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THREE YEARSLFILFILFI, Your browser does not support the element. ago the French Socialist Party was crushed into irrelevance. The party that supplied two modern presidents—François Mitterrand (1981-95) and François Hollande (2012-17)—and nine prime ministers became as invisible in parliament as in public debate. Its presidential candidate in 2022, Anne Hidalgo, secured less than 2% of the vote. Its contingent in the National Assembly was swallowed up into a left-wing alliance dominated by the hard left’s firebrand leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He engineered the downfall of the previous minority government, under Michel Barnier, in December.Now, for the first time in years, the party has been propelled to the centre of political attention. Mr Barnier’s successor, the centrist , is trying to get a much-delayed budget for 2025 through parliament—and to survive in his job. Without the Socialists’ votes, the hard left and hard right together do not have the numbers to bring Mr Bayrou down. A no-confidence vote in the government could take place in early February.The first hint that the Socialists may be freeing themselves from Mr Mélenchon’s grip came on January 16th. In December all four parties in the alliance voted to topple Mr Barnier. A month later, only three of them—Unsubmissive France (), the Greens and the Communists—voted to eject his successor. To Mr Mélenchon’s consternation, 58 out of 66 Socialist deputies, including their leader, Olivier Faure, refused. They abstained after Mr Bayrou agreed to trim some proposed spending cuts in the budget and to reopen talks on the retirement age. The Socialist Party has “quit the spiral of radicality, which it never believed in”, argued Zaki Laïdi, a political scientist, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a former Green politician, in . Now it is “back in the political game”.With a fresh spring in his step, Mr Faure has since been seeking further concessions. The party threatened to go into reverse, and vote against the government, if it did not get them. Part of this may be bluff. But part of it also reflects splits within the party about how far to distance itself from the follies of the hard left, and make the Socialists electable again.Behind these latest manoeuvres also lies a wily old-timer: Mr Hollande (pictured). A mere backbench deputy since he returned to national politics in 2024, the 70-year-old has a long history of rivalry, and accommodation, with Mr Bayrou. In 2012 the centrist backed Mr Hollande for the presidency; the Socialist may now be returning the favour. “The Socialists have taken a major decision,” he told a newspaper, by rejecting “the posture of , whose only objective is to block institutional life and provoke a presidential election.” Mr Hollande, say friends, has his eye on running for the presidency in 2027, when the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, is barred from a third consecutive bid.The Socialists are teetering on the edge. Younger radicals, fed up with the Hollande generation, want to topple the government. Mr Faure’s leadership is fragile and his job is on the line at an upcoming party congress; he cannot afford to upset too many of them. Chloé Morin, a political scientist, argues that it would be a mistake to expect an emancipation from the alliance. It is rather, she says, a “duel for influence” between the Socialists and and between Mr Hollande and Mr Mélenchon.Moderate Socialists have long struggled to impose pragmatic politics on a party perpetually drawn to anti-capitalist thinking. Faced with Marine Le Pen’s hard right, a united left remains a potent electoral force. The party is now weighing its quest for electoral respectability at the centre against tactical calculations that threaten to pull it back to the extremes.
