As French parliamentary elections pushed the leftist New Popular Front into first place, a pleasant sort of shock greeted revolutionary and progressive-minded people in France and around the world who had feared the triumph of the neofascist National Rally party. To be sure, recent elections in India and Turkey have seen the authoritarian right lose some support, while in Poland, Spain, and the UK, moderates defeated conservatives and reactionaries. But this was different.

Not only had one of the world’s oldest democratic republics been faced with the potential of a neofascist government for the first time since the Vichy Regime during the Nazi Occupation. But equally surprising was the fact that the dam that stopped the right was forged more from the left than from the supposed “center.” After the National Rally placed first in the June 9 European Parliament elections, rightward-moving “centrist” President Emmanuel Macron called snap parliamentary elections for June 30/July 7. He implied, with the arrogance that has won him the sobriquet “Jupiter,” that he wanted to give the French people an opportunity to “correct” their erroneous vote of June 9, presumably by voting in greater numbers for his Together bloc. Some thought he really wanted the neofascists to gain power so they could discredit themselves, in a centrist version of the old Stalinist strategy of the worse the better, repackaged today sometimes as “accelerationism.” (In the French political system, the president serves for six years but the prime minister is elected by the National Assembly and can be from a rival political bloc.)

Macron and almost all other factions of the dominant classes wrote off the left, which had seen its promising 2022 coalition, the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (NUPES), founder over Palestine after October 7, 2023. NUPES had united the leftwing France Unbowed, by far its largest component in terms of electoral support, with the shrinking and rather moderate Socialist and Communist parties, and Europe Ecology-the Greens. But to the surprise of many, in June 2024 they did not double down on their divisions. These had been stoked in recent months by center-left media like Le Monde, which demonized France Unbowed’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon as an antisemite, an authoritarian, and an irresponsible critic of the police. Instead, under pressure from their rank-file members and other social forces, the four main leftist parties reunified themselves into another electoral bloc, the New Popular Front, within a matter of days after Macron’s reckless call for a snap election. The New Popular Front’s June 2024 program featured stronger support for Palestine than the Socialists had been espousing, but also more robust support for Ukraine than France Unbowed had expressed up to then. It united more easily around a strong pro-environment platform and on repudiation of Macron’s unpopular increase of the retirement age from 62 to 64, which had touched off mass strikes in 2023 and that he rammed through under France’s semi-authoritarian Gaullist constitution without even a vote in the National Assembly. The New Popular Front also took strong stances in support of immigrant rights, in contrast to Macron’s viciously anti-immigrant policies, which were increasingly echoing those of the neo-fascists. There was little mention of women’s rights, however, as feminists noted, and none of police racism and brutality of the kind that sparked the June 2023 uprising of marginalized youth.

Over the past several years, the National Rally has continued to sanitize its image under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, who rejected her father’s open expressions of fascist sympathies and antisemitism, even joining the large “antisemitism” march last year that was aimed equally or more so at supporters of Palestine. The National Rally put forth the telegenic 28-year-old Jordan Bardella as its prime minister-designate. In addition to their threats to deport immigrants en masse, Bardella and his coterie stated openly that they planned to deny “important” state positions to dual citizens. It was widely pointed out that this was also the first decree of the Vichy Regime, soon followed by measures against the Left and the Jewish community. As to their at least verbal opposition to Macron’s austerity and his raising of the retirement age, this seemed to fade as they courted big capital. National Rally’s attacks on the environmental movement also increased, as seen in their slogans targeting an allegedly “punitive ecology.”

In the first round of the parliamentary elections on June 30, the National Rally placed first (34% of the vote), with the New Popular Front second (28%), and Macron’s party a humiliating third (21%). With the prospect of a neofascist victory now at hand, not in the relatively powerless European Parliament, but at the helm of the French state, with the prime minister almost coequal in power to the president, public opinion and various progressive organizations and spokespersons sprang into action. Leftist parties, mainstream media like Le Monde, intellectuals, trade unions, and other associations demanded that in three or four-way races where the National Rally was a contender, candidates who supported the democratic republic (1) pull out (désiste) in favor of another supporter of democracy who had scored higher in the first round, and (2) call upon their supporters to back the other democratic candidate against the neofascists. From day one, the New Popular Front adhered to this policy almost everywhere, which included backing distasteful figures like Gérald Darmanin, Macron’s minister of the interior, who had orchestrated repression against workers, students, and ecologists. (He won against the National Rally.)

Macron’s centrists and a few rightwing socialist leaders hemmed and hawed, with some saying they would have to oppose “both extremes,” and, in particular, that they could not support a France Unbowed candidate even against the National Rally. They complained that France Unbowed had strongly attacked Israel, had condemned police brutality and Islamophobia, and attacked capitalism as well. Since France Unbowed is the largest party of the left nowadays, that was very problematic indeed. But such views were largely refuted, with people like Jacques Toubon, a veteran conservative who served in several important ministerial positions in the 1990s, telling reporters, “We need to erect a global republican front, including with France Unbowed.” Toubon praised Mélenchon’s party in particular for its democratic discipline, in contrast to the dilatory stance of the people around Macron (“’Il faut ériger un front republican global, y compris avec LFI,” Jacques Toubon interview with Thébaud Metais and Laurent Telo, Le Monde, July 3, 2024). This kind of pressure pulled the centrists into line, though not as completely as the left.  In this sense, the parliamentary victory of July 7 for the New Popular Front was not only a political but also type moral victory for the left. Once again, the socialist and working-class left has shown itself the strongest defender of democracy.

The specific results were as follows, in a National Assembly of 577 members that require 289 votes for a majority: New Popular Front (182), Macron’s Together (168), National Rally (143), with the mainstream conservative party The Republicans at 45 seats and other leftists now holding 13. Within the New Popular Front itself, France Unbowed won the largest number of seats (74), followed by the Socialist Party (59), the Ecologists (28) and the Communist Party (9).

On the evening of July 7, as election results were announced, somber and youthful crowds that had gathered to launch the fight against the neofascists were they to come to power, or at least obtain first place, exploded into joyful celebration. In the Place de la République in Paris, a giant French flag went up, with the slogan “immigrants are the fabric of society” written across the white part of it, while pro-Palestine and anti-genocide banners waved underneath and to the side. A young delivery worker exulted about the repudiation of racism he saw in the vote: He told a reporter that contra the dominant narrative, the election proved that “the majority of the French people want us, the Arabs, to stay in France!” (Christoph Ayad et al., “La joie et l’amertume, les deux France du 7 juillet,” Le Monde, July 9, 2024). In Marseille, another delivery worker celebrating the victory recounted that, as the National Rally seemed to be surging during the week between the first and second rounds of the election, so were open expressions of racism: “A customer said to me that he was voting for the National Rally so that people like me would leave [the country]” (Benoit Floc’h et al., “Forte mobilization: ‘people are very concerned’,” Le Monde, July 9, 2024). Elsewhere, Black and Arab workers reported being called the n-word in public places for the first time in years during the electoral campaigns or being told they would have to leave France once the neofascists won. LGBTQ people also reported verbal and physical attacks by homophobes, who warned them of further and escalating attacks once Bardella won the election.

As was also pointed out during the heady celebrations of July 7, the National Rally has not disappeared and will continue to fight for its reactionary, fascist policies. Nor is the victory of the left one that is strong enough to allow it to actually implement its program. That will take popular mobilization on a sustained basis, at the very least. But the left is on the move in France in 2024, blocking the neofascists and fighting for a positive program. This is a big step forward, and not just for France.

If I may be permitted, I would like to conclude this essay with a quote from my new book, A Political Sociology of Twenty-First Century Revolutions and Resistances: From the Arab World to Iran to Africa, Ukraine, and France, due out in August:

“The principle Marx articulated back in 1882 still holds, that a revolution in a less developed part of the world can achieve full victory if it can combine with similar movements in the more industrialized regions. France, which remains part of the latter, stands out for having experienced the most numerous and most persistent radical movements in the recent period. Three very large social movements and upheavals have convulsed France in the past five years: the rural Yellow Vests of 2018–19, the 2023 mass strikes of the urban working class, and the 2023 uprising of the urban poor and oppressed minorities.”

To this list can now be added the electoral contests of 2024, which barred the way to neofascism, at least for now.