France: The decline of the left is accelerating

Socialist candidate for mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, came first. With 1.75% of the vote, she had the worst result in her party’s history in a presidential election. In 2017, Socialist Party candidate Benoit Hamon had already suffered a humiliating defeat with only 6.36% of the vote.

We will see if the results of the upcoming legislative elections will be similar to the results of the presidential elections. The Socialist Party is betting on its survival. Is a credible government still possible? Certainly not with François Hollande, who is said to have dreamed of making CountAs the French say. He promised an “initiative” after the second round of presidential elections.

Unpopularity

I doubt that the party, which is over a century old (formerly SFIO), will ever recover from its disastrous electoral failure, given the daunting challenges it faces.

He will not replace “La France Insoumise” and its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who came in third by a few thousand votes behind Marine Le Pen.

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The Socialist Party is divided between a practical wing and a left wing. This causes credibility problems for its leaders. François Hollande is responsible for this situation. The former president campaigned on the left and embraced center-right economic measures as soon as he was elected.

Since Anne Hidalgo did not receive 5% of the vote or more, her campaign will not receive any public funding. Is bankruptcy threatens his party again? In 2017, PS was forced to sell its symbolic headquarters on Rue Solférino in the 7th arrondissement of Paris to clean up its finances after its electoral defeat.

At the moment, due to the massive unpopularity, the Socialist Party has been making a terrible landing for ten years. In 2012, after François Hollande won the presidency, he took control of all political institutions in the country, including most cities and regions.

His current electoral disaster will limit the party’s ability to impose its candidates in safe left-wing districts in the legislative elections next June.

The popular classes move to the right

The traditional French left, mainly the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, has always represented the working classes.

Now, the Socialist Party is above all a party of civil servants, teachers, and office workers, long abandoned by manual workers, sharing it with the Communist Party before being tempted by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.

Industrial workers are now being replaced by robots. A large part of the left-wing electorate has disappeared. Severe cuts not yet introduced into the public service will amplify this phenomenon.

The attraction of the uneducated and proletarian social strata to the Socialist Party and the Communist Party is declining. According to the IFOP polling institute, only 36% of working-class neighborhood residents planned to vote for a left-wing candidate in the presidential election, while 54% voted for the left in 2012.