France: 'We Are At A Turning Point': As Election Looms, What Is Left of The French Left?
- The Guardian, March 31, 2022. ‘We are at a turning point’: as election looms, what is left of the French left?' - In Joigny, where fatalism is feeding the far right, voters need a new vision from the mainstream left for improving their lives. - *Excerpts, Ed:
The Bourgogne-Franche Comté regional express train from Paris takes just 74 minutes to reach Joigny on the banks of the River Yonne in northern Burgundy. For decades, the largely agricultural area has been fertile ground for many shades of the French left – the Resistance and later the Socialist president Mitterrand were rooted in Burgundy. Today it is where French socialism just about stops the slide of grassroots support to the far right. A decade ago, France’s centre-left Parti Socialist (PS) was the driving power in French politics: it had a president, François Hollande; a majority in both houses of parliament, the Assemblée Nationale and the Sénat; and control of most of the country’s major local authorities.
- Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, The Armançon in Semur-en-Auxois
Now, less than two weeks from the first round of the presidential election, with its candidate Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, trailing in the latest polls at 1.5% (lower than a sheep farmer called Jean Lassalle and the Communist party candidate Fabien Roussel), the mainstream left is in an electoral black hole leaving its voters facing what they call a casse-tête – a major headache. Joigny has become the symbol of La France péripherique, a term used to evoke the territorial fracture between city and countryside whose populations have been left behind: excluded from jobs, public services, access to high speed internet and – as they are more reliant on cars – among the worst hit by the soaring cost of living.
It was one of the first places Hidalgo visited on launching her campaign, declaring it typical of an ailing, rural and semi-rural France full of people worried for their futures in a way those from the cities did not understand. “The factories and businesses have closed and not been replaced, the public services have left, the centre of the town is deserted, youngsters no longer find work opportunities and their parents are worried,” she said afterwards. Marcel Reynaud, the owner of Couleurs Leroux, which has supplied high-quality pigments and oil paints to artists – including Salvador Dalí – for 112 years, says he hears a lot of local talk about supporting Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN).
“In the routier [truckers’] cafes it’s all about how they will be voting RN because they feel their social protections, pay, hours, conditions have got worse & worse. It’s very odd, because these are traditional leftwing voters. It seems they no longer believe in the sincerity of the PS or it’s ability to improve their lives. “These people voting RN are not ‘fascists’; they are voting RN because they don’t feel the PS have protected them or improved their situation.” With the campaign so far hijacked by the far right & its obsession with the three “i”s – Islam, Immigration & Integration- moderate leftwing voters feel politically orphaned. Political analysts say France's left, like elsewhere in Europe, has suffered from a tectonic shift to the right driven by populism. For the mainstream left – the “govt. left” – the spiral began during Hollande’s 2012-17 single term when he was accused of damaging the party’s credentials with a neoliberal agenda...
- More, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/31/we-are-at-a-turning-point-as-election-looms-what-is-left-of-the-french-left
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgogne-Franche-Comt%C3%A9
- French Surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904 -1989) in the 1960s.
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