The rise of the Left Front in France

by Murray Smith · 2012-08-05 · first published in Links · 178 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “August 2, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did.

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By Murray Smith

August 2, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

The Left Front ( Front de Gauche ) emerged onto the political scene at the beginning of 2009. As the Left Front to Change Europe, it was established by three organisations -- the French Communist Party (PCF), the Left Party (PG, Parti de Gauche ) and the Unitary Left (GU) -- with the aim of standing in the European elections of June 2009.

These three organisations were not of anything like equal weight. The Communist Party, though much weakened over the previous 25 years, was nevertheless still a mass party with well over 100,000 members and thousands of elected representatives at every level. More than that, it was an inseparable part of the history of the French workers’ movement, which it had largely contributed to defining. The Left Party was a recent split from the Socialist Party, numbering at the time at most 2000 members. The Unitary Left was even smaller, having left the newly formed New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) just after its founding congress.