Introduction
Sarah Durieux shares the story of the snap French election of July 2024 and the way the left collaborated to win. Sarah presented this case study at FWD+Organise 2024, a conference hosted by Australian Progress in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.
Few expected these results, but I wasn’t surprised. It’s not the first time this year that we’ve achieved a seemingly impossible victory. Who thought France would get abortion enshrined into the constitution, which happened in March this year? Once again, over the last few weeks, we succeeded because we put into practice what we’ve learned, campaign after campaign, over the last few years.
Converging Movements, Accelerated by a Sense of Urgency
By calling for snap elections, President Emmanuel Macron created the most effective fuel for mobilization: a sense of urgency.
Three weeks to campaign was both worrying and energizing. Having led repeated mobilizations in recent months (on pension reform, on immigration), French activists felt exhausted. But for many of us on the activist left, the clear, time-bound objective of preventing the far-right coming to power at all costs provided us with boundless resolve, energy and efficiency. This sense of urgency – the key ingredient of this campaign – only bore fruit because it could be channeled through pre-existing solidarity networks waiting to be activated around a clear rallying call.
Over the past 15 years, the arrival of digital technology in the activist space has disrupted the way people mobilize globally and in France. That technology brought with it incredible possibilities but also led to further fragmentation. People and movements, equipped with new tools, are able to effectively campaign for specific causes practically on their own – outside of unions orestablished organizations and campaign coalitions. Much has been written about the immense benefits of technology for campaigning, but in France that also led to the loss of vital ties between causes, issue areas, spaces for collective action and between the people who power those movements. In some ways, tech weakened our capacities.
Seeing these gaps emerging in France, civil society initiatives tried to rebuild links between these spaces, for example in the run up to the 2022 presidential elections. In 2020, I took part in this “convergence of struggles” with the creation of the Rencontre des Justices (literally a “Meeting of the Justices”) which brought together climate, feminist and anti-racist collectives to discuss their respective fights, the singularity of their struggle and where they can come together, in particular ahead of the 2022 presidential election.
Links were created particularly among the climate movement and the movement against police brutality (for example, between organizations like Alternatiba and Justice pour Adama). On the eve of the 2022 presidential election which eventually saw Macron beat Marine Le Pen for the Presidency, a massive ‘Justice March’ was organized by climate, antiracist and feminist movements. More recent movements on pension reform or immigration have seen this trend towards common marches and movements reinforced. Climate activists chanted “Pensions and climate are the same fight” while dancing together on labor union floats. In a similar way, feminist organizations have increasingly included race and class concerns, ableism and the right of LGBTQIA+ people in their demands.
In addition, there’s been a collective realization of the importance of exerting greater electoral influence than ever before. To an American audience, this might seem obvious but French civil society has traditionally kept a distance towards partisan or political battles in order to preserve its independence. But many of us, activists of more recent generations, have realized that we can no longer leave politics to parties as these have been weakened by the electoral turbulence of recent years (as new parties emerged and old parties disappeared), and deserted by citizens who have turned to the internet, the street or civil society as better places to mobilize.
Why did all this play a role in beating the far-right in June and July 2024? Personal bonds of trust were forged over many years between different organizations. It was these bonds, combined with a new focus on politics, that enabled and powered the mobilization of the last few weeks.
A popular slogan over the last few weeks was “On s’engueulera après!” meaning “we’ll argue later!”. Beyond rivalries and disagreements, the bonds forged over the past years proved strong enough to mobilize a force that proved essential to the success of the New Popular Front and to the defeat of the far-right.
A Unifying Slogan, Against Hatred and for a Better Life
The urgency provided by President Macron’s unpredictable decision to dissolve parliament and the need for a united front on the Left, beyond our disagreement, allowed us to go straight to what mattered most and simplify our slogans, making it easier to connect with people beyond our activist circles. The clear danger of the far-right and our newfound ability to say what we are for – not just what we were fighting against – were particularly mobilizing. We quickly focused our messaging and narrative work on three ideas:
1. We are better united than alone in the face of hatred. That enabled us to speak to progressive voters reluctant to support certain parties in the New Popular Front coalition.
2. Voting means choosing a better life: breathing better (climate), eating better (climate, food, cost of living) and a better future for our children (to speak to the undecided)
3. Voting means not letting anyone else choose for you (that was aimed at those tempted by abstention).
We drew on studies in cognitive linguistics, which have shown that the simplicity of the messages and the link with people’s everyday lives accelerates the take-up of far-right discourse. Urgency enabled the progressive camp to be much more direct and engaging in its narrative. We worked on a common guide about these key messages that was distributed to all campaign teams and to content creators on the Internet, who independently used them and adapted them to their contexts.
Collective but Decentralized Mobilization
The announcement of the dissolution of parliament came on the heels of a previous campaign for the European elections. That proved helpful. The WhatsApp group we’d set up to discuss the European campaign never went quiet. “We’ve got to talk”: within 30 minutes of Macron’s announcement to call new elections, we were all on a Zoom call. We went from a group of 20 people to 50 people from various organizations that evening.
Those interpersonal links, the solidarity and shared trust that we’d patiently built got activated in less than an hour. At that first meeting, we discussed priority objectives on which we all agree: we need to press for left-wing unity among parties, we need to activate a massive mobilization of civil society, decentralized and led by grassroots organizations in an autonomous way, to complement the work of political parties.
Our WhatsApp group grew to over 130 members organized around a dozen thematic exchange groups. What’s special about this space is that it brought together campaign managers with experiences of different themes, audiences and tactics. The way we structured this groups and explained its purpose was clear: this was a space to share insights, offer and ask for help. It was explicitly not a command and control, vertical organization where one group decides for all the members who have to apply them.
We shared polling, memos and ideas. Partnerships on specific tactics were built within hours between some members. We organized trainings on door- to-door campaigning and how to use TikTok, for example. We talked strategy but there was no expectation that we would all agree. We encouraged each other to move fast and test ideas through shared tools. Spontaneous links were forged: some people made the connection with other digital organization spaces including grassroots movements in rural areas or working-class neighborhoods, for example.
The key learning from this campaign is this: there’s no need for a centralized organization encompassing all militant spaces but there is a need for an informal decentralized space where everyone can find support, resources and partners.
Each of these organizations already has the connections and confidence to do its own work. There is no need to centralize our actionsexcessively (for example on our calls to Get Out the Vote). The medium is the message: decentralizing the messengers increases their legitimacy with the target audiences.
Great initiatives were born on our group. For example, the “Call of the 18th of June” (a reference to a famous speech by General De Gaulle from London on 18 June 1940). Spearheaded by several organizations in our group, we made 18,000 phone calls to encourage people to vote. This is the largest initiative of its kind ever carried out in France. We launched “5 days to win,” an opengroup on the messaging app Telegram proposing simple mobilization actions and tips every day. The group grew to be 30,000-strong and focused on priority seats identified by shared data analysis. It allowed the deployment of thousands of volunteers through “victory convoys” in real life, boosted by social media influencers.
You don’t need control to win.
That is the lesson I draw from this campaign and one I will take forward to the next electoral battle. The strength and commitment of civil society organizations can make a big difference in an election. But for that to happen, movements need to be connected, to trust each other, and to have the means to pool their efforts around clear, self-defined and understandable slogans.
We won’t protect our democracy by saving the day at every election, but by building and sustaining the militant infrastructure across the country that made this victory possible. That work has only just begun.
This contribution was first published as part of a report by More in Common “From Apathy to Action – How France beat back the threat of the authoritarian far-right (for now) and what the US can learn from a crisis averted“, July 2024.
Explore Further
- Multitudes Foundation where Sarah Durieux is a Co-Director
- What Happened In France (in the Summer)? Sarah Durieux, Anat Shenker-Osorio; NEON
- Coalition Building: Start Here
- Election Campaign Skills
- Lessons from European Election 2024: Toolkits for Organic Social Media
- Fixing our Democracies and Winning Elections in the Age of Junk Politics: A Guide to Transformational Campaigning
- Commons Librarians’ Recommended Resources for FWD+Organise 2024
- Other resources from FWD+Organise 2024
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