Less than four months after the first round of lFrench presidential elections, the left is torn between presenting itself divided or organizing a primary among all the candidates to concur with only one of them. This would be the only possibility that a left-wing candidate would go to the second round and not even that is certain.
None of the candidates on the left exceeds 10% of voting intentions in polls. According to the latest study published by the newspaper ‘Le Monde’, on the 18th, with a large sample of 10,928 respondents, the best-placed candidates from the left are the populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, from the La Francia Insoumise party, and the ecologist Yannick Jadot, both with 8.5%. The rest does not reach 5%: the mayor of Paris and candidate of the Socialist Party (PS), Anne Hidalgo, remains at 4.5%; Communist Party candidate Fabien Roussel gets 2% and former Socialist minister Arnaud Montebourg gets 1.5%.
Five years ago the left did not go to the second round, but the situation was not as catastrophic as it is now, since Mélenchon obtained 19.58% in the first round. In 2017, however, the socialist debacle already began because its candidate, Benoît Hamon, only garnered 6.36% of the votes, and that the environmentalist candidate withdrew in his favor.
The causes of the collapse of the PS in 2017 are diverse: it was the first presidential election after the failure of the presidency of Francois Hollande, who resigned to run for reelection, and a large number of votes went to Emmanuel Macron due to the lack of credibility of Hamon, the socialist candidate of the left wing of the party, who was chosen by surprise in a primary in which he defeated, among others, Manuel Valls.
But how can the current helplessness of a practically non-existent left be explained, when Macron has practiced a rather center-right policy and have you been able to clear a space to your left? The aforementioned poll shows that the electorate perceives the current president as center-right, against his initial promises to make a policy neither of the right nor of the left or, better, of the right and the left at the same time. This perception of Macron as a center-right candidate is verified in two pieces of information: 44% of first-choice voters for the Republican candidate (right), Valerie Pécresse, would vote for the current president as a second option, while 50% of those who plan to vote for Macron would do so for Pécresse as a second option, compared to only 12% who would choose the ecologist Jadot and 11% for the socialist Hidalgo.
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The disappearance of the socialist left is also due to lack of ideas and organization of a party that only maintains its strength in the mayoralties, also diminished to the benefit of environmentalists. Another reason for the weakness of the entire left lies in the brutal right-wing French society, with an extreme right that has two candidates, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, which in the polls add up to almost a third of the electorate (29%, with a tie of 14.5% for each), more than the entire left put together. Five years ago, in December 2016, Marine Le Pen totaled between 24% and 25%. Finally, in the second round he obtained 33.9%, compared to 66.1% for Macron.
Faced with this bleak outlook, Hidalgo proposed on December 8 holding a primary left to choose a unique candidate, idea that was rejected immediately by the ecologists, the communists and La Francia Insoumise. Only the insignificant Montebourg supported the initiative. In parallel, a group of citizens has collected 300,000 signatures to organize a “popular primary & rdquor; on the left, which raises suspicions in some parties. And to finish creating more confusion, the prestigious former Socialist Justice Minister, Christiane Taubira, has announced that she is considering running for the presidential election. But the differences in the entire left, and especially between Hidalgo and Mélenchon, are so great that it is most likely that there will be no unity, that they will all appear separately and that they will be eliminated in the first round of April 10.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com