France has rendered unto the world, over the past quarter-century, a distinct public service. Thanks to the trailblazing research of three French scholars — Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman — we know much more about the world’s maldistributed wealth than ever before. Could France now be on the brink of making another significant More
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The Coat of arms of France – Public Domain
France has rendered unto the world, over the past quarter-century, a distinct public service. Thanks to the trailblazing research of three French scholars — Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman — we know much more about the world’s maldistributed wealth than ever before.
Could France now be on the brink of making another significant contribution to a more equal global future? That question has suddenly become surprisingly timely. French voters, after an unexpected turn of political events, will shortly have a real opportunity to begin shearing our global super rich down to something approximating democratic size.
France’s surprising turn of events started earlier this month when millions of voters went to the polls to elect the 720 members of the next European Parliament. For Europe’s centrist political leaders, most notably French president Emmanuel Macron, the results would turn out to be a disaster. Candidates with Macron’s French centrist coalition garnered less than half the 31 percent of the vote that the French far-right coalition, the anti-immigrant Rassemblement National, took in.
Macron’s reaction? He quickly dissolved the French National Assembly and scheduled a “snap election” to replace it, with the first voting round coming June 30 and the second July 7. Then, right on the heels of Macron’s move, another stunning surprise. In the June 9 European Parliament balloting, France’s four top left parties had competed separately. For the new French National Assembly elections, the four parties announced, they would be fielding a single, unified slate of candidates.
That single slate — the Nouveau Front Populaire, the New Popular Front — has what many observers see as a real shot at beating the election’s initial favorite, the French far-right coalition led by Marine Le Pen. And if the Nouveau Front Populaire does gain legislative control, France could soon be experiencing a distinct egalitarian shift. The Nouveau Front Populaire, as Jacobin analyst Harrison Stetler notes, has “laid out a radical program to rebuild France’s dilapidated democracy.”
The New Popular Front has framed this “radical program” as a three-part “legislative contract” with French voters. The first part lays out the “emergency” steps the new government will take in its first 15 days in office. The second covers the New Popular Front’s action plan for its first 100 days and the third the longer-range “transformations” the Front plans on pursuing.
The struggle for a more equitable distribution of French income and wealth figures prominently throughout all these three stages. The Front’s “legislative contract,” points out Jacobin’s Stetler, “would mark a clean break” from the Macron years and their “transfer of economic power to the wealthiest.”
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