massively rejected by the French people, he is doubling down on his efforts to strengthen his alliance with Macron. He is not calling for workers and young people to be mobilized in demonstrations and strikes against the war and pension cuts, but is blocking a movement of the working class against Macron and the RN.

An analysis of Mélenchon’s Friday night speech, “The Political Moment,” makes clear why he remains silent on Macron’s ties to the RN. Attacking Macron’s ties to the RN would blow up Mélenchon’s strategy of allying with Macron, ostensibly to stop the far right, even as Macron calls for sending troops to Ukraine to wage war on Russia and imposes a police regime in the country.

On Friday night, Mélenchon defended the recent reshaping of the alliance between his middle-class populist party, La France Insoumise (LFI), and the Stalinist Socialist Party (PS) and French Communist Party (PCF), under the name NFP. He claimed that his proposal to create an NFP had stunned the PS and PCF, prompting them to act suddenly against the danger of the far right:

“They were surprised and stunned when, once the New Popular Union was dead, the New Popular Front emerged. I will not go into details, they are all fresh in your memory. (…) We said that nothing would be too expensive for us, because we knew that if we reconstituted the Union, at any price, it would be the quickest way to undo what Macron was trying to do, telling us that what he was doing carried an enormous risk that it would end in a victory for the extreme right.”

Mélenchon’s presentation of the NFP as a determined opponent of the far right is a political lie. If he intended to fight the far right, he would have denounced Macron’s secret negotiations with the RN and used them to mobilize working-class opposition to Macron. But he is doing the opposite. Maintaining a complicit silence, he is deepening his alliance with Emmanuel Macron’s coalition, a strategy that strengthens the RN by allowing it to present itself as Macron’s only opponent.

In his speech Friday night, Mélenchon praised his strategy of withdrawing NFP candidates to support Ensemble contre le RN candidates in the elections. He boasted that the NFP had entered into this alliance with Macron without “illusions” about Macron’s anti-working class role, but that it had happily withdrawn its candidates and supported Macron’s candidates anyway. Mélenchon said:

“Since we had no illusions, we could not lose them. That is why, with only 3% to go, we put 100 constituencies at stake. There are comrades who did not like this story. It took a lot of courage for the comrades to accept that the constituency in which last time they narrowly missed victory, next time it will no longer be them, it will be someone else who in some way arrives and “takes the benefits” of the work that has been done. But that is life, that is the law of combat.”

If this is what Mélenchon calls a “fight” against Macron and the RN, one has to ask: what would a capitulation look like? Mélenchon then made a remarkable admission of political bankruptcy by explaining why alliances with Macron were supposed to be the only possible choice for LFI and the NFP. At the start of the elections, he claimed, the New Popular Front “did not have the same capabilities as the National Rally at that time.”

The NFP, Mélenchon explained, had been so weakened by the PS’s defense of the Gaza genocide and its defense of the trade union bureaucracies’ betrayal during last year’s mass strikes against pension cuts that it had no choice but to ally itself with Macron. Euphemistically calling the PS’s reactionary attacks on LFI’s statements of solidarity with Gaza “disunity,” Mélenchon said:

“First we had the problem of disunity, then the problem of defeat. (…) 91% of the population is against raising the retirement age to 64, and finally what happened? Nothing. Not only did nothing happen in either chamber of Parliament, but the National Assembly did not have time to vote because Article 49-3 was invoked (by Macron to impose the cuts without a parliamentary vote), and it was adopted.
In truth, in all the languages of the world, this is called a defeat. There was no explanation from the unions, no one said how or why we lost. (…) On this point, what people felt was resignation, they said: “Listen, okay, we lose all the time but we still have to start all over again.” So it’s very hard.

Such a confession confirms the warnings of the Socialist Equality Party (PES) pointed out that the NFP’s opportunistic alliance with the PS and Mélenchon’s Stalinist bureaucracy of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) is a trap for workers. Mélenchon’s remarks raise the question: if alliances with the PS and the Stalinist bureaucracies of the PCF and CGT weaken left and working class opposition to Macron and the RN, why does Mélenchon support such alliances?

It must first be said that the argument that Mélenchon put forward to justify his alliance with Macron – that his NFP was too discredited to do anything else – is a fraud. In reality, the NFP received the votes of millions of workers and young people who saw no other way to demonstrate their opposition to Macron and Le Pen. This surge of left-wing sentiment would have been stronger if LFI had not worked for several years to subordinate workers and young people to alliances with the PS, the PCF and now with Macron.

The bureaucrats’ betrayal in the pension struggle has undoubtedly created bitterness and confusion. But it also reveals the reactionary role played by Mélenchon himself. LFI did not call for mobilizing its millions of voters in a strike movement, but demanded that the opposition go through parliament. Mélenchon now admits that there was no viable parliamentary tactic to stop Macron’s budget cuts – that this strategy was doomed to failure. The reason why Mélenchon is pursuing this strategy must be found in the class base and political program of the NFP.

The NFP is a coalition between the imperialist bourgeoisie behind the PS and the affluent middle class academics and trade union bureaucrats of the PCF and LFI. The NFP’s electoral program calls for sending French troops to Ukraine and strengthening the French military police and intelligence services. It seeks to block the massive opposition of the working class to Macron, the imperialist war, the police regime and the RN because it has limited tactical differences with Macron.

It is common knowledge that Mélenchon began his political career in Pierre Lambert’s cabinet. Internationalist Communist Organization (OCI), shortly after its break with the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the Trotskyist movement. The OCI supported the Union of the Left, an alliance between the PCF and the Socialist Party (PS) recently founded by former Nazi collaborator François Mitterrand. OCI members such as Lionel Jospin and Mélenchon joined the PS and became ministers in pro-austerity PS governments.

Mélenchon’s calls for building a “populist” movement echo the PS-PCF alliance’s promises to form a “popular” government after their agreement on the Common Program in 1972. However, since this alliance took power in France in 1981—abandoning the Common Program’s promises of reforms during the “austerity turn” of 1982-83—and especially since Stalinism dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991, the PCF’s base in the working class has collapsed. The forces that remain within the NFP today are middle-class movements that are consciously hostile to Marxism.

This is what emerges clearly from the remarks made by Mélenchon on Friday evening. Mocking those who spend their time “comparing the works of Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky,” Mélenchon insisted on the fact that he rejects the construction of a Marxist vanguard in the working class:

“We believe that the actor of history is the people themselves, who do not need to be invested with consciousness as a revolutionary vanguard would, who do not need to be led. They need to be enlightened. Sometimes they need someone to do something, and then they act.”

He went on to promote the NFP’s pro-war, pro-police program as a continuation of Mitterrand and the PCF’s 1972 Common Program:

“All the great actions that led the left to victory have always been actions based on a program. Given my age, I can tell you that the common program led to the victory of 1981… We come together to decide what to do and thus we arrive at a common program, so that many people who have totally different ideas about Yugoslav socialism or Chinese socialism, or about the absence of socialism at all, end up coming together because they say, ‘Yeah, okay, that sounds good.'”

The crisis in France is revealing Mélenchon’s arguments. Last year’s pension struggle offers very hard lessons that must be learned. To be “enlightened,” the working class must build its own revolutionary vanguard to politically break the efforts of counter-revolutionary organizations like the NFP to sabotage its struggles. This is especially urgent now that the NFP is blocking opposition to Macron’s corrupt maneuvers with the RN as he prepares for war with Russia.

In the context of the left turn of the early elections, the decisive question is to prepare and mobilize a movement of the working class in struggle against the war, the genocide in Gaza, austerity and the fascist police regime in the country. The essential precondition for such a movement is to reject the bitter hostility of the NFP towards socialism. The essential questions facing the working class cannot be resolved in parliament, but only through class struggle. The only way to defeat the rise of neo-fascism and war is to build an international socialist anti-war movement within the working class.