François Hollande hopes to make the French left electable again

THREE YEARS(LFILFILFILFI 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, was beaten into a dismal tenth place, scraping together 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 French government, under Michel Barnier, in December.Now, for the first time, cracks are appearing in that alliance. Tentatively, the Socialists—who voted last month to topple the Barnier government—are freeing themselves from Mr Mélenchon’s grip. If they succeed, it could mark the return of the party from the fringes of radical folly to the realm of electable politics.The first evidence of a shift came on January 16th, when Mr Mélenchon’s party, Unsubmissive France ), tabled a no-confidence motion in the new government under , a veteran centrist. All the alliance’s members, he ordered, should vote for it. Three of its four parties—, the Greens and the Communists—did so. To Mr Mélenchon’s consternation, however, only eight Socialists obeyed; 58 of them, including the party leader, Olivier Faure, refused. They abstained after Mr Bayrou agreed to trim some proposed spending cuts in the budget and to re-open talks on the retirement age, in a bid to get a new budget for 2025 through parliament—and to secure his own job. Mr Mélenchon called it a “stinking deal” and declared that the Socialists were “no longer partners”.With a fresh spring in his step, Mr Faure is now looking for further concessions ahead of a parliamentary vote on the budget, due in early February. His success so far in squeezing them from Mr Bayrou has propelled his party to the centre of political attention. 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”.Mr Faure is not the only party figure to have distanced himself from the hard left. Behind these latest manoeuvres lies a more wily Socialist leader: Mr Hollande. A mere backbench deputy since he returned to national politics in 2024, the 70-year-old former president has a long history of rivalry, and accommodation, with Mr Bayrou. In 2012 the centrist leader backed Mr Hollande for the presidency; the Socialist may now be returning the favour. Mr Hollande is also keen to show that he is a responsible statesman and not, like Mr Mélenchon, out merely to manufacture chaos. “The Socialists have taken a major decision,” he told newspaper. “They have rejected the posture of , whose only objective is to block institutional life and provoke a presidential election.” Those around Mr Hollande suggest that he hopes to run again for the presidency in 2027, when the incumbent and his former adviser, Emmanuel Macron, is barred by the constitution from a third consecutive bid.Not all Socialists like the party’s fresh stance. Younger radicals, fed up with the Hollande generation, still seek to bring down the government. Mr Faure’s leadership is fragile and his job is on the line at a party congress this summer; he cannot afford to upset too many of them. Nor are the Socialists about to become active supporters of the Bayrou government; they could yet even try to vote it down. Indeed Chloé Morin, a political scientist close to the left, argues that it would be a mistake to see all this as an emancipation from the alliance altogether. It is rather, she says, a duel between the Socialists and , and between Mr Hollande and Mr Mélenchon, designed to show left-wing voters who has the greater political clout.The French left has a long history of division. Those on the Socialist Party’s moderate social-democratic wing, embodied by such prime ministers as Michel Rocard in 1988-91 and more recently Manuel Valls, have struggled to impose pragmatic centre-left politics on a party perpetually drawn to anti-capitalist thinking. Moreover, a “union of the left”, which reaches out to the hard left, remains a potent electoral force, particularly faced with the rise of Marine Le Pen’s hard right. As he seeks to put himself back in the game, Mr Hollande may find that he is up against a hard choice between restoring respectability among voters at the political centre and keeping open the possibility of linking up in future with the Unsubmissives.