Over a quarter of a million people marched through France on Saturday and I was among their ranks as an observer. According to much of the media, the march was against Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party, which dominated last week’s European elections. But among the tens of thousands of protestors in Paris I saw and heard as much opposition to Emmanuel Macron.
The president’s name was on placards and in chants as the procession left the Place de la Republique for the Place de la Nation. So, too, was Jordan Bardella’s. The 28-year-old president of the National Rally – and the man who Le Pen says will be prime minister in the event her party wins the parliamentary election on 7 July – was the target of much hostility.
Macron’s standing has dropped sharply because of his social reforms and his support for the war in Ukraine
No one had much to say about Marine Le Pen. I bought a copy of the Workers Tribune from a woman in her fifties and asked her who she disliked more: Macron or the National Rally? Macron, she replied, without hesitation. She blamed him for the rise of the right because of the contempt he has shown for the people. She was scathing of the EU and when I asked if she had voted against ratifying the EU constitution in 2005 in France she replied that she had.
The EU is a major fault line in the French left. The young bourgeois progressive left have on the whole a positive view of Brussels; the older blue-collar left remain as opposed to the EU as they were in 2005 when they were the biggest block in voting no to the constitution in the referendum.
Their political figurehead was Jean-Luc Melenchon. He was so disgusted that the Socialist party establishment backed the constitution that he left and eventually formed La France Insoumise (LFI).
Melenchon remained bitter about the betrayal for years, particularly the role played by two people. ‘Ten years ago the French people gave their opinion, and two leaders, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande…agreed to turn the French no vote into a yes vote,’ he said in an interview in 2015. ‘It’s our country that’s sick, it’s democracy that’s been violated.’
The overturning of the referendum result in 2005 was a betrayal that has not been forgotten or forgiven by millions of French. It was a breach of trust that explains why the ruling centrist elite, be they Sarkozy, Hollande or Macron, are so despised.
This feeling is particularly strong within an element of the left. They despise Jordan Bardella not because they think he is racist but because he is an ‘Atlantist’, in thrall to capitalist America, unlike Marine Le Pen whom they admire for wanting to leave Nato. Bardella, on the other hand, is a fan of Nato.
To general astonishment, Hollande, an abject president during his time in office between 2012 and 2017, is standing for parliamentary election for the Popular Front Union because he says the ‘situation is grave’. He helped make it grave. Had he and Sarkozy and the rest of the political class respected the referendum result in 2005, millions of French would not have abandoned the centre-right Republicans for Le Pen or the centre-left Socialists for Melenchon.
Several thousand of the protestors in Paris on Saturday weren’t even born when France voted no to Europe. They have a different left-wing ideology, one imported from America. They wore keffiyehs and waved Palestinian flags and were a diversity of ethnicities, what Melenchon recently called his ‘New France’. Marine Le Pen calls them ‘Islamo-Gauchistes’ and in an interview on Sunday she warned that they threaten the existence of the Republic.
There is growing unease within the Popular Front coalition, which was formed last week, that Melenchon is purging his moderate wing of LFI and replacing it with candidates who better represent this ‘New France’. One of these is Aly Diouara, who regularly tweets about ‘Jews’ and ‘Whites’. Last month during campaigning for the European elections he described Raphaël Glucksmann of the Socialist party as the ‘Zionist candidate of the liberal right of the left’. Diouara and Glucksmann are now partners in the Popular Front coalition.
Another LFI candidate in the elections is 29-year-old Raphaël Arnault, a senior member of Antifa and a man considered so extreme by the police he is on a surveillance watchlist.
Antifa were among the protestors in Paris on Saturday, marching beneath a giant banner wearing their customary black garb. As they strode down the Boulevard Beaumarchais towards Bastille, they clapped and sang about doing away with the fascists. Occasionally one of them broke away from the procession to daub graffiti on a shop window or smash up a bus stop.
A vandalised monument in Paris (Credit: Gavin Mortimer)
The police kept their distance, and they weren’t seen in force until Antifa, who were at the head of the procession, reached the Chemin Vert metro station. Assembled in a side street was a large number of police in full riot gear. There was a brief standoff. Bottles were thrown and a few firecrackers exploded. A couple of Antifa began smashing the window of a Harley Davidson store with hammers. A group of protestors in their sixties shouted at them to stop. There was an angry exchange of words, and a small grey-haired man told the thugs their behaviour was shameful.
Le Pen is aware that among a significant minority of left-wing voters Macron is more hated than her. One of the reasons her party won 88 seats in parliament in the 2022 election was because of how the left voted in the second round. In constituencies where left-wing voters had to choose between a Le Pen candidate and a Macron candidate, 45 per cent abstained, 31 per cent went for Macron and 24 per cent for her.
In the two years since, Macron’s standing has dropped sharply among the left because of his social reforms and his support for the war in Ukraine, which is unpopular among many.
On Sunday, Le Pen made her pitch to the more traditional left-wing voter. The National Rally, she said, is neither left wing or right. She described it as a ‘patriotic party whose objective is not to allow itself to be pigeon-holed’. Her enemies are Melenchon and his ‘New France’, and Macron and his globalist centrism, ‘a movement that sucks away the very substance of national sovereignty through a supranational structure’.
Many on the left agree with Le Pen’s description of Macron, what he himself called in 2022 his ‘extreme centrism’. For them, it is more of a danger to France than Le Pen’s extremism.