In 1936, during the first heady months of France’s new Popular Front government, a Parisian schoolteacher coined the phrase that symbolised the hopes invested in it. “Tout est possible!” (Everything is possible) wrote Marceau Pivert in an editorial for the Socialist party newspaper of the time. As fascism overwhelmed the continent, it proved a tragically over-optimistic assessment. Divided over how to respond to the threat, by 1938 the leftwing coalition of socialists and communists governing the country had fractiously fallen apart.
The challenges facing the contemporary French left pale somewhat in comparison. But they also have to do with problems of unity – or the lack of it – and with the growing popularity of the modern far right. The absence of a united front in the recent presidential race led once more to dispiriting defeat and, in the case of the Socialist party candidate, Anne Hidalgo, outright humiliation. Representing the traditional party of the centre-left, Ms Hidalgo scored a mere 1.75%. The Greens performed marginally better (4.6%), but only the most radical candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, made a fight of it. Campaigning on a hard-left and markedly Eurosceptic platform, Mr Mélenchon almost matched Marine Le Pen’s score in the first round. Some more moderate supporters voted for him as the only leftwing candidate with a realistic chance of success.
