French Communist MPs abandon Roussel and rally behind Mélenchon

According to Libération, the Communist group in the National Assembly announced this Thursday, 5 November, that it backed Jean-Luc Mélenchon, candidate of La France insoumise (LFI) in the presidential election, rather than Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the PCF (French Communist Party). The daily's headline quotes a line from the group: "We commit to supporting Jean-Luc Mélenchon". Libération speaks of a majority of the group, not all of it. At this stage we do not know the detail of the signatories, the reasons given one by one, or the response from the party leadership. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The move is a harsh one for an apparatus. Elected members, supposed to carry their party's line into the Palais-Bourbon (the seat of the National Assembly), are publicly saying the compass points elsewhere. One could read this as a squabble over turf, a matter of constituencies and electoral survival. That is possible, and we have no evidence to settle it. But one can also read it as pressure from below, from militants and voters who judge that division on the left is a luxury no one can any longer afford.

Luxemburg distrusted leaderships that confuse the party with its own summits. For her, initiative is born among the masses, and organisations that fail to hear it end up being bypassed. Here it is not strikers bypassing the apparatus but deputies, that is to say people from inside the system. A caution: this remains a parliamentary event, not a mass movement. The question is whether this pressure stays a game played among headquarters or becomes an open discussion, in the local branches, about what a left of rupture should be.

For the trap is well known. A rally negotiated between elected figures can be nothing more than one more arrangement, a way of managing the left as one manages a portfolio. The yardstick we propose, drawing on the Luxemburgist critique of reformism, is simple: does this realignment increase the confidence and capacity to act of working people, or does it invite them once again to delegate to a providential candidate? Backing a man is not worth a programme debated by those who will have to make it live.

The PCF, for its part, faces a question it would rather avoid: what remains of a leadership when its own elected members choose another flag? We shall see whether Fabien Roussel answers with discipline or with debate. The history of the left is full of leaderships that have confused the two.

We will know no more today. But one thing is already legible in this statement: when the base moves, the apparatus discovers that the old wall was only a partition.