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PARIS: France’s left-wing parties attempted Friday to patch together an alliance ahead of June parliamentary elections which would give them a chance of thwarting newly re-elected President Emmanuel Macron.
The left fielded four major candidates in France’s April presidential election, splitting the vote. All of them were eliminated in the first round.
The hard-left France Unbowed party, the Socialists, the Greens and the Communists are now attempting to agree a united front before a weekend deadline ahead of the June 12 and 19 polls.
“I’m very hopeful that these negotiations will come to a successful end in the next few hours,” the head of the environmentalist EELV party, Julien Bayou, told the France 2 channel.
“We can agree on the fundamentals and much more,” he said, adding that “a deal was in sight” between his party and France Unbowed, known in French by its initials LFI.
The multi-party talks are being led by LFI chief Jean-Luc Melenchon, who finished third in the presidential election and now the dominant figure on the French left.
The Socialist Party, which is fighting for survival after winning less than two percent in the presidential election, indicated Friday that it could broadly accept 12 core policy proposals by Melenchon.
But the party then suspended talks and called for a “guarantee” that all parties would be respected in the alliance and that Melenchon “ends any hegemonic way of thinking.” Analysts say that any alliance will require left-wing parties to overcome historic rivalries and hammer out a tricky agreement to divide up parliamentary constituencies.