18.07.2024

Fragile unpopular front

Unity with the neoliberal Macronites made the Nouveau Front Populaire the largest bloc in the lower house. But, Mike Macnair warns, the signs of fragmentation are already all too apparent, and there is a real danger that Marine Le Pen will have a successful presidential run in 2027

Elections to the National Assembly produced (in English terms) a ‘hung parliament’. The Nouveau Front Populaire coalition came first … and consists of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s proprietary brand, La France Insoumise (LFI - France Unbowed), the Parti Socialiste (PS), Europe Écologie - Les Verts, the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), and various smaller groups. Second placed comes president Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble coalition.¹ Third placed is the far-right Rassemblement Nationale (RN). There are also a number of smaller groups represented that are not part to the three major blocs.²

The substance of this vote is ‘anti-fascist’. The strong showing of the RN in the Euro elections produced Macron’s decision to call a snap election. And it also produced the decision of the Parti Socialiste to return to unity with LFI in the NFP - a rebranded version of the 2022 Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (New Social and Ecological Union of the People - Nupes). The PS had split from Nupes in October 2023 over the LFI leadership’s refusal to call Hamas ‘terrorist’: that is, over the question of loyalty to the USA. This, in turn, led to the first-round result with RN in the lead, followed by NFP, and then the Macronistes. In the second round there was substantial step-down between the NFP and the Macronistes in order to defeat the RN.

Failures

The rebranding of Nupes as the NFP is part of the same ‘anti-fascist’ framing as the original Front Populaire of May 1936, against the threat of the fascists of Action Française and other groups, which had driven out the previous Radical-led government by riots on February 6 1934, forcing the Radicals to submit to a right-led government. The original FP united the PS (then called the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière - SFIO), the PCF, the left-origin but largely rural-based Parti Républicain, and the Radical et Radical-Socialiste (usually referred to in English as the Radical Party).³

The idea had been most famously promoted by the report of Georgi Dimitrov to the 7th Congress of Comintern in August 1935.⁴ It had been in the air since 1934, when it became clear that Hitler was not returning to the Rapallo policy, in which the German nationalist right allied with the Soviet regime (as the Soviet government at first hoped).⁵ Dimitrov did not only codify the Popular Front idea; he also promoted a new idea of the workers’ united front - one that, unlike the older Comintern doctrine, required downplaying disagreements for the sake of unity:

‘The communists attack us,’ say others. But listen, we have repeatedly declared: We shall not attack anyone, whether persons, organisations or parties, standing for the united front of the working class against the class enemy. But at the same time it is our duty, in the interests of the proletariat and its cause, to criticise those persons, organisations and parties that hinder unity of action by the workers.⁶

The French Popular Front was not the first. The Spanish Frente Popular (FP), including (among others) the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party - PSOE), the Izquierda Republicana (Republican Left), the Unión Republicana, (Republican Union) and the Partido Comunista de España (PCE), won elections in February 1936. It aimed to defeat the far-right Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (‘Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights’ - CEDA), which imitated aspects of fascist and Nazi ideas, but aimed to win power through elections, and the monarchist Renovación Española (‘Spanish Renovation’), which openly sought a coup to overthrow the republic that had been created in 1931. The FP victory led initially to an Izquierda Republicana government with external support from the PSOE.

In July 1936 Francisco Franco and his fellow rightwingers in the Spanish army launched a coup against the government, leading to a three-year civil war. The PSOE and the PCE joined the government in September 1936, while leaders of the anarchist CNT trade union confederation did so in November. In May 1937 the government suppressed local militias in Barcelona of the CNT and the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (‘Workers Party of Marxist Unification’), formed in 1935 by fusion of the Trotskyists and Bukharinists to create a ‘broad-front’, non-Stalinist party).

The Frente Popular government was determined to fight a regular war, and a constitutionalist war, not a revolutionary war, in the (delusive) hope of attaining British and French support: the Francoists were militarily backed by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; the British and French, under the name of ‘non-intervention’, imposed an embargo on arms supplies to the Republic, which they actually enforced. In particular, the Republic did not attempt to undermine the base of the Francoists in the colonies by offering independence. It is quite possible that a policy of revolutionary war would have failed⁷; but the policy of the Frente Popular government certainly ended in a regular military defeat. In April 1939 the Republicans finally surrendered Madrid.

The French Front Populaire initially seemed much more successful. The PCF agreed to external support of the SFIO-Radical government led by Léon Blum. The publication of the election results triggered a mass strike wave with factory occupations in May-June 1936; the result was massive economic concessions in order to preserve the constitutional order, codified in the June 1936 Matignon agreements between the government, the main employers’ organisation and the Confédération Générale du Travail trade union federation.⁸ Workers obtained, as well as substantial wage rises, the legal right to organise, to collective bargaining and to strike, two weeks’ per year paid holiday, and the 40-hour week.

Capital flight

However, 1936-37 saw a flight of capital, forcing a devaluation and inflation. And without the pressure of the strike wave after the Matignon agreements, the Senate - which was indirectly elected and overrepresented rural areas, and hence was controlled by the right - blocked Popular Front initiatives. In June 1937 the Senate brought down the Blum government by refusing emergency-powers legislation to deal with the foreign exchange crisis. The powers it did give Blum’s successor excluded foreign exchange controls; and in March 1938 a brief return of Blum as prime minister was defeated by the same means.⁹ During 1937-38 the SFIO was forced out of the cabinet, leaving a Radical government with external support.

Meanwhile, the Blum government from the outset maintained French colonial policy, offering only French citizenship for some Algerians (which it was unable to deliver anyhow). The British from July 1936 insisted that France join the arms embargo against the Spanish republic as a condition for British (limited) diplomatic support for France against Germany.

The end of the Popular Front came when the PCF voted against the Munich Agreement in September 1938, leading the Radical government to denounce the PCF as warmongers: the formal agreement was abandoned. In November 1938 centre-right politician Paul Reynaud became finance minister (under the premiership of the Radical Edouard Daladier) on a policy of deregulation, austerity and “shock therapy”. There were massive sackings.

This regime was, of course, overtaken by the outbreak of World War II in August-September 1939. The PCF was banned for failing to condemn the Hitler-Stalin Pact. In spring 1940 France fell. The French right had for some time taken the view that the USSR was the main enemy and senior generals shared this view - they were as much concerned to get rid of the French constitutional regime as to conduct military operations against the Germans. The result was German occupation of France in the north and west, the Vichy Catholic-authoritarian regime in the south-east.

Spanish and French

Thus both the Spanish and the French popular fronts ended with the victory of fascism, albeit in different forms. If we ask why this is the case, the answer is that the outcome was implicit in the nature of the project from the start. What was involved was an electoral bloc of leftists with centre-left constitutional-loyalist parties on the basis of defence of ‘democracy’, meaning by ‘democracy’ the parliamentary-constitutional form of bourgeois rule.

In Spain, the determination to preserve fig leafs of ‘constitutional credibility’ reduced potential military effectiveness, without achieving its goal of British and French support. In France, once the Matignon agreements had brought the strike wave to an end, the government gradually met the usual fate of leftwing governments: flight of capital, blocking operations by the second chamber, inflation and demoralisation; the military and political victory of fascism in 1940 only capped this, showing that the possessing classes have a real appetite for revenge if they have once had a serious scare.

Secondly, the essence of the popular front of the 1930s (and of ‘popular front’ rhetoric in France today) is the creation of a bloc of the workers’ parties, with at least some element of the liberals, against the ‘external’ threat of fascism or some other authoritarianism to the liberal constitution. Trotsky commented in 1937, of Spain, that the liberals were merely the shadow of the bourgeoisie, since big capital in fact backed Franco.¹⁰ The French Radicals similarly represented the anti-clerical wing of the petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry, not big capital. The role of the left-liberals was not the direct control of big capital through these parties: it was a signal to the state core that the government would abide by constitutional norms for the protection of private property. It thus would be perfectly possible to have a ‘popular front’ with no capitalist party, as long as it gave such a clear signal of constitutional loyalism.

But the political bloc for ‘defence of the constitution’ contains a misconception of the constitution. Fascist bands are not merely an external threat: they are a paramilitary auxiliary to the state core, and are able to gain real effectiveness due to protection by the police and the judiciary - as is evident in both Italy and Germany in the 1920s. The liberal constitution contains within itself the principle of ‘nation, work, family’ authoritarianism (which is not an inheritance from the feudal past, but has a material ground in the necessary authoritarian side of capitalism, the regime of the workplace). It is expressed within liberalism in the nation-state form, and in the constitutional principles of autonomy of the executive and of the judiciary, in the regime of the regular army and the professional police force, as well as in the reserve ‘emergency powers’; and in the imperialist countries, in the overseas colonial possessions. The constitutionalist ‘defence of the constitution’ is the defence of these elements, as well as of its liberal elements.

Trotsky famously wrote in 1931, in his article ‘For a workers’ united front against fascism’, that

When one of my enemies sets before me small daily portions of poison and the second, on the other hand, is about to shoot straight at me, then I will first knock the revolver out of the hand of my second enemy, for this gives me an opportunity to get rid of my first enemy. But that does not at all mean that the poison is a ‘lesser evil’ in comparison with the revolver.¹¹

In the same article, he referred to the Bolsheviks’ common efforts with the Kerenskyites to defeat the Kornilov coup in late August 1917.

The image of poisoner and shooter is striking, but in fact misleading. The reason is that the circumstance that gives rise to a real threat of the victory of the far right is the breakdown of the political ascendancy of liberalism due to economic failure. In this situation, after one nationalist-authoritarian operation fails, another will come along shortly. Kornilov was seen off, but the October revolution only at the last minute pre-empted Kerensky’s plan to use troops to prevent the meeting of the Congress of Soviets (also reflected in the attack of Krasnov’s Cossacks on Petrograd alongside a rising of the officer cadets; both failed). Next came Alexeev’s and Kaledin’s ‘Volunteer Army’, created in November … One way or another, civil war was inevitable. Kerensky was not merely a poisoner, but planned to shoot the soviets, but at the time of the Kornilov coup bottled it when he saw the level of opposition.

Thus the electoral victory of the Frente Popular in Spain saw off the CEDA and the monarchists, but by July 1936 Franco and co were ready with their coup. Restricting the horizons to the defence of the republic was, in practice, to set up a weak regular army against a stronger one. The victory of the Front Populaire in France saw off the rag-bag groups of the far right who had rioted in 1934; but the demoralisation that resulted from the failure of the government to control the stagflation (thanks to the Senate’s ability to block exchange controls) prepared the way for the peculiar form of fascist coup through military defeatism of spring 1940.

Popular fronts win

This is not, however, the end of the story. The fall of France and Norway in Spring 1940 broke the back of the British empire’s geostrategic line, which was (and had been ever since the 18th century) to hold Europe divided in order to free British imperial hands in the larger world. The British became desperate for US support, and agreed for the sake of ‘lend-lease’ supplies to hand over world leadership to the USA after the war.¹² The USA, for its part, now faced a potential fascist-united Europe as a world rival for the role of Britain’s replacement.

In consequence, when Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941, and more clearly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the result was a global popular front against fascism of the USSR and the ‘democratic’ imperialist countries. Under its banner, popular-front resistance movements were armed by the Allies. Also the US and UK provided real material support to the USSR, but held off until June 1944 from ‘opening the second front’ in Europe - with the result that Soviet victory on the eastern front took Soviet armies to the Elbe, and so on. In Yugoslavia and Albania communist-led popular-front partisan movements (militarily supported by the Allies) drove out the German-backed regimes.

Across much of Europe popular front governments were the immediate outcome of the defeat of Germany. In western Europe, these commonly functioned to restabilise capitalism and then gave way to centre-right governments.

In eastern Europe, it is fairly clear that Stalin’s intended policy was to create capitalist states in a friendly-neutral relation to the USSR, which was the outcome in Finland, Austria and Afghanistan. In 1947-48, however, the USA began to push for naval access to the Danube, and proposed the Marshall Plan to apply to eastern as well as western Europe. This would revive capitalism on the basis of US control, and thereby recreate the inter-war ‘cordon sanitaire’ against the USSR. The Soviet government responded by setting free the CPs in the Soviet Army-occupied eastern European countries and northern Korea to pursue a policy of ‘Sovietisation’. The cold war commenced, and the Chinese CP also pushed forward, taking power in early 1949 - again in the name of a popular front government. The ‘socialist camp’ was further extended under the name of such governments in North Vietnam (and later the whole country), in Cuba and in South Yemen.

These apparent successes made the idea of the popular front as the strategic road to socialism the common opinion of the very large majority of the left worldwide. They overshadowed the equally numerous cases in which the popular front, or anti-imperialist front with nationalists, led to defeat, and in some cases to the destruction of mass communist parties.

Why did popular front governments bring in socialism (or rather, appear to do so)? I set on one side the ‘state capitalist’ and ‘bureaucratic collectivist’ theories that this was all just ‘Soviet imperialism’. Both theories were disproved - as much as ‘official’ communists’ celebration of the ‘socialist camp’ was - by the ignominious collapse of 1989-91, leaving little standing. Neither theory could predict such a collapse. Trotskyism could predict such a collapse, but outside the Critique group round Hillel Ticktin, and the Spartacists, few Trotskyists did.¹³

USSR question

I am personally of the opinion that the USSR after the effective implementation of the ban on factions in the double police coup against the party in 1927-29 cannot be characterised as a dictatorship of the proletariat, or, therefore, as socialist (unless we were to revive and stretch the Communist manifesto tag, ‘reactionary socialism’,¹⁴ for it). The same applies to the imitators of the Soviet regime.

But let us suppose, purely for the sake of argument, that the Soviet regime and its imitators could be characterised as ‘socialist’. If we ask why popular front governments succeeded in creating ‘socialism’ in this sense in the countries that joined the ‘socialist camp’ between 1948 and 1970, where others failed and were merely antechambers to rightist governments or military coups, the answer has two fundamental elements.

The first is that the armed forces of the old regime were first smashed and those controlled by the USSR or by the local CP created, before the creation of the popular front government. In Austria and Finland the USSR agreed to the recreation of capitalist state cores. Elsewhere, not so.

The second is the relationship to the USSR. We have seen endless cases in which the flight of capital and ‘capitalists’ strikes’ destroy very mild reformist projects, like those of the government of François Hollande in 2012-17 - leave aside more extreme cases like the original French Front Populaire government. The ability of the Spanish Republic to survive as long as it did was due to Soviet arms supplies. It is normal for capital to strangle dissent by economic sabotage; the British ‘non-intervention policy’ in Spain was in reality what would now be called a ‘sanctions regime’ against the republic, and Britain maintained technical and financial sanctions against the Soviet regime from 1917 to 1941. 1941-45 ended by making the USSR strong enough that it could support allied regimes.

But this must not be overstated. At the end of the day, the USSR was out-produced by the USA and its global empire, and in 1989-91 the Soviet leadership agreed to abandon its allies and to demolish its own regime, both to cut costs, and in the illusory hope of getting in exchange favourable access to international financial markets. The result was collapse. There is no case since the collapse in which a popular-front government has produced more than a period of initial hopes, followed by demoralisation, like the 1930s French Front Populaire.

Non-governmental

Small communist parties could not construct popular front government coalitions. But they could imitate the popular front policy on a small scale, by creating fronts that similarly signalled constitutional loyalism - not by the involvement of mass petty bourgeois parties, but by that of celebrities and of single-issue campaign groups. (It is worth noting that single-issue campaign groups go back to the 18th century in Britain, well before the emergence of a political labour movement with Chartism.)

Thus the old CPGB constructed ‘popular front’ campaigns involving characters like Hewlett Johnson, the ‘Red Dean of Canterbury’. The CPUSA in the same period began using the idea of the ‘trilogy’ of class (represented by the Rooseveltian Democrat trade union officials), gender (represented by various bourgeois feminists) and race (represented by black nationalist figures) as a form of popular front.

They were unpopular fronts, because - with the exception of the US civil rights movement in the 1950s-60s - these forms of attempt to make the popular front work have largely got nowhere. But it is this ‘unpopular frontism’ that has since the 1980s been extensively adopted by the far left. The Socialist Workers Party’s Anti-Nazi League was a very clear ‘unpopular front’ of the 1930s CPGB type, signalling constitutional-loyalism through the ‘Nazi’ trope (which appealed to the British self-image of ‘our finest hour’) and the role of various celebs. Its successors have followed the same pattern.

It should by now be transparent that this antifa unpopular-frontism has completely failed to stop the rise of the far right, which is spearheaded by forms of right-populist nationalism that cannot be easily pigeonholed as ‘fascism’ or ‘Nazism’. Indeed, just as Chilean Popular Unity promoted the ‘constitutional’ general Pinochet before his 1973 coup, antifa popular-frontist no-platforming has provided political support for state no-platforming of anti-Zionists …

Unpopular-frontism does not have effects on the scale of popular front governments. What it does is to generalise on the left the idea that unity is only possible on terms of the suppression of disagreement (Dimitrov’s ‘united front’ argument) and that it is only possible with the presence of ‘celebs’, whether from the ‘official’ left or from the milieu of charities and single-issue campaigns. The effect of this idea is in fact, on the one hand, to produce division of the left, as different groups seek to engage different celebs; on the other, to actively promote the politics of social democracy, which was already grounded on politically signalling constitutional loyalism to the state.

It now seems unlikely that there will be a Nouveau Front Populaire government in France. The PS, the PCF and the Greens have proposed as prime minister the non-deputy economist, Laurence Tubiana, who served as French ambassador to the 2015 Paris climate negotiations. The LFI has refused to accept this option. Le Monde and L’Humanité are piling on the pressure on the LFI to submit; but the break-up of the NFP and the formation of a ‘grand coalition’ government excluding the LFI on the left, as well as the RN and its allies on the right, remains a real possibility. The effect of such an outcome would be to prepare the ground for RN victory in the next presidential election in 2027.

In light of this development, it seems probably better to regard the NFP not as an actual popular front, but as something closer to the unpopular frontism of British and American politics. It seems to have been merely a rebranding operation, and one that appeals to a false nostalgia, like talk of a ‘green new deal’ that carefully forgets the failure of the real 1930s ‘New Deal’ to deliver sustained economic recovery - until the war actually did the job.

We will not successfully defend democratic rights by committing ourselves to a common bloc for defence of the liberal constitution as such. We need our own clear programme of radical democracy, on the basis of which we can enter partial agreements for common action, and for common defence, where needed, against far-right gangs and against state repression. But we also need to recognise that the working class actually taking power will need to be on a European scale, in order to organise the resources to defeat flight of capital, sanctions regimes, and so on. A political project of nostalgia for the run-up to World War II can never be more than a short-lived rebranding operation.

1. I am usually hostile to the media cult-of-personality method of identifying political trends with individual leaders, but in these cases Mélenchon’s outright ownership of the LFI brand is well-known, and ‘Renaissance’, the core of ‘Ensemble’, was created round a cult of personality of Macron as a Bonapartist saviour of France from right and left.↩︎

2. Le Monde’s ‘make your own coalition’ game (www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2024/07/09/construisez-votre-majorite-absolue-a-l-assemblee-nationale-avec-notre-simulateur-de-coalition_6248225_4355770.html) gives a full list of the parties. More political geography and names can be found at www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2024/07/08/la-carte-des-resultats-des-legislatives-2024-au-second-tour-la-composition-de-l-assemblee-et-le-depute-elu-dans-votre-circonscription_6247510_4355771.html.↩︎

3. www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/06/20/claire-andrieu-historienne-l-etiquette-nouveau-front-populaire-fait-appel-a-l-imaginaire-plutot-qu-a-l-histoire_6241782_3232.html.↩︎

4. Dimitrov’s introduction and reply to the discussion are at www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/7th-congress/index.htm.↩︎

5. J McIlroy, ‘Stalin, the Comintern and the popular front in Britain, France and Spain, 1935-1939: some historiographical and political reflections’ Critique Vol 51 (2023), pp305-61.↩︎

6. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm.↩︎

7. There is an interesting discussion on land reform attempts in S Basco, J Domènech and L Maravall, ‘Land reform and rural conflict: evidence from 1930s Spain’ Explorations in Economic History Vol 89 (July 2023): www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498323000244. This points to the conclusion that land-holding patterns in Spain were sufficiently different to the Russian ‘Black Earth’ region that promoting peasant land seizures more vigorously, a policy Trotsky argued for, would not have worked. But this does not preclude the possibility of a policy of revolutionary war more generally succeeding.↩︎

8. The CGT had recently reunified (1934) after the 1920 split, when the pro-SFIO union leadership expelled the communists and anarchists after the split in the SFIO between the communist majority and the loyalist minority, which had reconstituted as SFIO.↩︎

9. O Kirchheimer, ‘Decree powers and constitutional law in France under the Third Republic’ American Political Science Review Vol 34, pp1104-23 (1940). This is a very valuable article on the slide from parliamentary forms of government to the delegation of broad powers to the executive.↩︎

10. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/xx/spain01.htm.↩︎

11. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/311208.htm.↩︎

12. N Moss Nineteen weeks New York 2003.↩︎

13. I have written about this issue in ‘Historical blind alleys: Arian kingdoms, signorie, Stalinism’ Critique Vol 39, (2011).↩︎

14. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm. It would be stretching the sense, since the Manifesto refers to ideological trends, while the point of using this tag for the Soviet regime and its imitators would be that this regime actually enserfed the industrial workers and re-enserfed the peasantry, so that in a sense it ‘froze’ the transition between feudalism and capitalism.↩︎