New Popular Front
The New Popular Front is a broad left-wing electoral alliance with centre-left, left and far-left factions in France. It was launched on 10 June 2024 to contest the 2024 French legislative election following the gains of far-right parties in the 2024 European Parliament election. The Front stood in opposition to both Ensemble, the presidential camp of Emmanuel Macron, as well as the far-right National Rally.
The Front is an alliance of La France Insoumise, the Socialist Party, the Ecologist Pole, the French Communist Party, Génération·s, the Republican and Socialist Left, the New Anticapitalist Party, and other centre-left and left-wing political parties, comprising the majority of left-wing political parties in France. With the unifying motive of defeating the far-right National Rally, its name echoes the interwar anti-fascist alliance the Popular Front.
The Front agreed to a common distribution of candidates and political platform. The platform includes scrapping the 2023 French pension reform law, increasing public sector salaries and welfare benefits, raising the minimum wage by 14 percent, and freezing the price of basic food items and energy. This would be funded by reintroducing a wealth tax, cancelling many tax breaks for the wealthy, and raising income tax on the highest earners. On other issues, such as foreign policy and European integration, the Front's policies are closer to the centre-left.
Pushing for a mobilization of organized labour, political associations, and civil society, the Front received the largest number of seats in the 2024 legislative elections, gaining a relative majority in the National Assembly with 182 members elected. La France Insoumise won the most seats out of all parties in the alliance, gaining 72 seats total.
Background
Before the 2022 French legislative election, several parties of the French Left founded the New Ecological and Social People's Union electoral alliance to jointly contest the election against National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen and the main representative of far-right politics in France, and En Marche, the political party of the incumbent French president Emmanuel Macron. Although collectively able to form the leading opposition bloc, the alliance failed to agree to form a singular parliamentary grouping. Regardless, this denied Macron a majority in the French Parliament. Amid divisions, NUPES was dissolved in June 2023.History
Formation
On 9 June, the 2024 European Parliament election in France took place, with exit polls indicating that the National Rally had received twice as many votes as Renaissance, Macron's party, in what was described as a crushing defeat for the incumbent president. The French left's main leaders warned that the far right was "at the door of power". NUPES did not take part under one ballot but under many, and the Socialist Party returned as the largest part of the French left, ahead of La France Insoumise; the Socialist Party rose from 6 to 14 percent, while La France Insoumise scored 10 percent. Responding to his underperformance and tapping into the divided French left, Macron dissolved the parliament to call for snap elections, with the first round scheduled for 30 June and a second for 7 July.After the announcement of fresh elections, some called to renew NUPES and form a new left-wing alliance, amid the 2024 French protests against the National Rally, after its member parties had broken up over personal and policy disagreements, from nuclear energy to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Leftist politician François Ruffin called on all left-wing parties, including the Ecologists, to form a popular front. Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure called to "create a popular front against the far right" but dismissed the notion of the left allying itself with Macron and criticized his policies.
On 10 June, the New Popular Front, also called the Ecological and Social Popular Front, was announced with an intent to "build an alternative to Emmanuel Macron and fight the racist project of the extreme right" in the upcoming elections. The alliance was formed in order to stop the far-right National Rally party from taking power. The name intends to hark back on the old Popular Front formed in the 1930s. The alliance, which in addition to the main left-wing parties also includes several trade union and anti-racist groups, agreed to a single joint slate of candidates going into the first round of the elections, making the French left the strongest and main challenger to the National Rally.
2024 French legislative election
Initially, the Front did not designate a possible next prime minister in the event of success in the legislative election. On 12 June, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was confident of being prime minister but added he was neither excluding nor imposing himself. On 16 June, he expressed his willingness to step aside for the sake of unity, saying: "I will never be the problem. If you don't want me to be prime minister, I won't be." On 22 June, Mélenchon stepped up to this responsibility, saying that it was agreed that the largest parliamentary group within the Front would present its candidate for prime minister. For Raphaël Glucksmann and Carole Delga, the left-wing candidate for prime minister would not be Mélenchon. After his 22 June speech, Mélenchon's figure was brandished by the National Rally and the presidential camp as a repellent.Several voices in the coalition opposed this hypothesis, considering Mélenchon not unifying enough, in particular Fabien Roussel, Clémentine Autain, François Hollande, and Marine Tondelier. On 24 June, Mélenchon said he was not a candidate but that the prime minister would be from La France Insoumise. On 25 June, François Ruffin said Mélenchon impeded the Front. Ruffin and Roussel said they were ready to take on this responsibility. Valérie Rabault, the vice-president of the French National Assembly, said she was in favour of a female candidate, citing Delga, Clémentine Autain, and herself. Former CFDT leader Laurent Berger was also proposed by Glucksmann and Sandrine Rousseau. On 22 June, a LegiTrack poll by OpinionWay-Vae Solis for Les Echos and Radio Classique showed that in the event of the Front's victory, the French would prefer a prime minister from the Socialist Party rather than from La France Insoumise.
Of the 546 candidates for the Front, 229 were from La France Insoumise, 175 from the Socialist Party, 92 from the Ecologists, and 50 from the French Communist Party, reflecting the Socialist Party's resurgence. After its establishment, polling showed that 25 to 28 percent of likely voters backed the Front, behind the 31 percent who supported the National Rally but ahead of Macron and his allies, estimated to be below 20 percent; a mid-June IFOP poll similarly showed a gridlock situation, with the Front at 29 percent, behind the National Rally at 34 percent and the presidential camp at 22 percent. In the first round, the Front finished five points behind the National Rally, with Macron and his allies coming a distant third. According to a tracker from the Financial Times, the Front had the second most first-place finishes after the National Rally and before the presidential camp. Among these who finished second, the Front had 158 candidates, compared to 154 for Macron's camp and the 117 of the National Rally. Overall, as many as 85 candidates had cleared the 50 percent threshold to win election in the first round, and 291 third-place candidates across the three leading blocs qualified for the second round. Afterwards, attempts were made to build a Republican Front, asking their candidates from three-way races to drop out in order to reduce the likelihood of a National Rally victory in the runoff election.
The Front soon made clear it was willing to withdraw its candidate and support the presidential camp against the far-right where it had little likelihood of victory. In turn, the presidential camp offered to do the same, although Macron's indications were less clear. During the electoral campaign, Macron focused on attacking the left and said that as a general rule his coalition would also withdraw its candidates who had finished third but not always; for example, he said he would evaluate cases where candidates from La France Insoumise came second on an individual basis. Several voters and French newspapers, including Libération and L'Humanité, criticized the presidential camp for this ambiguity. As of 5 July 2024, this Republican Front resulted in the withdrawal of more than 130 of the Front's candidates, along with about 80 candidates of Macron's party and presidential camp. As a result, the Front made it harder for the National Rally to achieve an absolute majority, with the latest polls indicating that while the National Rally was still well positioned to win the most seats in the National Assembly, it might fall short of the 289 needed for an absolute majority.
Aftermath
According to the final results, the Front obtained 182 seats, ahead of Ensemble with 168 seats and the National Rally plus a minority of The Republicans with 143 seats. Compared to 2022, the Front made significant gains both in terms of votes in the first round and in the number of seats compared to NUPES. On 12 July 2024, a group of dissidents from La France Insoumise announced the formation of a new party named L'Après. The party claimed to be "in service of the New Popular Front".After the fall of Michael Barnier's government in December 2024, Macron met with the Socialist Party, Ecologists, and Communist Party in talks to propose a solution to the political deadlock. Originally meeting with Olivier Faure, the talks were criticised by Mélenchon for breaking with the alliance's line.