The Left in Europe - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

France
Paris, at the edges of the massif central and on the Mediterranean coast. 2 Its
voters are typically men aged over 45 and members of the highest age
groups. It is markedly underrepresented among voters aged between 18 and
29. Its social composition is indicative of a traditional working-class party.
Its voters tend to have low or intermediate educational qualifications. They
are often in work, such as manual workers, while members of the technical
intelligentsia are less well represented. In relation to the general population
a larger proportion of members of the socio-cultural professions vote PCF.
The party is noticeably underrepresented among the unemployed, who are
more likely to support the parties of the extreme Left. 3
Within the left-wing camp the PCF has been a rival of the PS on the one
hand and the parties and groupings of the extreme Left on the other. The
latter include the above-mentioned LCR, the Lutte Ouvrière and the Parti
des Travailleurs, who entered the European Parliament in 1999 on a common
list and in the 2002 presidential elections managed to win 11 percent
of the votes (the PCF under Robert Hue got 3.37 percent). In the 2007
presidential elections the PCF under Marie-George Buffet received 1.9 percent,
and in the parliamentary elections that same year 4.3 percent, i.e. 15
seats as “Gauche démocrate et républicaine”, to which the Greens also belong.
These results call for close analysis and open discussions on the
party’s sense of identity, its strategy, its programme, and its organizational
structures.
This was the task facing the extraordinary party congress of the PCF in
December 2008. What were the results? Alongside Marie George Buffet,
the former editor-in-chief of L’Humanité, Pierre Laurent, was elected head
of a new collective leadership, set up at the demand of members in the interests
of greater efficiency. The political resolution of the party congress
attempted to define the political strategy in the light of the new realities of
capitalism and the calls for radical social change aggravated by the crisis.
The search for alternative paths took account of the PCF ’s concrete strategic
experience of participation in government, the successful collective
movement at the time of the 2005 referendum, the failed attempt to rally
the anti-neo-liberal forces around a single presidential candidate, the poor
election results at the national level and the occasional good results in local
elections. Eighty percent of the delegates voted in favour of a broad leftwing
front for the European elections of June 2009 with as many political
2 Tim Spier 2007. Ausnahmeerscheinung oder Normalität? Linksparteien in Westeuropa in: Tim Spier,
Felix Butzlaff, Matthias Micus and Franz Walter: Die Linkspartei, VS Verlag, Wiesbaden. p. 96f.
I.e. parties and tendencies to the left of the and
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