French Socialist Party’s EU election list deemed too elitist

France’s Socialist Party is facing internal turmoil over its EU election list, which some in the party believe excludes “workers and employees”, according to a letter from federations and elected officials seen by AFP.

Read the original French article here.

The French Socialist Party (PS) is counting on the European elections in June to recover from its historic defeat in the first round of the 2022 presidential elections when its candidate Anne Hidalgo finished the race with 1.7% of the vote, “the lowest score in the history of the PS in presidential elections”, as Le Monde pointed out at the time.

With 31 MPs in the National Assembly and now no longer part of the left-wing NUPES alliance after it suspended its participation in October, the PS is credited with 10% of voting intentions in the June 2024 ballot – polling first among the left-wing parties, ahead of the Greens’ EELV and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI).

Raphaël Glucksmann, MEP and co-president of the Place publique movement, is expected to head the list – as he did in 2019 – as part of the PS/Place Publique that has long been announced and is more or less set in stone, with a vote on the list scheduled for 8 February.

However, such optimistic predictions could be tarnished by a letter signed by federations, MPs, and local councillors addressed to PS First Secretary Olivier Faure, of which AFP has published excerpts.

The PS’s EU election list is “territorially and socially unrepresentative” when “almost three-quarters of the eligible candidates are Parisians living within the city limits”, the letter says.

Unlike the French parliamentary elections, the EU elections are based on a proportional single-member constituency system in which all national political parties can present a list of members who could potentially win seats if the list wins at least 5% of the votes cast.

But current polls suggest that only 10 members on the PS/Place Publique list would even make it into the EU House, meaning that the first member from a working-class background to appear is unlikely to stand a chance, as he is placed 40th on said list.

“The party of Jaurès cannot exclude candidates from the working class or the white-collar sector,” Noha Tefrit, parliamentary assistant to PS deputy Philipe Brun, complained on X, as the party was due to ratify the list on Wednesday (31 January).

Others have accused the PS of favouring candidates from Paris and ignoring the rest of the country, as regional and departmental federations are attempting to put forward their own candidates.

EU elections campaign: Which parties have their act together?

The Pandora’s box of the EU elections is already wide open and raging and, with less than six months to go before a key vote that seems set to see the continent make an unprecedented lurch to the far-right, EU political forces are well underway in their preparations

The Left’s only credible pro-European alternative

“We tried to set up an open and democratic procedure where everyone could stand,” PS Senator Corinne Narassiguin told AFP.

Glucksmann is positioning himself as the only credible left-wing and pro-European alternative to prevent the election from being “hijacked”, in his words, by Rassemblement National’s Jordan Bardella – who heads the far-right party’s EU list – and by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who is expected to defend the government’s record – even though the EU list of presidential majority party Renaissance is yet to be announced.

In a recent interview with Le Monde, Glucksmann called for the EU to form a genuine striking force both at the budgetary and political levels.

He added that the EU had dug itself into some kind of hole from which it needs to “dig out [from], by investing massively in transition industries, by introducing ecological protectionism at Europe’s borders and by taking a federal leap for the Union”.

Further burying the possibility of a left alliance

The letter also struck a chord with the French left, which many say is currently “irreconcilable”, as LFI MP François Ruffin demonstrated in an open letter accusing Glucksmann of being “out of touch, disconnected, without roots”, the symbol of “an elite that moves forward arrogantly and unconsciously” – while acknowledging that a split in the left “would be the certainty of defeat, the open road to the worst”.

The LFI and the PS/Place publique alliance are also at loggerheads in the European Parliament: the former, a member of the Left Group, calls for an overhaul of the EU treaties and expresses doubts about the enlargement of the EU to include Ukraine; the latter, a member of the Socialist and Democrat Group (S&D), wants to strengthen European prerogatives at all levels.

The controversy that now surrounds the PS’ EU election list appears to once again bury the possibility of a left-wing alliance in the run-up to the EU elections.

[Edited by Alice Taylor]