The Rise of France Insoumise
- John Smith
France, like many other European countries, has seen a historic decline of the old workers’ parties. Yet the rise of France Insoumise has ensured the renewal of a dynamic left rooted in popular mobilization.
(Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Teiko
The many crises afflicting Emmanuel Macron’s presidency point to deep turmoil in France’s institutions. In many accounts, the likely beneficiary is Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National, which is today polling strongly. Yet, time and again, the country’s Left has shown that it cannot be discounted. Only last summer, the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance defied expectations to come first in the parliamentary elections.
Decisive to that success — and to the radicalism of the NFP’s program — was radical-left force France Insoumise. Its presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was by far the most popular left-wing candidate in the last two election cycles, and it has established a much more enduring presence in protest movements and in institutions than other European radical-left forces.
In an interview, France Insoumise MP Clémence Guetté and the Institut La Boétie’s Salles-Papou explained the movement’s strategy, its basis in popular mobilization, and the possibility of an overhaul of the Fifth Republic’s institutions. This interview originally appeared in Italian, in Teiko.
Let’s begin by going back in time and putting your movement’s development in some historical context. What was the social and political situation that gave birth to France Insoumise? What were the key forces that contributed to the movement’s creation, and how did they influence its structure and ideology?
France Insoumise was created in February 2016 to promote Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s candidacy for president. Its exact form wasn’t fixed at that time. The French, European, and global context helps us to understand, after the fact, why this initiative succeeded: it arose at the intersection of multiple cycles of social and political struggle; it arose as a means of breaking through the impasses of that moment, of advancing the cause of rupture.
What were these cycles? First, there has been a long succession of French social movements against neoliberal reforms. We can simplify by starting with the massive strikes against Alain Juppé’s plan [for welfare cuts] in winter 1995. The “plural left” government of Socialists, Communists, and Greens [from 1998 to 2002] — even if it resulted in some privatizations and other neoliberal reforms — was nonetheless remarkable in European social democracy. First of all, it was an alliance of the Parti Socialiste turning toward its left, not the center. Secondly, the workers’ movement got a reduction in working hours, a unique achievement in Europe at that time.
In the 2000s, there were several impressive mobilizations against neoliberal reforms with strikes, occupations of universities, and massive street protests. In 2003, there was a big strike in national education against François Fillon’s retirement reform. In 2006, there was opposition to the “First Job Contract” bill, finally withdrawn by Dominique de Villepin. In 2010, Nicolas Sarkozy’s retirement reform was fought by 3.5 million workers and students at the height of the struggle, according to union estimates. And we have not even mentioned the largest mobilizations against the financial autonomy of universities and reforms of national education, etc. Even if many of these social movements were defeated, victories came often enough: in 1995, 2006, and 2008, for example.
All this is to say that France’s long cycle of mobilizations, taken together, was a unique experience in Europe and the West: a vast, combative resistance and critique of neoliberalism. This is also partly why neoliberalism has had a weak hegemony in France, in the sense that large swathes of the popular classes never bought into even a passive acceptance of neoliberal dogma but were always critical.
Yet at the same time, over the whole of the 1990s and 2000s, no political expression of this social contestation ever came together. Groups to the left of the Parti Socialiste remained unusually popular by European standards (two Trotskyist candidates together got 10 percent of the vote in the 2002 election), but there was no unifying force capable of transforming social resistance into political resistance.
The second important cycle to understand, in terms of understanding our success, is specifically political — even if we can’t analyze it except in relation to the social movements. Our point of departure, here, is the referendum on the European constitution in 2005. This event served to trigger and accelerate the breakdown of the big social-political blocs both on the Right and Left.
Since the 1980s, these two blocs managed different internal contradictions — some hostile to the neoliberal reform of capitalism in France, others favorable. During the 2005 referendum campaign, we saw these blocs fracture and the pro-EU groups on each side campaign together.
The image most symbolic of this moment was found in the magazine Paris Match, where two future presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, stood side by side to call for a “yes” vote. These two were later the agents of a double realignment: the French center right turned to neoconservatism, and the center left to the “Third Way” of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. These forces lost their specific, properly French character. We must remember that neoliberalism did not have a strong grip on France. The realignment of the leading French political parties into a sort of proto-bourgeois bloc produced a major change.
The social blocs found themselves orphans, angry at their former representatives. Other blocs found themselves among strange bedfellows. All this led to the total collapse of the political scene during the 2017 [presidential election] campaign. This showed that the moment was ripe for new proposals to reorganize the political landscape. In hindsight, that’s why some spoke of the “populist moment” back then. It was a moment when the old political identifications broke down. It was a very fluid moment that favored the emergence of new political actors.
Finally, the creation of France Insoumise nearly coincides with the beginning of the social movement against the [Hollande government’s] labor law reform — in other words, the revival of social movement four years after Hollande’s election. We can take this to be a kind of restart, after a pause, of the cycle we mentioned before that began in 1995. We can consider it the delayed launch of a new generation, in France, in the global movement against neoliberal hegemony.
If we remember the movement of 2016, we can clearly see the influences of other social movements following the 2008 crisis: notably in Southern Europe and North America. The method of occupying public space was obvious from this point of view. In the so-called “Nuit debout” movement [of 2016], the critique of neoliberalism took a more radical turn, with democratic concerns percolating and feminist or antiracist issues also gaining prominence. If France Insoumise’s political proposal could take off in 2016–17, this was also because it was a tool fit to continue these historic cycles, to advance their causes.
France Insoumise invented a new symbolic language removed from the old political identifiers of the Left and developed a populist discursive strategy designed to fill the void left by the crisis of the old political blocs. Finally, France Insoumise’s program with its themes and demands were coherent with the beginning of the crisis of neoliberal hegemony — in France we can date this to 2016 — and with the movement against the labor law reform.
Since it was founded, France Insoumise has developed rapidly and become — with the NUPES [New Ecological and Social Popular Union] alliance in 2022 and Nouveau Front Populaire [NFP] in 2024 — the hegemonic force on the French left. How is the movement structured today?
The first thing to say is that France Insoumise has always been a work in progress, in constant evolution. The basic structure that has existed since 2016 is the action group. The rules for how these action groups work were written to allow for plenty of leeway in organizing, to be paired with various projects of different intensities that develop over time, and to handle the changing tides of social and political cycles.
Anyone can create or join an action group. There are no dues to pay, no formal or official membership. It is enough to join our social network Popular Action, which allows anyone to find or start an action group nearby. No action group has any territorial monopoly. This means anyone can create their own group even if a group already exists in the same town, neighborhood, or even street! The point of all this is to remove as many barriers as possible, both material and symbolic, to political action.
We want a porous structure enmeshed with broader society to establish a continuum between personal conviction, occasional participation in actions, identification with the social movement, becoming an activist, and belonging to an action group. Another goal is to have as many groups as possible, to permeate society on a microscopic level. It seems to us that the best way to achieve such a molecular spread is not to draw up a highly detailed plan imagined from above and try to impose that over the whole territory. The total freedom to create action groups allows their structure to fit the shape of actually-existing social structures: a circle of friends, a group of neighbors, parents of kids who attend the same school, a neighborhood, etc.
This is more effective than simply cutting up the map into zones. Of course, a consequence of this is that some groups are not very active. This is intentional, actually, even if it can produce problems when someone is looking for a group to join. This is why we added a certification process for groups. Certified groups are those who register at least two actions on Popular Action within the last two months and have a gender-equitable pair of co-facilitators. This allows us to note which action groups are actually active.
Yet the action groups are only one facet of France Insoumise. The movement takes many different forms. It applies a kind of confederalism. Within France Insoumise, we have different “spaces.” Each space works in a semiautonomous way, according to its own logic. There is a space for action groups. There is also a program space that brings together all the programmatic work: notably, there are about fifty thematic groups composed of activists with particular experience concerning this or that subject.
These groups write the thematic booklets of the program, work across the different phases of updating the program, meet with associations and collectives to maintain the links between them and the movement, etc. There is also a space called “social battles,” which is the space for struggles. It is composed of union, ecological, anti-racist, and urban self-organizing activists. These activists, like France Insoumise, maintain the links between our movement and the world of social struggles, bringing up their needs, etc. The Boétie Institute, where academics choose to work for the movement, is also considered a space. You can see by these examples that each space corresponds to a logic, a specific type of activism.
France Insoumise activity does not have a single form. This is why, when it comes to forming a space of identified leadership for the movement, we wanted to represent this confederal structure. We thus have a national coordination of spaces. This is a body in which each space recognized by France Insoumise is represented and comes together once a week to discuss short-term objectives that the movement needs to take positions on. For longer-term questions, the relevant body is the representative assembly that comes together twice per year, with delegates from each département drawn by sortition as well as each space sending a representative. This body adopts strategic orientations, for example toward upcoming elections.
Here we’ve described in broad strokes how France Insoumise basically works. There are other, complicating elements like the département-level groups. This is a new development that helps solidify the movement internally — which nonetheless remains flexible and fluid by nature. These groups coordinate at the département level, assigning particular roles (handling material, event security, etc.) and forming a kind of skeletal structure for the gaseous movement. Added to this are the temporary structures relating to the discussions required to prepare for electoral contests. At this time, France Insoumise is preparing strategies and programs for the upcoming municipal elections at the level of each municipality.
How can we make sense of your political decision-making that we might call “vertical” — embodied by a leader and their leadership circle — and the “horizontal,” democratic structure of all these assemblies and action groups organizing on the Popular Action social network?
This is a question about managing different temporalities. In politics, there is no separation between the moment at which one decides and at which one adopts political positions, strategies, and tactics. In reality, it’s impossible to distinguish the two. The decisions to be taken arise according to the situation. There is no concrete situation that corresponds to a pure and perfect application of theory drawn and framed beforehand. And, of course, a good theoretical framework evolves with the concrete situation.
The general rhythm of society has sped up compared with the past. This may seem a banal observation, but it is an essential reality of our time: deriving from the explosion in human population and the speed of the transmission of information, even the acceleration of the profit cycle itself. Therefore, we must make decisions faster than in the 1960s, in order to keep up with the times. Even if the image that you mentioned of the leader who decides alone is reductive, it is true that in France Insoumise there are tight-knit leadership bodies designed to make quick decisions, to prevent delays in taking action.
From 2017 to 2022, the parliamentary group — which at the time had only seventeen MPs — performed this function. Since we got seventy-two MPs [in the 2022 election], it is the national coordination of the spaces that plays this role. They can be in touch at all times via group chat and remain reactive enough given the necessities of modern politics. But this is only one part of the story.
Our structure might seem to create an unbridgeable divide between the base and leadership within the movement, but only if you overlook our broader process of decision-making. First of all, formally and institutionally, there are mechanisms for longer-term decision-making at regular intervals. As described previously — the representative assemblies are structured in a more or less classic way around a text that makes its way from the leadership and around the action groups, with the assembly producing the synthesis.
Next, there is what binds together our institutional and informal culture: the program, the Future in Common. Through the way the program is elaborated, its successive updates, and the importance it has had from the beginning in France Insoumise discourse — as well as the central place it now occupies in discussions across the French left — this document has become more than a simple tool of an electoral campaign. It is a common reference, and it is the frame within which France Insoumise enjoys a great degree of freedom of initiative. This frame is what permits the movement to afford the leadership its flexibility.
Beyond the program, there is the fact that a responsive leadership . . . operates every day as a forum for the exchange of dense information from France Insoumise, with so much information circulating every hour between the base, elected officials, and the leadership. Messages pass directly and without needing more time than it takes to type and hit “send.” We can’t discuss the structure of organizations — be they political or social — without accounting for the information and communication technologies at their disposal.
Communication between central structures, base cells, and intermediary layers is not the same when it is done by telegraph, a single telephone for every fifty households, or group chats allowing instant and unlimited discussion. The pyramidal structure of twentieth-century mass parties with their regular meetings at every level was largely justified by the concrete constraints of communication! Yet these are technologically obsolete.
How does France Insoumise distinguish itself from other left-wing political experiments from the 2000s to the 2010s? What lessons are there to be learned from Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, or Morena in Mexico? How has France Insoumise evolved since its founding, on questions concerning alliances and the conditions by which the project of a “social Europe” and alterglobalization?
Generally speaking, France Insoumise arose from the same historical context as experiments like Podemos, the Bloco [in Portugal], and Syriza, and indeed the movement behind Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the United States. Right away we must say that, in our view, Syriza definitively exited this group when Alexis Tsipras capitulated. Yet that episode provided us with food for thought. It showed us the level of conflict we must be prepared to face when the radical left wins power.
That’s the main problem we must confront. The institutions of the European Union — notably those most detached from popular sovereignty, like the European Central Bank — play a key role as instruments of the ruling class to crush left-wing experiments. The lesson we learned here was to double down on our commitment to rupture. We must not encourage the illusion that a quick compromise will be possible with the ruling class. It’s not, and it’s for this very reason that we must prepare in advance the programmatic tools necessary to push a tug-of-war with the EU.
That’s why we were sticklers on the issue of Europe when we drafted the common programs of the NUPES and NFP. In the end, we have to think ahead and prepare countermeasures for the offensives we know will come.
To respond more directly regarding the type of internationalism that we are building, especially in Europe: we are today in a particular position. In Europe, we are the force that enjoys the most advanced position both in terms of electoral success and the strength of our base. This gives us the responsibility to take the initiative and build a network. We take this issue very seriously. Our leaders travel widely, meeting with forces across Europe as well as the Americas and Africa. We believe in rebuilding a new international network of mutual aid, coordination, and discussion between comrades — rather than in the idea that a hegemonic force of the radical left might emerge at the scale of Europe or beyond.
You often insist that France Insoumise is a “movement” rather than a traditional party — or, at the most, an “umbrella party” designed to cover, support, and reinforce the diversity of tactics in struggle, cooperation, and mobilizations. The movement itself is influenced in turn by these dynamics.
This raises the question of the relation between inside and outside, or, in other words, between France Insoumise as a political-electoral platform and the social movements. Could you comment on this conception of organization and the relations between France Insoumise and French social movements over the last decade?
The question of how we relate to those inside and outside our movement is not so dichotomous for us. It’s precisely the form of organization that we are trying to invent — the movement form — that sees itself in continuum with society, as porous and not as an organism separated by some membrane from the rest of society.
Our movement lives by taking part in other social movements, as a component of them and fed by them. Whether it is in the growth of action groups meeting across the country or in the data showing the increasing use of the Popular Action platform, we can clearly trace the history of recent social movements. The periods of intense mobilizations, for example against the pension reform in 2023 or in support of Palestine in 2024, were moments in which the movement expanded and filled out. We can attest to an increasing intensity of activity, more people signing up. A period of decline corresponds to a cooling off of social movements as well, even if activity never wholly ceases, as is the case with social movements. Since we see our relationship to struggles in this way, you can easily understand why we feel free to take the initiative.
As everyone can tell, we do not follow the traditional line of left parties: “We stand behind the unions and that’s all.” We feel legitimate, given our important place in the political landscape, to advance our own strategies for the social movement, to call for actions on our own terms. This does not mean that we wish to replace the unions, collectives, associations, or autonomous organizations of social struggle. We have a particular function in relation to them by virtue of our work: drawing together social movements and electoral politics, struggles and institutional change. Our movement exists so that the struggles can enter the state and institutions in order to transform them.
The period from 2018 to 2023 saw not only the COVID crisis but also the gilets jaunes uprising, insurrections across the world, the uprising against Macron’s retirement reform, and several anti-racist revolts (from the US in 2020 to France in 2023). These years clearly marked a fundamental turn. How did these struggles redefine the political line and strategy of France Insoumise?
We read this period as the entry of the French people into the process of the citizens’ revolution. The gilets jaunes movement marked a rupture. At the beginning, it was a movement responding to a fuel tax, and by that issue it was substantively about fiscal justice and urban inequality. But what we saw was that in a few weeks, the movement’s demands transformed. On the one hand there was a sense of demands growing across different domains: reconsidering taxes in general, salaries, retirement, popular ecology, etc. On the other hand, the question of power was posed with a destituent call to arms: “Macron must go” — and may we remind you that it is no small thing in France to call for the resignation of the president of the Republic. And democratic demands became central to the gilets jaunes: the citizens’ initiative referendum, the ability to recall elected officials, a constituent assembly, etc.
The gilets jaunes moment has perhaps come and gone, but the destituent moment has not. Since then, in every serious convulsion across this country, it has rapidly reappeared. Social movements cannot long remain focused around a precise objective. We can feel in them that sentiment, or really the consciousness that for things to truly change, everything must change. And the question of power and the rejection of its organization is posed in this spirit.
That’s what happened again, for example, in the movement against the retirement reform starting from the government decision to pass the reform by force (article 49.3 [i.e. passing the measure without a vote]).
We are in a long cycle of citizens’ revolution, and we see this as a phase rather than as a clearly circumscribed insurrectional event. Our strategy is therefore two-sided. Firstly, we try by our action and our proposals to prevent this phase from ending, to help it overcome all its challenges and keep alive the constituent perspective. This can be done by parliamentary measures, which was why we did all we could in the National Assembly to prevent the government from hiding its lack of majority [by avoiding a vote on the reform].
We worked to help the street-level struggle advance and prevented maneuvers to prematurely end it. This kind of work can be advanced also by the institutional proposals that we bring to the table. Take the example of our attempt to impeach Emmanuel Macron following his refusal to recognize the results of the July 2024 legislative elections. We worked to keep a destituent perspective alive, to show that Macron’s abandonment of basic democratic principles by sheer force did not mean the end of the battle.
Secondly, our role as a political movement is to integrate electoral contests into the long process of the citizens’ revolution. We do this by our programmatic work: whatever the election in front of us and configuration of alliances prepared for it, we always present the option of rupture. We directly pose the question of power — how it is really within reach — in every election.
What are the relationships between France Insoumise, the committees and associations in the suburbs, and the unions? How have these evolved over time? What are the tensions and where do you converge? How do you see the future of these relationships?
We should first take a clear-sighted view of what the relations on the French left were like before France Insoumise arrived on the scene. The link between the Confédération Genérale du Travail [CGT union confederation] and the Parti Communiste Français weakened with that party’s flagging electoral results. The links between the Greens and ecological movements likewise weakened as those movements evolved and due to mistrust born of the experience of social democratic governments. Finally, the collectives that formed in popular neighborhoods were really ignored and despised.
France Insoumise chose to look at French society as it is today, and not to dream of the past. There is a form and mode of organization that allows everyone to participate. It is not possible to found a mass movement requiring absolute and permanent party discipline in the twenty-first century, grounded in the rhythms of life like those of the male proletariat of the last century.
So France Insoumise is a porous movement in and with the whole of French society. It recognizes and organizes the potential for all its members to be engaged outside the movement: in their unions, collectives, and associations. Most of our activists tend to take on another major commitments parallel to France Insoumise or in between electoral campaigns.
This organization follows from the theory of the Age of the People and the Citizens’ Revolution. It identifies the new sites of social struggle that take place in cities for access to networks. It demands special attentiveness for those who take up these battles every day in various forms.
On account of this fact, France Insoumise’s program is largely driven by widespread social demands. The demands of collectives in the popular neighborhoods, feminist movements, the youth fighting climate change, and the mobilizations in French overseas territories are ours too — articulated in a program that aims for harmony between human beings and nature.
This programmatic dialogue obliges us to build new relationships with the actors in social struggles, whether individuals or collectives. To get beyond the distrust of politics caused by the failures of social democracy, we work daily to bring in the greatest number. In the popular neighborhoods, this is done by constantly going door to door, a stark contrast with the practices of the old left. This means giving the inhabitants their rightful place, whether we are organizing our annual meetings in the popular neighborhoods or running candidates in elections. Here we progress little by little, as a growing number of people volunteer to work together.
The reluctance of the old left in taking up this strategy of popular union across party lines with us is worth noting. In both the NUPES and NFP, we fought hard to open up this organizing framework to everyone — whether or not they are a member of this or that party — and to include unions and associations. This was not possible because the old left sees nothing but electoral deals, trashing their programs and promises at the first opportunity. They did not rise to the occasion and the hopes raised, but this will not stop us from pursuing this strategy in coming elections.
At the beginning of 2023, you launched the Boétie Institute, France Insoumise’s cultural foundation, with whom several among us actively collaborate. The Boétie Institute does not only organize conferences and publish research but also plays an essential role in popular education and activist training. What is the place of the institute in France Insoumise as a party movement?
The Boétie Institute developed from reflections on the evolution of our movement following the 2022 elections. We had realized several important objectives: the overtaking of social democracy, as confirmed by two presidential elections; the growth of our parliamentary group to become the largest left-wing force; and the experience of a left front driven by its radical wing.
Here we entered a new phase: the period where we definitively left behind our infancy as a permanent electoral campaign. To grow, we built this new institution that allowed us to mobilize intellectual activism from various sectors that joined us — most often during campaigning — and allowed us to put their capacities to use in struggle.
The Boétie Institute is firstly a structure designed to give the many academics who joined us over our campaigns more permanent tasks. Among these tasks is, of course, the production of good arguments for our activists. There is also the intellectual combat against the reigning ideology and therefore the production of research, of scientific studies that contradict it. The economists of the institute have done much work, for example, to explain in France the inflationary price-profits loop. And of course, popular education is understood as the gradual construction of a common structure for critical inquiry.
The Boétie Institute has also allowed us to deal with major strategic discussions. It is a space to talk through the struggle against the far right, strategies for ecological struggle, the electoral orientation of the fourth bloc, etc. The institute has the advantage of decorrelating these discussions from any competition for roles within France Insoumise. And in so doing, it grounds debates in terms of the social sciences. Our collectively written book, The Resistible Rise of the Far Right, served as the occasion for nearly a hundred dialogues across the country between the researchers who worked on the book and France Insoumise leaders and activists. And yes, of course, this includes the large, recorded conferences with Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
But our idea was not only that the relationship between intellectuals and the movement should flow both ways and should not only be the movement taking. Rather, the interface that the institute provides makes it possible to transform intellectuals as well, by putting them in permanent contact with the world of struggles, activism, etc. We really hope that this space allows for meetings that influence those who participate in them. Finally, the Boétie Institute is also a cadre formation program. It’s here that the contact is the most substantial between the university professors and France Insoumise activists.
This training program corresponds to several objectives of France Insoumise movement since 2022. First, it is a tool for the partial solidification of the movement we described earlier. In the current phase, we need more cadres than we did when we were a sort of political commando operation. Above all, there is a critical need to socially recruit these cadres, both as intermediaries and as local figures of the movement. The mobilization of the popular classes that we are counting on cannot be accomplished unless we offer a true representation to the popular classes in their diversity.
The acceleration of the process of fascistization of state apparatuses and the rise of the far right in several countries are crucial issues today. Faced with this, what is France Insoumise’s strategic horizon? How do you understand, for example, the notions of anti-fascism, municipalism, and dual power?
We believe that it is crucial to seize the state. While we support movements of civil disobedience, ecological resistance, and struggles against big-and-useless projects — all essential to call into question the hegemony of the dominant order and to propose credible alternatives — their action does not alone suffice. Direct action and disobedience have the capacity to block development and put pressure on the state, but the autonomous zones are insufficient to really protect all common goods. If we want to put an end to capitalism: Who can transform the productive apparatus? Isolated initiatives or a state that plans? We are faced with a problem of time: the reality of ecological crisis requires not only profound changes but rapid ones.
It is crucial to seize the state, and this must be done through the ballot box, through elections. Why? Because revolutionary armed action does not fit twenty-first-century French society. We are materialists: for decades, armed insurrections and guerrilla warfare have only led to the death of our comrades. The objective of victory in elections requires the construction of a revolutionary people. This is mathematically necessary: we need 50 percent plus one of the vote to win. It is above all necessary to mobilize abstentionists around a program that brings the people together.
A revolutionary people is needed in order to exercise power. Rallying against us already are the forces of money, capitalism, and the strong and organized multinationals. Ecological bifurcation that we want to put in place requires shattering the forces of money by state planning, radical regulation, and thus a strong power. This brings with it the necessity of a real clash with capitalism, and this can only be done with the support of the people.
A France Insoumise government necessarily requires democracy in the larger sense. These were the errors committed during [the Parti Socialiste’s Mitterrand’s spell as president from 1981 to 1995], specifically in 1981: the nationalizations were made without calling into question the management of the enterprises. This is different from the collectivization that we defend. The Socialists did not call for popular mobilization and were thus cut down. The ecological planning that we will put in place must be democratic and rely on the citizenry, drawing from popular aspirations for the total reorientation of our system.
More than the idea of dual power, France Insoumise’s goal is to seize the state and transform it by organizing continual popular interventions and its appropriation by the greatest number of people possible: notably by setting up a Constituent Assembly. But this must not exclude a dialectic with autonomous zones and experiments, and with popular mobilizations outside of the state. Our revolutionary strategy is a process that includes and intertwines the democratization of the state with the catalyzing of society by strong social movements outside the state, including experiments in new forms of life.
Looking ahead to the coming municipal elections, we have put forward the idea of a France Insoumise municipalism. For us, the commune [local-level authority] is above all a critical instrument in our political agenda: the citizens’ revolution. Of course, this cannot be realized in one town or city alone. Neither can it be done by winning many municipal races at once. The institutional role, the financial resources and productive level of communal territories do not permit this. Yet at the local level, we can form culture of permanent popular intervention, setting up the practices, habits, and new relationship with elected officials necessary to build the citizens’ revolution at the national level.
In this sense, local authorities are a space for deepening popular sovereignty.
One of the central tasks for the citizens’ revolution will also be to break with the mode of production, consumption, and exchange in order to put human beings in harmony with each other and with nature. Ecological planning is the concrete means by which to do this. And it is at the local level where its institutions and basic structures are found. It is at this level that the delicate management of real needs and the slow trickle of investments can be dealt with.
Upstream and downstream, it’s up to local democracy to realize what the market can never do. It will come down to municipalities dedicated to this ideal, beginning to put in place public authorities and local public companies, to perform biospheric assessments and to build up the know-how that ecological planning will need when the time comes at every level of public decision-making.
It is within this frame that we confront the rise of the far right within the political-media sphere. We are not coming up against a party but an ideological movement that derives from and fuses together the actors that share a will to protect bourgeois interests. This demands an openly anti-fascist response. The unexpected success of the march against racism and the far right [earlier this year] owes much to the work of our movement and shows the popular appetite in France for getting rid of the fascists. This was also a major factor behind the electoral victory of the Nouveau Front Populaire in July 2024.
We predict a showdown with fascism: “In the end, it will be us versus them,” as Jean-Luc Mélenchon has said for more than a decade. This battle demands the strengthening of tools that we have patiently built: France Insoumise media, communications both internal and public-facing on social media, our security service, and organizational discipline. This battle also demands that we never cede an inch on the ideological or programmatic terrain. Our harsh confrontation with the bourgeoisie prepares us for this combat. It is more and more violent, but we will not back down.