A cry is rising from the French left: everyone except Glucksmann

Paris. This summer, following weeks of negotiations, the Socialist Party (PS), Place publique (PP) and the Gauche républicaine et socialiste (GRS) – the three parties, in order of importance, within the French social-democratic bloc – reached an agreement to organise primaries this coming October, with the aim of nominating a joint candidate to represent the non-Mélenchonist left in the 2027 presidential elections and to achieve a better result than in 2022, when the then PS candidate Anne Hidalgo recorded the worst result in the party’s history, with 1.7 per cent of the vote. Party members holding a membership card from one of the three parties will be eligible to vote in the primaries, as will non-members who support the social-democratic bloc, provided they pay a participation fee of 15 euros. The first round will take place over the weekend of 9–10 October, with the second round following the weekend after, on the same days that the Greens, led by Marine Tondelier, and Debout!, the progressive party of former Mélenchon supporter François Ruffin, will be holding their own primaries in parallel. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France insoumise (LFI), the radical left-wing party, will stand alone in the race for the Élysée, as will the French Communist Party (PCF), which will field an independent candidate in the presidential election, confirming a deeply divided political landscape on the left.

The Social Democratic primaries in October epitomise this fragmentation: rather than bringing order to the reformist left’s candidacy for the 2027 presidential elections, they risk becoming yet another chapter in the long fratricidal war within French socialism. At the heart of the clash are two figures with very different ideas on how to rebuild the left: Olivier Faure, First Secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), who officially announced his candidacy for the primaries on Sunday evening, and Raphaël Glucksmann, leader of Place publique, the clear favourite. The former, aged 58, who in 2022 was forced to step aside to make way for Anne Hidalgo, has a political machine, a network of activists and a strong local presence that Glucksmann does not yet possess. The latter, leader of a smaller party such as Place publique – founded outside the old party apparatus and built around a strongly pro-European, environmentalist and social-democratic identity – brings with him, however, something the PS has long lacked: the idea of being able to represent a left capable of speaking to an electorate that goes beyond the party’s traditional boundaries, drawing support from the broad liberal centre. Faure, who was re-elected as leader of the PS just over a year ago, finds himself in the position of an outsider within his own camp: all his internal opponents, starting with the influential Socialist group leader in the National Assembly, Boris Vallud, have, one after another, thrown their support behind Glucksmann. What, then, should he focus on to spring a surprise in the October primaries? On the socialist identity – an issue very close to the hearts of the ‘Party of the Rose’s’ activists, who have always had a candidate from their own ranks to vote for in the presidential elections (Hollande and Hidalgo being the most recent examples) – but also on the aspiration among a section of the electorate for unity on the left.

“Faure wants to stir up a united response amongst activists, even amongst those who do not hold a PS membership card; he believes in a pluralist left,” explains Célestine Gentilhomme, a journalist at Le Figaro who covers the left, to Il Foglio. In an interview on TF1, Faure – whose father was a Treasury official and whose mother, of Vietnamese origin, was a nurse – presented himself as “a son of the middle class”, having grown up in contact with “poverty” on the outskirts of Orléans, to emphasise the sociological divide separating him from his rival Raphaël Glucksmann, son of the famous philosopher and essayist André. “He is also banking heavily on this sociological narrative; he wants to show the French that he is a son of the working-class neighbourhoods, setting himself apart from Glucksmann, who has a different background – he comes from a Parisian, philosophical left,” says Gentilhomme. Glucksmann has never sought to hide his family background – the fact that he is the son of André Glucksmann, one of the most influential philosophers of his generation – nor has he tried to fabricate a claim to affinity with the ‘left-wing populace’; on the contrary, he has always admitted to having been ‘born on the right side of the socio-cultural divide’ but also to not having left Sciences Po to attend the Davos Forum – “I went to Rwanda, Georgia and Ukraine,” he has said on several occasions – and, unlike his rivals, who were trained at the Socialist Party headquarters when it was still on Rue de Solférino, he is not a “professional politician”, let alone an “apparatchik”, always ready to negotiate his own survival “in Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s office”.

Faure is also banking on a proliferation of candidates as a strategy to counter Glucksmann. For now, in addition to the First Secretary of the Socialist Party and the leader of the People’s Party, there are three other official contenders: former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, Socialist Party MP Jérôme Guedj and his colleague Philippe Brun. However, the deadline for submitting candidacies is 15 September, and Mathieu Pigasse—the punk-rock banker of French capitalism, owner of Radio Nova and a friend of Mélenchon—is reportedly considering a bid. “The more candidates there are, the less chance Glucksmann has of winning in the first round: Faure is well aware of this. His aim is to reach the second round and play the ‘everyone against Glucksmann’ card, albeit with little hope of victory,” emphasises Gentilhomme.

The scale of the result will be very significant. “If Glucksmann were to win by a landslide, the ten years of ‘Faurism’, this decade – or rather, these eight years devoted to rebuilding the PS, re-rooting it on the left and integrating it into a union of the left – would come to an end, and we would move towards that strategic reorientation, towards that refoundation of the gauche called for by the PP leader’, explains Gentilhomme. In the background looms the shadow of François Hollande, the former Socialist president who sees himself as a last resort. “In December he will announce whether or not he will stand as a candidate, depending, of course, on the dynamics of who wins the primaries,” concludes Gentilhomme. “Hollande is banking on the fact that primaries generally end badly and everyone will be at each other’s throats, making it difficult to find common ground.”