Alliance with Mélenchon ahead of general elections

On Monday night, the French Greens announced that the party executive had approved cooperation with Mélenchon’s party. They want to work together “to prevent Emmanuel Macron from continuing his unjust and brutal policy and to build a bulwark against the extreme right,” it said. Mélenchon’s team is also holding talks with the Socialists, the sister party of the SPD, as well as the Communists and left-wing splinter parties, which could be concluded this week.

The left’s new spokesman breaks with the camp’s pro-European tradition: “The real history of the European Union is one of profound deception and, since 2005, an illegal takeover of power,” Mélenchon wrote in the foreword to his party’s European strategy for the 2022 election year The French voted no in the 2005 referendum on the then buried EU constitution, saying that the EU in its current form is an “illegitimate construct with a view to the sovereignty of the French people”.

Brussels as a capitalist opponent

In Mélenchon’s worldview, Brussels is the capitalist opponent. He threatens “European disobedience” if this is necessary to implement his program. Recently he moderated his tone somewhat, but his will to break EU law continues to shine through. This applies above all to the debt rules, which Mélenchon sees as a German dictate.

After the euro crisis, he wrote a book about the alleged economic and financial hegemony of the Federal Republic of Germany in Europe. The title: “Bismarck’s herring – the German poison”. The 70-year-old rejects the accusation of German hostility, but his statements leave a lot of room for interpretation. He commented on the special fund of 100 billion euros for the Bundeswehr on Twitter: “Ukraine must not be a pretext for a new arms race. Especially not in Germany.”

In the past, Mélenchon has shown a lot of understanding for Russian President Vladimir Putin. He now condemns his war of aggression against Ukraine. However, he is sticking to his position that he wants to lead France out of NATO. As a “non-aligned” state, France should forge “alliances critical of globalization”. Mélenchon considers the Franco-German armaments cooperation to be a mistake. His position on international trade is reminiscent of Le Pen’s foreclosure rhetoric.

The French left always had a national wing, and the first steps towards European unification after the Second World War met with a lot of resistance. However, under François Mitterrand – party leader of the Socialists since the early 1970s and French President from 1981 to 1995 – the commitment to the EU became a consensus. The French Greens have even taken up the cause of a “federal Europe”.

Now the Greens and possibly also the Socialists in France seem ready to sacrifice their European policy positions for a left-wing counterweight in Macron’s second term. Domestically, the Greens like Mélenchon’s environmental and climate policy agenda. Like the Socialists, they also support plans to raise the minimum wage and lower the retirement age to 60, not from 62 to 65, as Macron had planned.

But there is also likely to be a power-political component: the agreements with Mélenchon could enable the weakened center-left parties, as representatives of the new left-wing alliance, to save some of their seats in the National Assembly – the more important of the two chambers of parliament in Paris. According to French media, the agreement with Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise provides for the Greens to get 100 of the 577 constituencies, of which around 30 are considered promising.

Like the presidential election, the parliamentary elections take place in two rounds: if none of the candidates in the constituencies gets an absolute majority in the first round on June 12, a second vote will take place a week later. The difference to the presidential election: not only the two best-placed qualify, but all candidates who have received at least 12.5 percent of the registered voters. In the second round, a relative majority is sufficient.

In order to be successful, the parties need allies. Traditionally, the left-of-centre Socialists and the conservative-bourgeois camp, now known as the Republicans, have taken on the role of umbrella parties. Both are now facing the abyss, their candidates got less than five percent of the votes in the presidential election. The political landscape in France is experiencing an upheaval.

More Handelsblatt articles on the election in France

An alliance led by Mélenchon would transform the fragmented left into a powerful bloc. Without a majority in the National Assembly, the president’s influence would shrink: Macron would have to involve political opponents in the formation of the government and legislation. This condition is called “cohabitation”, a kind of grand forced coalition that has existed three times so far in the Fifth Republic, founded in 1958.

Macron and his movement La République en Marche (The Republic on the Move) are confident of defending the governing majority in parliament with allied centre-left and center-right parties. Recent polls suggest that around six out of ten French people are in favor of cohabitation. Only a minority would like a Prime Minister Mélenchon.

In the past few days, prominent representatives of the Socialists and Greens had warned against an alliance with the left-wing populist. Yannick Jadot, the unsuccessful presidential candidate of the Greens, said with regard to Mélenchon’s idea of ​​an EU à la carte: “Then every country will choose its own topics.” Poland’s government would insist on special rules for the rule of law, other countries in the fight against tax havens. “So that would be the end of the EU.”

François Hollande, the socialist president in power from 2012 to 2017, warned that an alliance with Mélenchon would “call into question the history of socialism and François Mitterrand’s commitment to Europe”. Mélenchon’s answer to the former head of state: Hollande is a “has-been”, a grumbling voice from the past, nothing more.

More: Ukraine accession and debt debate: Europe’s unity is in danger