Rundale

Dónal Hassett

The success of Catherine Connolly’s presidential campaign has prompted extensive discussions around the possibility of a future left alliance that has the potential to transform politics on this island. While mainstream media coverage was quick to highlight stylistic commonalities with the insurgent campaign of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, those interested in learning from both the success and the failures of alliance-building on the left would perhaps do better to look across the Celtic Sea to recent experiments in left unity in France. There, the experiences of the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (NUPES) and its successor, the New Popular Front (NFP), demonstrate both the potential and the pitfalls of electoral alliances in ways that should be instructive for the Irish left. While both coalitions succeeded in mobilising a broad left-wing electorate behind programmes of radical transformation, left unity fractured when personal and party rivalries became more important than the common goal of securing power to implement change.

Both the NUPES and the NFP brought together rival and often mutually hostile movements on the left of French politics, from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical La France Insoumise (LFI) to the once hegemonic centrist Parti Socialiste (PS), with the Communists, the Ecologists and various smaller centre-left, eco-socialist and radical left movements rallying to the cause. They denied President Macron’s allies a majority in the French Parliament and ensured that it was the left, and not the far right, who constituted the main opposition bloc. While the NUPES gained 74 seats for the left in the 2022 elections, securing its position as the second largest bloc in Parliament, the NFP unexpectedly gained a further 49 seats, emerging as the largest bloc in the snap elections of 2024. In an electoral climate where the left had been fragmented and its share of the vote in decline, this was a major achievement.

At the heart of the relative success of both alliances stood a clear commitment to a joint policy platform that promised to deliver transformative change across French society. The programmes that detailed how the left’s vision would be implemented served as the key vehicle both for sustaining unity across a broad coalition and rallying popular support among the electorate. Both the NUPES and the NFP published their programmes online and distributed them widely, with the texts themselves becoming part of the visual branding that was so central to their campaigns. A close study of their composition and  content might offer some insights to those seeking to build left unity on this island.

Programmes of Practical, Positive and Transformative Change

Neither the NUPES nor the NFP shied away from declaring a commitment to ‘rupture’ with the existing neoliberal order in France. The programmes were ambitious in their embrace of the politics of wealth redistribution, a rapid and extensive green transition, the protection of social services and workers’ rights, and popular democracy. The commitment to radical change was put front and centre but paired, in both cases, with clear costings that were more detailed than those offered by rival parties, a means of pre-empting some of the inevitable critiques from opponents and their media outriders. The alliances explicitly refuted the logics of austerity politics, insisting on the need for state investment in environmental policies, in healthcare and in education to be funded through increased taxation on profits and on wealth, an unabashedly left-wing platform.

Crucially, the left alliances were careful to ensure that their platforms framed radical change always in terms of its positive impact on ordinary citizens. The restoration of the wealth tax, abolished by Emmanuel Macron, was presented as a measure of social justice as well as a means of raising revenue. This opened up wider discussions around tax justice, allowing candidates to detail the broader suite of redistributive measures that underpinned the programme. These were paired with discrete economic measures such as increasing the minimum wage and imposing price controls on basic goods that offered voters a clear understanding as to how the left would help them grapple with the cost of living crisis. The commitment to tackling ‘energy precarity’ through mass retrofitting permitted left candidates to avoid the trap of punitive environmentalism and instead frame the programmes’ extensive commitment to the green transition in terms of social justice. This was coupled with an expansive policy to promote the protection of nature and the empowerment of citizens to improve and enjoy the environment around them. While the defence of social rights and services, including the retirement age of 60, were framed in terms of the struggle against Macron’s neoliberal agenda, the programmes and the candidates always emphasised their necessity to guaranteeing the health and happiness of voters and their communities.

Both the referendums and the presidential campaign in Ireland underlined the mobilising power of a positive message, even if their visions for change were relatively limited. In France, conservative intellectuals have effectively cultivated a narrative of national decline (déclinisme) that has fuelled nostalgia about an imagined idyllic past and anxiety about an uncertain future. This has made for a happy electoral hunting ground for the far right. In contrast, the left alliances offered voters a positive vision of social, economic and environmental transformation that would change their lives for the better. The transformative impact of previous left alliance governments, most notably the Popular Front government of 1936, were central to the mythology and iconography of the campaigns.

While both programmes outlined a vision for change, it is notable that the NFP’s programme in 2024 embedded this in a clear calendar, delineating the immediate measures to be taken in the first 15 days, the ‘period of rupture’, then the laws to be passed in the ‘summer of new directions’ and finally the longer term policies in the ‘period of transformations’ that followed. This provided potential electors with a legible pathway to concrete and positive change, something that  was missing from the left’s campaign and left political party manifestos in the last Irish general election but is vital both to mobilising electors and concretising coalitions for change.

Coalitions of Compromise, Not Capitulation

Developing these programmes inevitably required compromises from the different political movements. Tensions over attitudes to the European Union were resolved by pairing the expression of support for the European project with a stated willingness to break and remake the fiscal rules that have come to define and constrain it. As the leader of the Ecologists and noted Europhile Julien Bayou put it, ‘let us disobey to save Europe’. Contrasting positions on Ukraine and on Palestine, a more acute issue on the French left than in Ireland, were partially reconciled through a broad commitment to international law and human rights. Both the opponents and supporters of nuclear power had to content themselves with a policy of a gradual transition to full renewables. The leaders of the much diminished Socialist Party, still grappling with the legacies of the party’s disastrous embrace of a market-oriented social democracy under Francois Hollande, had to accept policy platforms that advocated the repeal of laws they had supported and broke with many of the logics that had underpinned their rule.  All in all, the policy divergences on the French left were far more acute than is the case in Ireland and yet they were still able to agree a common and transformative policy platform that garnered broad support for radical change.

Standing under the banner of the alliance required all candidates to sign up to the proposed programmes. Those who chose not to were deselected and had to run as dissidents, with no party support. The alliances played into the different strengths of their constituent movements when campaigning. I saw this myself when leafletting in the Paris suburb of Asnières-sur-Seine in 2022, with PS and Green activists leading a canvass of the market in the middle-class south of the constituency with material focusing on the candidate’s experience as a local public school teacher, while LFI led a canvas in the tower blocks of the north, with a focus on the minimum wage and price controls. This was not purely a question of electoral tactics. It also allowed movements to ensure that both their activists and their priorities were included in the joint campaign. We have seen this work in referendums and presidential campaigns- the French experience shows it is also possible at a general election.

People Power Over Parties and Personalities

Building a movement for change cannot rely on political parties or electoralism alone. The reproductive rights and marriage equality referendums, the Connolly campaign and the Palestine solidarity movement have all underlined the potential of the mobilisation of civil society behind progressive causes in Ireland. This has always proven more challenging when it comes to general elections. There have been efforts to create umbrella groups to support transfer pacts and joint canvasses. The French model of creating local committees of the NUPES and NFP open not just to party activists but also to civil society groups would be easy to replicate here. They could give left independents and/or political newcomers a structure through which they could support and help to shape the alliance, grounding it in the kind of grassroots activism that can transform communities bottom-up. Moreover, both the collective experience and the organisational infrastructure of the referendums and the Connolly campaign as mass movements outside of the direct control of parties would perhaps empower activists to enforce unity on parties and politicians who sometimes struggle to sustain it.

The ultimate fracturing of the left alliances in France comes in no small part from the abandonment of the focus on programmes of radical change and the popular mobilisation they inspire for a return to a politics of personal and party rivalry. The failure of the major parties to agree a common candidate for the post of Prime Minister for months after the 2024 elections stymied any chance to implement at least some of the NFP’s radical programme. Since then, the prospect of next year’s impending presidential election has further splintered the left alliance, with potential candidates jockeying for position and parties pursuing competing strategies in ways the not only undermine but may well render impossible future left unity. How we apportion blame within the left alliance largely depends on our political sympathies, but it is clear that there has been a collective failure by the political class to sustain a unity that is so desperately needed in the face of an ever-more reactionary right and an ascendant far right. The declining popularity of the leaders of the left in France shows that the electorate is punishing them for this. While the presidentialism of the French system undoubtedly turbocharges such rivalries, political leaders on Ireland’s left cannot afford to let personal ambition or party interests trump the need to deliver real change.

Conclusion: Uniting for Change, Not Just for Power

The NUPES and the NFP brought a sense of hope to large sections of the French electorate in the last four years. Their programmes presented concrete visions for a fairer and more sustainable future while the collective action they inspired at a local level forged new communities of left activism across and beyond partisan divides. And yet, the failures of political leaders and parties to fully renounce their own ambitions and interests stymied attempts to transform policy platforms into lived realities for the French people. The French precedent shows that it is both possible and necessary to develop a programme of radical change that can unite disparate movements and activists and rally wide electoral support.

Crucially, it underlines that popular engagement in a left alliance must be not only broad but also deep, rooted in grass-roots activism at a local level and not subject to the whims and ambitions of political elites. A left alliance, on either side of the Celtic Sea, will never work if its primary purpose is to aggregate more power for politicians or parties. It must be rooted in a movement for radical change tied to a clear and achievable programme. Now is the time to lay the foundations for such a movement so that we can, to paraphrase the NFP programme, ‘write a new page in the history of’ Ireland together.