From success to “survival”, rise and fall of socialists in France

Eight years ago it would have been the image of success: the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and then-President François Hollande on the same stage. But, sunk in the polls, the socialists are now risking their future in France.

The audience gathered one March afternoon in Limoges, a city in rural France famous for its porcelain, breaks into applause when the Socialist Party (PS) candidate for president makes an appearance.

Everything has dyes of a common rally. Flags of France, of the European Union (EU) and, as is currently being marked, of Ukraine, posters with the slogan “Hidalgo! 2022". But in the environment the ghost of a defeat is planned on April 10.

“I call you to perseverance and courage! We believe in ourselves, we believe in you!” , asked by way of conclusion Hidalgo, born in Spain in 1959, to fifty supporters, after detailing their social and ecological proposals.

However, with 3% voting intentions according to the polls, it would achieve the worst result of a historic party, which had two presidents — François Mitterrand (1981-1995) and Hollande (2012-2017) — since the arrival of the Fifth Republic in 1958.

And if it fails to exceed 5%, instead of being eligible for the maximum of eight million euros (8.8 million dollars) in compensation, it could only recover from the authorities up to 800,000 euros, a new financial setback.

“If a bad result in the presidential elections is added to a debacle in the legislatures” next June, “the question of the survival of the party in its current form will appear,” says Frédéric Sawicki, professor of Political Science at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

- “Even if there are murmurs, we exist” -

In 2017, after a setback in both elections, the PS had to sell “Solferino”, its historic Paris headquarters, and go to the outskirts of the capital. In February 2021, those responsible for training recognized a “difficult financial situation” for the current presidential campaign.

“I refuse to believe that the left embodied by the PS is going to die (...) She is a solid candidate,” Osiris Malbranque, a 26-year-old socialist militant, assures AFP in Limoges.

Malbranque's youth contrasts at the “Pavillon Buxerolles” with a majority of retirees, such as Josiane Sauriat, an 80-year-old former nurse optimistic about the future of the PS: “Even if there are murmurs, we exist”.

However, the lack of enthusiasm was even felt in the speech of the star guest, former President Hollande, who already called for “rebuilding the left” after the elections.

Hollande has been little involved in the campaign and even made the fuss of replacing Hidalgo, assuring in January that “for the time being” he was not a candidate.

For Sawicki, mobilizing Hollande in the campaign follows a “strategy of despair”, since “many voters consider him the undertaker of the PS and the left” and “responsible” in part for the success of the current president, Emmanuel Macron.

- “Fidelity” -

In 2007, as first secretary of the PS, he was criticized for the party's lack of support for then-presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, who with almost 47% of votes lost the ballot to conservative Nicolas Sarkozy.

But in a political landscape still shaken by the arrival of the centrist Macron, the socialists are at stake much more than a choice. In 2017, Macron, then Hollande's minister, already attracted several of his referents, such as the current Chancellor Jean-Yves Le Drian.

The socialist candidate in those elections, Benoît Hamon, won only 6.36% of votes and ended up leaving the party. Of the total number of voters who voted for him, only 13% will now choose Hidalgo, according to a poll conducted in mid-March by Harris Interactive.

The professor of Political Science attributes this to the “inability of the PS to show that it drew the conclusions” of Hollande's mandate and the defeat of 2017 and to choosing a “clear strategic line”: between approaching the liberal centre-left or the radical left.

Of the left-wing candidates, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (radical left) is the only one to overcome the 10% barrier in the polls, as in 2017. But he failed to take advantage of that success to settle in an increasingly atomized space.

The PS still has important local and regional power, but another “bloody defeat” could jeopardize the “fidelity” of these representatives who, according to Sawicki, might be tempted to declare themselves non-partisan or approach Macron or the environmentalists.

jt/bl