France’s four main leftwing parties have agreed to form a “Popular Front” (NPF) to contest the snap election, campaigning on a joint platform and fielding a single candidate in every constituency.
The Socialist party (PS), Greens, Communists, and France Unbowed (LFI) led by the hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon said they had reached agreement after several days of difficult talks and would present their manifesto later on Friday.
“A new page in the history of France has been written,” they said in a joint statement. Mélenchon tweeted his “warmest congratulations and thanks to our negotiators who had four sleepless nights” deciding on the programme and candidates.
Politicians from the alliance have said the policies agreed include lowering the retirement age, which President Emmanuel Macron raised in an unpopular change last year, linking salaries to inflation and introducing a wealth tax for the rich.
Ian Brossat, a Communist senator, said the retirement change, which led to mass street protests, would be annulled and France’s pension age would return to 60. The LFI MP François Ruffin said the left could now “start our campaign – with the aim of winning!”
Polls suggest the NPF, a repeat of the Nupes left-green alliance formed for France’s 2022 parliamentary elections, is unlikely to beat Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN), which is on about 33% of the vote.
But it could capture more than 25%, giving it more than enough deputies in the 577-seat national assembly to prevent both Macron’s centrist coalition – forecast to lose half its MPs – and RN, which could double its tally, from forming a stable majority.
As Nupes, the left-green alliance worked together in 2022 before a leadership struggle, Mélenchon’s polarising tactics and policy differences, notably over the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Middle East, triggered its de facto collapse.
Macron called the snap ballot, which will be held over two rounds on 30 June and 7 July, last Sunday after his list in the European elections suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the RN, managing less than half the far-right party’s score.
Infighting has continued in the centre-right Les Républicains, the party of former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, after its president, Éric Ciotti, announced a surprise alliance with RN.
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That prompted the rest of the party’s leadership to vote him out on Wednesday, but Ciotti said on Thursday he was still party leader, dismissing the effort to oust him as illegal “quibbles, little battles by mediocre people … who understand nothing”.
Ciotti has called his opponents’ vote a “takeover” attempt and said he was challenging its validity in court. A Paris tribunal would examine the case later on Friday, judicial sources told Agence France-Presse.
Speaking on BFM-TV on Friday morning, Jordan Bardella, RN’s 28-year-old president and probable prime minister should the far-right party win a majority in parliament, said the rightwing alliance would field a joint candidate in roughly 70 constituencies.