France Needs a Democratic Republic

The National Rally party failed to gain a majority in parliament, but France is still not a democracy. By Luke Pickrell

In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) hoped to win an absolute majority in parliament and form the country’s first far-right government since the Second World War.  During the first round of snap parliamentary elections, RN won 33 percent of the vote.  The New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition formed by several leftist parties, including Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI) party, came in second with nearly 28 percent of the vote.  Emmanuel Macron, who will remain president until 2027 regardless of parliamentary outcomes, watched his party, Renaissance, win just 20 percent of the vote. 

The tables flipped for RN during Sunday’s second round of elections, with Le Pen’s party coming in third behind LFI and NFP.  Vote totals aren’t expected until Monday afternoon, but preliminary results show NFP winning the most overall seats and becoming the biggest party in parliament.  If the results hold, no alliance will have an absolute majority, and the new prime minister will come from a party other than Macron’s.  Getting 289 or more MPs in the 577-seat National Assembly would have given Le Pen an absolute majority and forced Macron to accept her 28-year-old protege, Jordan Bardella, as France's new prime minister.  After falling to third place, Bardella said France is “in the hands of the far-left.” 

Macron called snap elections following significant losses in the European Parliament elections last month to NR, which surprised almost everyone.  National Rally, known as the National Front from 1972 until 2018, is a far-right political party “with a decades-long history of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny,” according to Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative.  The party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, “has a long track record of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, as well as pro-colonialism and anti-immigration views.”  NR has ties to other far-right European parties, including the Italian Lega Nord and the German AfD.

France has an executive branch (the president, prime minister, and junior ministers), a legislative branch (the National Assembly and the Senate), and a judicial branch (with a Constitutional Council composed of former politicians appointed by the President of the Republic, President of the Senate, and President of the National Assembly).  The constitution of the Fifth Republic, approved by a popular referendum in 1958 in the context of the Algerian Revolution and an attempted military coup, gives expansive powers to the president.  Article 49.3 allows the president to push legislation through the National Assembly without a debate.  In 2022, Macron used the article to pass pension reform and raise the national retirement age. The president appoints the government’s ministers and is chief of the armed forces.  He dissolves parliament, promulgates laws (or can temporarily veto them), and nominates certain members of the Constitutional Council, which determines whether new laws are legal.  Like his counterpart in the U.S., the French president is essentially immune from legal prosecution for all acts executed in office.  “It’s a vertical system of power that basically confiscates parliamentary democracy and allows the president to do what he wants,” said author Patrick Martin-Genier.  “Over time, that’s become more apparent and less acceptable, and we cannot continue like this.” 

The presidency isn’t the only undemocratic feature in the French Constitution.  Bicameralism was first introduced to France in 1795 to repudiate the unicameralism laid out in the abortive 1793 constitution.  The Second Republic returned to a unicameral system after 1848, but soon after the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852, a Senate was established as the upper chamber. While not as powerful as its counterpart in the U.S., the French Senate still retains essential powers.  The President of the Senate is elected by the senators, not by popular vote, and is first in line to the presidency of the Republic.  The left has historically opposed the existence of a second chamber, while the right defends it.

In 1934, the exiled Leon Trotsky wrote “A Program of Action in France” as a response to the situation that developed after fascist and reactionary groups staged an armed demonstration.  The program was designed to provide the political content and goals of a united front against the right.   Trotsky used the program to critique the Third Republic and demand a democratic republic (the only time, to my knowledge, he showed interest in the foundational political demand of Marxism up to the 1917 Russian Revolution).  Demands included the abolition of the Senate (“which is elected by limited suffrage and which renders the power of universal suffrage a mere illusion!”) and the presidency (“which serves as a hidden point of concentration for the forces of militarism and reaction!”) and the creation of a single legislative assembly with combined legislative and executive powers.  Members of the sovereign legislature would be elected to short terms by universal and equal suffrage.  The demand for a democratic and unicameral political system was the “only measure,” concluded Trotsky, “that would lead the masses forward instead of pushing them backward. A more generous democracy would facilitate the struggle for workers’ power.” Another socialist, Karl Kautsky, made similar critiques of the Third Republic in 1904. “If we want to strengthen the propagandist power of the republican idea in France,” wrote Kuatsky, “then we have to show, above all, that the republic we want — the republic that the fighters of 1793, 1848, and 1871 strove to achieve — is fundamentally different from the republic of today, as different from this republic as the last republic was from the monarchy.”

France Unbowed, created by Mélenchon in 2017,  wants to abolish the current political system and create a new constitution modeled after the 1793 constitution, in which a single legislative assembly holds sovereignty.  The New Popular Front also calls for a 6th Republic.  The party’s program includes establishing proportional representation, strengthening parliament, repealing Article 49.3, and convening a constituent assembly.  “When it comes to democracy in Europe, we’re bottom of the league,” said Mélenchon during the presidential elections two years ago.  “The revolutions of our time,” he continued, will “have a social fuel and a democratic motor.”

In demanding a democratic republic in France, Trotsky was repeating what the Socialist Party of America had consistently demanded for the first two decades of the 20th century: the abolition of the Senate, curtailment of Executive and Judicial branch powers, and complete legislative power in an expanded House.  As articles and interviews in this blog have explained, the demand for a democratic republic is slowly returning to the American left, along with a more widespread questioning of constitutional devotion.  The French and American working class have yet to achieve a democratic constitution based on the principle of unicameralism and one person, one equal vote.  In the face of a powerful right-wing movement, the French left is doubling down on the demand for a real democracy.  The American left should do the same.