In less than a year’s time, France will head to the polls to elect a new president. Two of the dominant figures in French politics over the past decade will not be on the ballot. President Emmanuel Macron is constitutionally barred from seeking a third consecutive term, while Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National (RN; formerly Front National), has been barred from running following her embezzlement conviction. In her place, the RN’s thirty-year-old Party resident, Jordan Bardella, is leading polling in both the first and second rounds.
The French left, however, remains divided. The relative success of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) — an electoral alliance bringing together much of the Left, in 2024, which emerged as the largest bloc in the National Assembly — has given way to growing tensions between its constituent parties, most notably Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise (LFI) and the Parti Socialiste (PS).
In an interview, Thomas Glasman met with Danièle Obono, a France Insoumise deputy for Paris and one of the party’s most prominent anti-racist and internationalist voices, who has served in the National Assembly since 2017. They discussed the fragmentation of the French left, the rise of racialized politics, and how to confront an increasingly powerful far right.
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Thomas Glasman
In Britain, many on the socialist left looked to the NFP’s success in 2024 as a model for how a fragmented left could unite against the far right. Yet that alliance has since come under increasing strain, with LFI contesting recent elections independently for the first time. What has driven these divisions, and how would you assess the state of the French left today?
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Danièle Obono
Since the formation of the NFP, we have been in conflict with successive Macron-aligned governments. Despite the NFP emerging as the largest parliamentary bloc in the 2024 election, Macron appointed Michel Barnier as prime minister. After the Barnier government fell, the PS chose to support the centrist François Bayrou’s government in order to help pass its budget. That was the immediate source of division within the NFP, but the deeper reason for the split is political.
François Hollande, the previous PS president, wants to steer the party toward an alliance between the center left and center right. He has openly said he regrets not transforming the party into something closer to Tony Blair’s New Labour or the US Democrats. The right wing of the PS used this moment to abandon the NFP, a coalition they had never fully embraced but had needed in order to win the election.
That strategy has left the PS isolated. Our votes of no confidence against Macron-aligned governments have been supported not only by LFI but also by the Greens and the Parti communiste français (PCF). More importantly, public support for the NFP remains strong, including among many PS voters. That was reflected in the municipal elections, where we formed successful local alliances with the Communists, Greens and, in some cases, the Socialists. We won Saint-Denis alongside the Communists, came close to victory in Toulouse behind François Piquemal, and achieved strong results with the Greens in Nantes.
Nationally, the Greens have moved closer to the Socialists, much as the Communists once did. At the local level, however, the divisions are less pronounced. The municipal elections showed that LFI has momentum. We are still a young movement, with relatively few elected officials, yet we made significant gains while both the Greens and Socialists lost ground.
Our position remains one of unity around the program adopted in 2024. We have formally proposed renewed cooperation with the Greens and Communists, and I believe this coalition can be rebuilt ahead of the presidential election. Despite the obstacles, we intend to stay the course that has guided us since 2017 and has repeatedly proven its worth.
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Thomas Glasman
LFI has been the leading force on the French left in presidential elections since 2017, yet the PS retains considerable strength at the local level, with strongholds in cities such as Paris and Marseille. Has LFI’s more decentralized organizational model made it harder to build the kind of durable local power that the PS has maintained?
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Danièle Obono
I think the story is a little different. The PS built itself through local government and, over more than a century, accumulated a network of elected officials and local powerbrokers who still exert considerable influence. LFI, by contrast, effectively emerged from nowhere ten years ago. We simply haven’t had the same time to establish those roots.
It’s also important not to confuse local power with national power. The traditional right performed strongly in the municipal elections, yet it has very little presence in the National Assembly and its presidential candidate won less than 5 percent of the vote. The relationship between local and national politics is not as straightforward as it once was.
Our strategy has been to identify the areas where we perform well electorally and build local structures from there. In that respect, we’ve made significant progress. In 2017, LFI had seventeen deputies; by 2022, we had seventy-one. Rather than using local strongholds to win parliamentary representation, we have often done the reverse: winning seats first and then building local organizations around them.
That may sound counterintuitive, but it reflects the peculiar state of contemporary politics. It speaks to a broader crisis of political representation in France, and perhaps elsewhere too, where traditional party structures no longer function as they once did.
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Thomas Glasman
LFI had a strong performance in the municipal elections, winning municipalities for the first time, most notably Nîmes and Saint-Denis. However, the RN also made significant gains and is continuing to lead in national polls. What is the LFI policy for combating the RN, particularly in working-class and rural areas where the RN has made some of its strongest advances?
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Danièle Obono
It’s true that the far right also made significant gains in the municipal elections, but this is the culmination of more than two decades of political advance since Jean-Marie Le Pen’s breakthrough in 2002. Bardella also benefits from the backing of powerful media and business interests. Parts of the French ruling class have concluded that the far right offers the best means of preserving their position in the social order. That reality makes it all the more important to rebuild the bloc populaire that proved so effective in 2024, when the NFP prevented what many had presented as an inevitable far-right victory.
Our analysis is that French politics is structured around three major blocs: a far-right bloc, a liberal-authoritarian bloc centered on Macronism, and our own bloc populaire. But there is also a fourth group: the millions of people who do not vote. We believe the path to victory for the Left lies there.
That is why our strategy is focused on winning over abstentionists through a program that directly addresses the cost-of-living crisis, including measures such as price controls and higher wages. We want to draw a clear contrast with the far right, which presents itself as antiestablishment while remaining closely tied to big business interests.
At the same time, we reject the idea that social and racial questions can be separated. The far right seeks to racialize social problems and turn economic grievances into hostility toward migrants and minorities. Our response is to combine class politics with anti-racism, recognizing that race and class are often deeply intertwined. We want to mobilize workers, young people, and racialized communities around a common program of social transformation, while remaining uncompromising in our opposition to racism.
We know we will not win over everyone. But if we can bring a significant share of those who currently abstain — particularly among poorer and racialized sections of society — into political participation, we believe the Left can reach the second round and ultimately win power.
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Thomas Glasman
Your colleague Nadège Abomangoli has argued that Europe is witnessing a shift from a social contract to a racial contract, in which the rights people are owed increasingly depend on racial identity and origin. This is certainly something we have seen on the rise in England. To what extent do you see that dynamic at work in France? And how does Bardella’s version of far-right politics differ from that of Marine Le Pen, whose strategy of dédiabolisation (detoxification) helped bring the RN into the political mainstream?
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Danièle Obono
Bardella and Le Pen represent different tendencies within the French far right, and at the moment Bardella’s appears to be gaining the upper hand, not least because Le Pen is likely to be barred from office following her conviction. Le Pen’s strategy of dédiabolisation — distancing the party from the legacy of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and making it appear more respectable — allowed the RN to build a broad electoral coalition stretching from sections of the petite bourgeoisie to working-class voters.
Bardella, by contrast, represents a far right that is more comfortable aligning itself with the neoliberal right. Despite its antiestablishment rhetoric, the RN has consistently sided with business interests on key economic questions, including opposition to increases in the minimum wage. In that sense, it has become increasingly integrated into the political and economic mainstream.
On the racial question, explicitly racialized politics have been pushed furthest by figures such as Éric Zemmour, whose presence has helped normalize the RN by making it appear comparatively moderate. At the same time, attempts by the center right to compete with the far right have meant that Islamophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric is no longer confined to the RN. Much of it is now articulated by Macron’s governments and other sections of the mainstream right, before being amplified through the media.
Our own understanding of race has had to evolve in response. Today questions of race and identity are used to divide society and build political alliances that stretch from the center right to the far right, particularly around Islamophobia and the conflation of Islam with Islamism. This serves to unite different social groups behind a common politics of exclusion. That is why we have developed a political strategy that combines anti-racism with social and economic demands, rather than treating them as separate issues.
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Thomas Glasman
Could you explain the Yadan bill, which was recently withdrawn from the National Assembly? Presented as a measure to combat antisemitism, critics argued that it posed a threat to free speech and conflated antisemitism with criticism of the state of Israel. You were involved in drafting a resolution against it. What were LFI’s objections to the legislation, and how does the party approach the fight against antisemitism more broadly?
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Danièle Obono
Its withdrawal is certainly a victory for us. The bill had been in preparation since last year and made it through committee stage in part because of Socialist abstentions. Yet opposition to it was immense: more than seven hundred thousand people signed petitions against it on the National Assembly website, while civil liberties organizations, human rights groups, and five UN special rapporteurs all raised serious concerns.
Its defeat matters, particularly while the genocide in Gaza continues. Had it passed, we believe it would have provided a powerful legal and political weapon for those seeking to shield Israel from criticism. But we are under no illusion that the issue has gone away. As long as the Israeli government continues its crimes in Palestine, there will be pressure from sections of the political establishment to restrict criticism of Israel. We therefore remain vigilant and are preparing for further battles on this front.
That is also why I drafted a resolution on combating antisemitism. Today there is an attempt to portray the anti-racist movement itself as antisemitic through the theory of a “new antisemitism,” which suggests that antisemitism is no longer primarily a problem of the far right but of Muslims, ethnic minorities, and the radical left because of their criticism of Israel. We reject that analysis. The far right remains a structurally racist and antisemitic force, yet we are increasingly told that the greater threat comes from residents of the banlieues or from left-wing activists who support Palestinian rights.
This approach not only conflates Jewish people with the State of Israel and its actions; it is also used to delegitimize political opponents. It is not a good faith debate. We saw similar dynamics in Britain during the 2010s, the same strategy is being deployed against Zohran Mamdani in New York, and we are seeing it elsewhere too. In our view, responding by moderating our position would be a mistake. Instead, we must continue to oppose antisemitism while also challenging attempts to instrumentalize it for political ends.
Our resolution is intended both as a tool of political resistance and political education. Antisemitism has its own specific history and characteristics, but it remains a form of racism. To isolate it entirely from other forms of racism risks obscuring the broader structures that sustain discrimination. By educating our movement about the history, mechanisms, and contemporary manifestations of antisemitism, we can fight it more effectively as part of a universal anti-racist struggle.