Despite the regime’s attempts to stigmatize La France Insoumise by portraying it as “far-left,” the term has historically designated a distinct political current in France — namely, organizations claiming a revolutionary perspective, especially those rooted in the Trotskyist tradition. Although Trotskyist organizations have lost part of their former electoral base, several recent election results demonstrate that revolutionary politics are not necessarily condemned to marginality, and that La France Insoumise has succeeded in capturing the radicalization of segments of the youth and working class.
Daniela Cobet
March 27 2026
If we take a closer look at the revolutionary left’s results in an election that largely foreshadows the issues at stake in next year’s presidential race, all lists combined received a total of just over 117,000 votes—a slight increase compared to the 2020 election, when turnout was extremely low due to the COVID-19 crisis. This number, however, continued the overall downward slope of the revolutionary left’s electoral influence compared to what it had achieved in the past, particularly during the period from 1995 to 2008.
1995–2008: When the revolutionary Left Polled Well Above 1%
During those years, the events surrounding the 1995 strikes, the crisis within the pluralist left, and the very strong results achieved by Arlette Laguiller and Olivier Besancenot in 1995, 2002, and 2007. These were also reflected at the municipal level, with remarkable results in major cities for revolutionary tickets despite a presence in fewer cities than today. In 1995, for example, the Lutte Ouvrière list led by Arlette Laguiller in Les Lilas won 15.63% of the vote, while in 2001 the revolutionary left combined won 20% of the vote in Gennevilliers, 9% in Lille, and 13% in Clermont-Ferrand.
The 2008 election presents a more complex case. While the number of tickets featuring revolutionary candidates was higher than ever and the results were significant, far from maintaining a consistently independent political line, they often fluctuated between revolutionary and reformist coaliations . The LCR formed numerous coalition lists with the institutional left over the years. This time, however, the Lambertist PT leaned into its “party of small-town mayors” card, led by Shivardi. Meanwhile, Lutte Ouvrière would field 70 candidates on left-wing coalition lists for the first time.
The revolutionary parties won an unprecedented number of city council seats on this occasion (79 for LO, about 50 for the LCR, and 45—including 40 in very small towns—for the POI), but at substantial cost. As Jean-Paul Salles points out, LO cited the “context of a strong right-wing government” at the time to justify “joining the Union de la Gauche (UG) lists in as many cities as possible”.
“In total, LO activists are active in nearly 200 municipalities: they are running independently in 117 municipalities and are represented on 70 UG (Union de la Gauche) tickets. This strategy, rejected by a minority within LO that would be expelled shortly thereafter, enabled the organization to secure 65 elected officials. Including Nathalie Arthaud in Vaulx-en-Velin—LO’s new spokesperson—who joined the 14 elected officials from the first round,” notes the historian. Thus, embracing alliances with parties such as the PCF(French communist party) but also the PS(Socialist Party). LO went so far as to commit “to voting for the budgets of this left-wing majority, at least for two or three years. That is, until Hollande became president, at which point it became unbearable even for the LO elected officials themselves.”
Mélenchon is winning over the revolutionary left’s vote.
From 2014 onward, the emergence of the Front de Gauche and the figure of Mélenchon began to dominate space to the left of the Socialist Party. However, this was at the expense of the revolutionary left. LO won only about ten local representitives, and the NPA about ten as well—a trend that did not fundamentally change in 2020, even though LO saw its number of elected representatives increase.
In a 2024 interview, Mélenchon candidly admitted (see from minute 46) that what convinced him to break with the Socialist Party was in part the electoral ground gained by Arlette Laguiller and Besancenot in the presidential elections. According to him, the 10% that voted for the revolutionaries were not necessarily committed to Trotskyism and could serve as the foundation for a radical left-wing project: The Front de Gauche (which garnered 12% in its first electoral campaign) or as we know it today; La France Insoumise.
The 2026 election took place within a broader context of declining influence among Trotskyist organizations, a shift that ultimately benefited La France Insoumise. We have even reached a point where even the term “far left” is now increasingly used by representatives of the French regime to refer to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s political movement. Encroaching on the revolutionary tradition while simultaneously painting a more radical picture of the Insoumise movement.
Nevertheless, two new phenomena have emerged. First, the near-complete dissolution of the current that emerged from the LCR—associated with Olivier Besancenot—into broader left-wing coalition lists, alongside significant sections of the left, effectively sacrificing its political independence at the municipal level. Second, the rise of Révolution Permanente as a new political and electoral force, capable—at least in the cities where it is present—of challenging for part of the space that Mélenchonism has increasingly contested with the revolutionary left in recent years.
The tragic Demise of the NPA–L’Anticapitaliste
With the full integration of the POI (PT) into La France Insoumise, a new stage has been reached in the long dismantling of a historic Trotskyist tradition in France, as it is steadily absorbed into the institutional left.
Even more significantly, the strategy adopted by NPA–L’Anticapitaliste in these elections made little distinction between the bourgeois, government-aligned left—represented by the Socialist Party, EELV (Europe Écologie Les Verts), and Place publique—with whom it readily formed joint lists, at times even in opposition to LFI(La France Insoumise), deemed insufficiently unified.
An isolated exception was long term presidential candidate for the NPA-A, Philippe Poutou in Bordeaux, which stemmed from a local disagreement with LFI. However, neither he nor the list succeeded in advancing to the second round or securing representation on the city council.
The elected officials of NPA–L’Anticapitaliste no longer embody an independent anti-capitalist politics, having instead integrated themselves into governing alliances with the institutional left, including openly bourgeois forces, with whom they now share local governing majorities. This represents a genuine political debacle for this historic current of French Trotskyism, while also marking a further encroachment by the institutional left into the political terrain traditionally occupied by revolutionaries.
With very few exceptions, neither the NPA-Révolutionnaires nor the Workers’ Party (PT) both born out of splits with the NPA-L’Anticapitaliste and the POI— were able to reclaim the electoral base that had belonged to the NPA or the Lambertist faction, despite significant efforts to form electoral lists for that purpose. In fact, both organizations achieved poor results: 18,445 votes (14,767 if we exclude district votes where they also ran citywide) for the 29 NPA-R lists in 26 cities, and just over 11,000 votes for the 59 PT lists.
As for the NPA-Révolutionnaires, the few slightly higher vote totals correspond to long-established branches of the former LCR in the suburbs of Bordeaux (Lormont and Cenon) and Rouen (Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray). These results mark a decline compared to the past, with the party retaining only a single elected seat in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, a city where the LCR and later the NPA have held seats since 1983. Meanwhile in major cities where it has a strong presence, such as Gennevilliers, the NPA-R achieved a rather dismal result: 108 votes, even though the list had 45 members, for a total of only 63 votes won. A reality that they seek to conceal by often presenting their votes combined with those of LO or by mixing sectarianism with denial, as in this article that criticizes certain RP campaigns without much argument while conveniently overlooking the result in Saint-Denis were RP held its highest scores.
Lutte Ouvrière: so many lists, yet so little to show
As the only revolutionary organization capable of running on a national scale, Lutte Ouvrière has broken its own record in terms of the number of lists and candidates, with 266 lists in 243 municipalities and over 11,000 candidates—a figure that undoubtedly reflects the organization’s material resources and nationwide network, as well as its more than 50 years of experience participating in municipal elections. The results in terms of votes vary depending on local conditions but are modest overall, with a total of under 80,000 votes and a percentage lower than in 2020.
While its results in small working-class towns in the North and East are sometimes significant and reflect both its historical presence and instances where LO’s ticket is the only opposition to the current mayor, in the largest urban centers the percentages are often low. In the largest urban centers, the percentages are often low. This includes places where LO fields its national figures, such as Nathalie Arthaud in Pantin (3.19%) or Jean-Pierre Mercier in Poissy (1.1%). They retain a total of 24 elected officials, a figure that falls within their historical average—setting aside the specific case of the 2008 election, to which we have already referred—which ranges from 10 (2014) to 34 elected officials (2001). This stagnation does not seem to concern the organization’s leadership, which sees the “rise of reactionary ideas” as the explanation for the revolutionary left’s poor results. They take the mere act of putting forward their tickets and being visible as a given.
Révolution Permanente: A New Political Force on the Revolutionary Left
Founded just three years ago, Révolution Permanente was a first-time participant in the municipal elections. After unsuccessfully attempting to form joint slates with Lutte Ouvrière and the NPA-Révolutionnaires, the strategy was to field a limited number of tickets, nine in total, focused on a few key districts, and to build the capacity to conduct genuine grassroots campaigns. Through intense political agitation, these campaigns aimed to initiate dialogue and seek to influence a (small) segment of the working masses. Behind candidates—workers, students, or lawyers representing workers—each campaign advanced demands rooted in the needs and aspirations of the people, highlighting both the futility of institutional illusions promoted in particular by France Insoumise and the need to prepare a response from below around a program of class independence that raises the struggle for a workers and aimed at transforming society.
It brought together pressing national demands concerning wages, pensions, and racist laws; anti-imperialist slogans opposing militarization and the genocide in Gaza, as well as calls for the defeat of U.S. and Israeli imperialist aggression against Iran; radical democratic demands; and anti-capitalist responses to issues such as housing, access to healthcare, and education—all linked to the need to challenge corporate profits and place these essential services under workers’ control. The campaigns also focused on the power of big business over cities, raising the issue of confronting Xavier Niel in Paris 13, Rodolphe Saadé in Marseille, the expropriation of the aerospace industry in Toulouse, and fortunes built on slavery in Bordeaux. This included a direct critique of the prevailing law-and-order consensus and the institutional left’s alignment with it
In Saint-Avold, a class-independent, anti-capitalist slate backed by Révolution Permanente succeeded in rallying numerous workers, militant trade unionists, and former Yellow Vests around Christian Porta, a labor activist and local figure. This list was formed to challenge the far right in one of its strongholds and to engage with workers tempted by the RN. The far-right list is led by the head of the local gendarmerie, who has repeatedly cracked down on workers at Neuhauser, Christian Porta’s factory. The campaign resonated strongly with the public and led to a rally that derailed Marine Le Pen’s intended triumphant visit to the department. The more than 6% of the vote obtained and the activist group that has been formed will be key assets in confronting the new RN-led town hall and continuing the fight against the far-right.
In terms of results, the venture paid off. The nine lists won a total of more than 12,000 votes—a modest figure but that represents a very high ratio compared to the rest of the revolutionary left, with remarkable percentages in major cities, all within a context of intense political competition. It is worth noting that wherever voters had to choose between an RP list and LO, NPA-R, or PT lists, the RP list came out well ahead, sometimes even garnering more votes than all the others combined. Three of these lists garnered more than 6% (Saint-Denis, Marseille 4th/5th, and Saint-Avold, with populations of 150,000, 95,000, and 15,000 respectively), and two RP city councilors were elected to the city council of the second-largest city in the Île-de-France region.
The center of gravity of Revolution Permanente´s strategy lies neither in elections nor in institutions, and our participation in them is part of the revolutionary tradition. It consists of using every opening in the veneer of democracy that masks the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to carry out revolutionary agitation and win positions useful to the struggle of the working class and the popular sectors to overthrow capitalism. While votes and elected officials are therefore not an end in themselves for us, they do serve as a barometer of the effectiveness of political agitation and of our capacity, as revolutionaries, to explain and convince a segment of our class of our program.
These positive results are all the more encouraging given that they have emerged in a context that is very different from that of the 1995–2008 period, when revolutionaries were able to capitalize on the crisis facing traditional left-wing organizations following the experience of the “plural left.” Since the mid-2010s, the situation has changed, as there is now a political force to the left of the Socialist Party that seeks to engage in dialogue with a certain degree of radicalism and is demonized by the regime: La France Insoumise. What the results of Révolution Permanente demonstrate, even on a very small scale, that Trotskyism is not condemned to remain a marginal electoral force, and that La France Insoumise is capturing at the ballot box the radicalism expressed among sections of the youth and the working class
The outcome in Saint-Denis is emblematic because, despite the powerful electoral momentum of La France Insoumise, RP was able to capture a significant portion (over 7%) of the anti-Hanotin vote by waging a campaign that directly challenged the incumbent mayor’s policies and the lukewarm measures of the LFI-PCF platform. Elsa Marcel’s sudden emergence as a political figure in the city will provide her with a favorable position on the city council of the main city led by LFI, from which she can engage in politics with complete independence for seven years. In her first speech to the city council, she emphasized: “In the city council, we will dedicate our term to the service of class struggle. As we’ve already said, we’re not professional politicians, and we’re not here to build a career. We want to be the eyes and ears of young people, workers, and working-class neighborhoods, and a lever for every protest, every strike, and every struggle”.
Lessons for rebuilding a revolutionary left
Far from any “turf war,” an examination of the various campaigns and election results of the revolutionaries show that by breaking with routine, it is possible to bring revolutionaries out of the margins and compete for the consciousness of a significant segment of our class. In this regard, we regret that the majority choice of the rest of the revolutionary left is to “plant their flag” in elections, content with their mere presence, without waging genuine campaigns, and by defending platforms that rarely seek to engage with the concrete (including local) concerns of the workers and residents they address.
While the accelerating dynamics of the international class struggle and the growing tendencies towards war only serve to reinforce this need, elections can be one tool among others in the revolutionary struggle. Despite our disagreements, a united front of the revolutionary left—drawing on the strengths and weaknesses of each organization—would be better situated to embody such an ambition and to amplify anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist ideas than three or four competing lists, which calls for considerable effort and resources for often negligible results.
This has already been done in the past, for example in the 1977 and 1983 municipal elections. According to Jean-Paul Salles, “after several legislative by-elections in which the far left faced off in a divided state (…), three far-left groups ran as a united front in the municipal elections of March 13 and 20, 1977. As early as January 1977, LO, the LCR, and the OCT reached an agreement, distancing themselves from both the right and the left of the Programme Commun (PS, PCF, and MRG). They were able to present 56 lists in 30 major cities (27 cities and 3 lists in Lyon, 6 in Marseille, and 20 in Paris) under the slogan “For Socialism, All Power to the Workers. “.He recalls that Lutte Ouvrière, in its editorial titled ‘Success of the Revolutionary Far Left’ published the day after the 1977 elections, acknowledged that the ‘united front’ (sic) agreement had been undeniably successful.
Today, this tactic already exists in other countries, such as Argentina, where the country’s main Trotskyist organizations have maintained an electoral front for the past 15 years. The FIT-U, while preserving the independence of each organization and the freedom to criticize one another. Among other things, this coalition has made it possible, on several occasions, to elect representatives rooted in workers’ and popular struggles, and to forge leaders who today play a key role in confronting the brutal offensive of Milei’s far right and the complacency of Peronism. Myriam Bregman, the candidate in the last presidential election, is emerging as the main opponent to Milei in the eyes of the general public, and some opinion polls show her leading the rankings of the country’s politicians.
This is a reality the revolutionary left must confront head-on if it is to rise to the urgent challenges posed by the crisis of capitalism, the rise of the far right, and growing militarization—and to build an independent, class-based response by preparing for the struggles ahead. In this sense, following these municipal elections, Révolution Permanente reiterates, once again, its proposal to initiate a process of discussion and exploration with a view to the joint or coordinated participation of revolutionary parties in the upcoming elections.
