Aubry barred from EU Left’s lead candidate race amid rift fears, plays down role

Manon Aubry, the co-chief of the Left political group, will not be the European Left’s lead candidate in next year’s EU elections to avoid infighting between her La France Insoumise and the French communists, the European Left’s party President Walter Baier told Euractiv.

While the far-right is surging across the bloc, with the Identity and Democracy group projected to become the fourth force in the European Parliament with 87 seats, national radical left-wing forces are increasingly fragmented.

In Spain, Germany, and Greece, radical left-wing parties have recently collapsed due to infighting and splintering, which has spurred worries at the EU level about the left camp’s capability to battle the far-right’s advance across member states.

“I’m very dissatisfied with the fact that while we experience the rise of the far right, so much energy is invested in inner leftist discussions and struggles. That is inadequate to address the situation we are in,” Baier told Euractiv.

Fearing more infighting and to prevent fragmentation from spilling at the EU level, Baier said the chief of The Left’s group at the European Parliament, co-president Aubry, will not be the party’s lead candidate – or Spitzenkandidat – for the EU elections.

“Because we have the two left-leaning parties in France competing with one another, and the philosophy of our party is to be neutral in these kinds of competitions,” Baier said.

“We love both of them, and we don’t want to somehow interfere.”

The other co-chief of the Left in the European Parliament, Die Linke’s Martin Schirdewan, “is definitely an option”, Baier said.

In response to Baier’s declarations, Aubry downplayed the lead candidate post “as it is not catching on in public debate” while affirming she is already gearing up for EU elections in her post as group co-president by bringing all European leftist forces together – also highlighting that the French communists do not have parliamentary representation.

“I am at my fighting post and will remain so until the elections to embody a strong voice in the face of the reactionary arc stretching from the liberals to the far right,” Aubry concluded in her comments to Euractiv.

Torn coalition

Aubry is a prominent figure of the radical-left party La France Insoumise, which competes with the French Communist Party for voters.

The two members of the European Left will ultimately run on separate lists in the EU elections after a back-and-forth with other left-wing colleagues, including the French leftist NUPES coalition (New Ecological and Social People’s Union).

NUPES, grouping left-wing parties in the French National Assembly plus the Greens and the Socialists, was formed after the 2022 presidential elections to work as a counter-power to liberal centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

Since then, the Socialist Party suspended its participation over the LFI leader’s Israel-Hamas stance, which failed to condemn Hamas’s attack on Israel.

Schirdewan “is an option”

Asked whether The Left’s other co-president, Martin Schirdewan, would be the lead candidate, Baier said he “is definitely an option”.

“But it would be premature to say he is becoming [the lead candidate]. There are a number of good options,” he said.

The lead candidate will be presented during the European Left’s electoral General Assembly on the 24th and 25th of February in Ljubljana, Slovenia, following an internal nomination process where national parties, within and outside the party, can bring forward nominees.

The winner will be chosen by the party’s presidency, composed of the leaders of each national member party.

The chosen candidate “will have a team around organising his personal campaign” in the run-up to the elections in June.

The Spitzenkandidat process allows European political parties to name a leader of their EU election campaign who will also be a candidate for the post of the president of the European Commission.

However, the system is in question as the process was sidelined in 2019 when EU countries overrode the party candidates in favour of an outsider, the current Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, who was appointed in closed-door talks.

Manifesto and pan-European campaign

The European Left organised this year a series of thematic clusters – peace and security, social politics, economy, ecology, among others – composed of experts, civil society, and politicians to develop working papers, which were the basis for the party’s draft manifesto.

“When we started the process, it was obvious that Europe is, so to say, in turmoil. We are in a period of profound transformation, which meant that we could not organise a process business as usual, so we decided to have a very broad and participatory process,” Baier said.

The draft manifesto has been sent to all national party members – and non-member leftist parties, as well as NGOs, trade unions, and other stakeholders, “to get from all sides as many amendments as possible”.

Simultaneously to the Spitzenkandidat vote, the submitted amendments will be ultimately voted upon during the General Assembly in Ljubljana.

Baier confirmed that the European Left will have a pan-European campaign for the first time, with a rebranding of the website and “five messages” drawing on the manifesto, which will be the basis for the electoral communications across member states.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Alice Taylor]