2017 French elections: Why is the NPA criticizing the Left Front’s populism?
By
Kumaran Ira
16 February 2017
Amid the international crisis triggered by the election of President Donald Trump in the United States, and in France by the discrediting of President François Hollande’s Socialist Party (PS), bitter policy divisions are emerging among the petty-bourgeois parties that have for decades orbited around the PS. The New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) is criticizing the populism of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Left Front leader running as the presidential candidate of the Rebellious France movement.
In its February 11 article “Mélenchon campaign: an attempt to re-orient the French left around populism?”, the NPA attacks Mélenchon’s 2017 campaign. The NPA writes that it “goes hand in hand with deep transformations of fundamentals, insofar as Mélenchon seeks to respond to the disorientation of the ‘left population’ by proposing that it turn to populism.”
Mélenchon’s 2017 campaign, the NPA adds, “does not constitute a simple aggiornamento of the orientations of the workers movement, but seems to indeed consist of a plan for a major break with the history of the French left.” Mélenchon is trying to “distance himself from the traditions of the workers movement,” the NPA writes. “This rejection of the old symbols of the French left implies fundamentally a break with the traditions of the workers movement.” It notes that words including “exploitation,” “profit,” “capitalism,” and “socialism” do not appear in Mélenchon’s 2017 program.
The NPA’s criticisms of Mélenchon, whose Left Front contains parties with whom the NPA has worked closely for decades, are politically fraudulent. There is no question that Mélenchon is a defender of…