French Socialist party agrees alliance with far left for June elections
France’s Socialist party and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party have reached an agreement in principle to form an alliance for June’s parliamentary election.
The coalition pact, which the Greens and Communists agreed to earlier this week, is an attempt to deprive Emmanuel Macron of a majority in parliament and block his pro-business agenda after he was re-elected president in April.
“We can and will beat Emmanuel Macron and we can do it with a majority to govern for a radical programme,” the LFI lawmaker Adrien Quatennens told Franceinfo radio.
If the agreement between the LFI and the Socialists is confirmed, the French left will be united for the first time in 20 years.
The deal was shaped under the leadership of Mélenchon, who broke from the Socialist party in 2008 over its pro-European Union stance, seeking to “disobey” the bloc’s rules on budget and competition issues and challenge its free-market principles.
A source in the Socialist party (PS) said that there was agreement on who would run in what constituency and on overall strategy, but that negotiators still needed to finalise details of the joint programme itself.
In particular, the wording on what the platform for the new alliance, which will run under the banner of the “Social and Ecological People’s Union”, would say on Europe was still being debated, sources said.
The deal would then need to be approved by the PS’s national committee.
Policies of the new alliance include plans to lower the retirement age to 60, raise the minimum wage and cap prices on essential products.
If confirmed, Mélenchon’s success in striking a deal with the Socialists would mark a turning point for a party that has given the country two presidents since the second world war and has been a driving force for European integration.
PS veterans, including the former party leader Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, have already called on fellow members to block the deal, saying it could mark the end of a pro-EU force on the left.
But the Socialists had little leeway in the talks after a collapse in the presidential election after their candidate, the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, garnered a meagre 1.75%. Mélenchon placed third.
In a sign of the Socialist party’s collapse, a source close to the talks said the deal – in which only one candidate from each party that joins the alliance run in any of France’s 577 constituencies – foresees that the PS would only have 70 candidates in mainland France, and possibly a few more in oversees territories.
A recent Harris Interactive poll showed a united left and an alliance between Macron’s party and the conservatives neck and neck, with each garnering 33% of the legislative vote. However, in France’s two-round election system, projections show this could still translate into a majority of seats for Macron.