Meanwhile, Yannick Jadot, the charismatic Europe Écologie Les Verts leader (EELV, the Greens) and an MEP since 2009, also likes to be in charge. He has reiterated on France Inter (radio channel) on Monday the absolute necessity for the fragmented Left to get together and “talk” (there’s been bad blood between the leaders of the 4 or 5 leftwing parties for a few months, plenty of digs and veiled attacks between them through the media).
Jadot is keen to move towards more unity on the Left(s), or come to some sort of alliance or agreement (to do with the 1st and 2nd rounds of the 2022 presidential, possibly also to do with the forthcoming Regionals), as is their only option to upset the status quo and rightwing electoral prognosis. All these leftwing leaders have apparently agreed to meet next week, IRL. It’s meant to be high profile so the media will be there and report on it.
This meeting looks like it’ll be more of an initial “prise de contact”, to clear the air after months of animosity and talk broadly about their respective party’s direction for 2022, bearing in mind that apart from Mélenchon none of them has actually officially declared that they’ll run for presidency, so there’s obviously no ligne directrice, no manifesto in place etc.
It’s not yet known officially who will attend this meeting but in the main probably Jadot for EELV, Mélenchon for France Insoumise, Faure for the PS, Hidalgo (no official affiliation yet) and possibly Roussel for the Communists.
A “hard alliance” (with only 1 leftwing candidate in the 1st round) is currently unthinkable given the ideological differences between the parties and the personal enmities (eg between Jadot and Mélenchon), and also the fact that Mélenchon is already officially a candidate, has a platform etc.
A broad leftwing alliance is something though that’s been done before successfully, most famously in 1936 with the election of Léon Blum leading the Front Populaire and of course in 1981 with Mitterrand (who’d sealed the leftwing alliance 10 years before with the Programme Commun, and thus by winning the 1981 Presidentials ended 23 years of the Right at the helm).
However the circumstances back then were very different. In the mid-1930s, such a pan-Left alliance had been achieved (with great difficulty) very much on a “needs must” basis, it was the only way to counter the rise of fascism (following the attempted coup of 6 february 1934 by the so-called Far-right leagues), and in 1981, Mitterrand had been the undisputed leader of the Left more or less since the mid-1960s bar a major disagreement with the socialist top brass in the late 1960s (hence his absence in the 1969 Presidentials, replaced by the maverick Marseille mayor Gaston Defferre who only registered a puny 5%, their lowest ever score), a major beef which would lead to the foundation of the Parti Socialiste, created on the ashes of the SFIO (Mitterrand recorded 45% vs De Gaulle in the 1965 Presidentials and over 49% vs Giscard d’Estaing at the 1974’s). But this time round there is no stand-out leftwing leader around whom parties could coalesce and the French Left is even more divided than back then, so there will certainly be no “programme commun”.
The objective of this meeting is more to first agree on a truce (a non-aggression pact) and to start a dialogue between them all, in particular to initiate a discussion on how best to go about tackling the perennial problem of the French Left: the multiple candidates in the Presidentials which split the vote 4 or 5 ways (with the additional problem of Macron last time who nicked plenty of centre-left votes in 2017, as many of these voters didn’t vote for socialist Hamon in the 1st round but for centrist Macron, in a damage-limitation exercise – as Benoît Hamon, presenting the beleaguered Socialist, had zero chance of making to the 2nd round so it’d have been a wasted vote. Indeed, the poor Hamon, very much thrown in at the deep end, recorded a ghastly 6,4%, the Socialists’ second worst score since the creation of the SFIO (the forerunner to the French Socialist Party) in the 1900s by Jean Jaurès, its co-founder).
So, in practical terms, I guess they’ll discuss who’s OK to pull out in the 1st round in order to have as few leftwing candidates as poss, eg as the PC (Communists) did in 2017, Just like in 2012, the PC, didn’t run a candidate, so as not to get in the way of Mélenchon. It was an agreement between the latter and the PC’s voters – there was a national vote –, and in return Mélenchon’s party didn’t run candidates against the PC in some constituencies in the June 2017 Législatives, explains why the Communists ended up with a disproportionate amount of MPs in the Legislatives, 11).
Christ, even the Greens are deeply divided within their party. For instance Jadot hadn’t told anyone in EELV that he would make that comparatively big announcement on France Inter that all the leftwing parties would meet to talk with a view possibly to agree on a common strategy… Apparently, the EELV’s big cheeses went ape shit when they realised they hadn’t been consulted.
The Greens have always been very divided party in France, but more so now that they have emerged in the last two years from years of anonymity. As they have become far more high-profile than previously, so have their divisions.
Historically and roughly speaking there’s always been three distinct factions within that movement: 1/3 of hardline pro-EU “autonomists”, politically on the Centre-Left but keen to go it alone; 1/3 who prefer an alliance with the hard left (currently represented by the Mélenchon’s Eurospectic France Insoumise) and the remaining third who favour an alliance with the Socialists or whoever happens to be on the Centre Left.
In the last few years, exponents of the first two factions have emerged: the “autonomist” Yannick Jadot vs the more radical Green “reds” led by Éric Piolle (Grenoble’s mayor since 2014) who is openly close to Paris socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo, and close to Mélenchon’s hard left La France Insoumise. To make matters even more complicated within EELV and the Left, Hidalgo, who’s been Paris Mayor since 2014, the last time – 2020 – thanks to a coalition with the Greens, and local divisions on the right) has hinted that she’d run for presidency next year, although she hasn’t officially decided.
It is an open secret that Jadot and Piolle, the two leaders of EELV and representatives of two main strands within the party, cannot stand each other. They will both vie to be the EELV candidate for the presidentials. There will be an EELV primary to decide, voting will be open to all (all 48 million voters; upon signing a chart and forking out €1) and it’ll be held in theory before the end of September 2021. It is likely that there will be at least 4 candidates: Jadot, Piolle, Sandrine Rousseau and ex socialist Delphine Batho (who’s an MP – in the same dpt 79 consistuency where Ségolène Royal was an MP for nearly 20 years – and was Minister of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy in the first gvt under Hollande).
According to various insiders, Piolle’s is more popular within the “écolos encarté(e)s”, the card-carrying EELV members but Jadot seems to have slightly more traction with the larger EELV electorate. Things are hardening, times are increasingly polarised and centrist Jadot seems to have been losing support of late within the rank-and-files, he’s not daft, he’s probably sensed that so
that could explain why he’s suddenly calling for a meeting that feels premature and a bit pointless to some.
EELV scored a decent 13.5 % in the 2019 Europeans and did very well last year in the Municipals, and although they’ve scored a few own goals in the intervening time they are a force to reckon with.