Sunday, March 15 marked the first round of municipal elections in cities and neighborhoods across France, a crucial preview of the presidential elections set to take place in 2027. In the context of high voter abstention (less than 60% of voters taking part), a crisis of legitimacy for President Emmanuel Macron, and the rise of the far-right Nationally Rally (RN) party, the future of the political landscape in France was far from certain.
It is with this context in mind that Révolution Permanente (RP), our sister organization and member of the Current for Permanent Revolution (CPR-FI), decided to run municipal candidates in nine cities across the country, with an uncompromisingly anti-capitalist platform centered around expropriation of vacant housing, opposition to increases in military budgets, ending state subsidies for large corporations, and placing city public services under the control of workers and communities. They defended these positions while rallying with the movement for Palestine, and against militarization towards the war in Iran, never losing sight of their internationalism or the necessity of class struggle for winning both economic and social demands.
Whether they were in cities historically controlled by the institutional Socialist Party (PS), or in places where the RN is gaining ground, they consistently messaged around this vision with slates made up of ordinary workers and students in constant communication with their communities and in their workplaces. Despite participating in municipal elections for the first time in their history, they garnered over 12,000 votes across the country, securing over six percent of the vote in several cities while outperforming other far-left coalitions in every election they stood in. In cities like Toulouse and Saint-Avold, this marked the highest electoral results achieved by any far-left party in decades, while in Saint-Denis RP was able to cross the threshold for electing two city councilors, Elsa Marcel and Dorian Gonthier, into office.
While the numbers may seem modest for a country of this size, these results signal an increasing openness to anti-capitalist and revolutionary ideas — and a recognition that workers across the world are desperately in need of a project that can organize those aspirations into movements that can meaningfully challenge the existing order. RP was also able to achieve these results without relying on electoral maneuvering and “pragmatic” alliances with sellout politicians that presided over decades of austerity. Their achievements hold lessons for socialists everywhere, including in the United States.
Emphasizing How We Win over Whether We Win
Revolutionary socialists use elections differently from most other political parties. Because we oppose capitalism and its political structures, we do not seek out the responsibility of carrying out its policies of austerity, exploitation, and repression. Instead, we use elections to mobilize people around our central ideas, fostering the developments of movements from below and holding our candidates accountable to our political strategy. This often means running in elections that we are unlikely to win, but can still use to call attention to problems created by capitalism and how the working class can organize to solve them. In this sense, how we win is more important to us than winning in the first place.
Contrast this with political parties whose only goal is to win the elections they run in: either they stop short of challenging the capitalist system, or their candidates go back on their campaign promises and become professional politicians just like the ones they tried to unseat. In order to placate a wider audience and compete with the center-left PS, La France Insoumise (LFI) has to pay lip service to “French sovereignty” and keep their antiwar politics within the bounds of French imperialism. While claiming the mantle of a “program of rupture” towards the capitalist system, in reality they defend the right of the French government to send weapons and ships to their colonies, and seek to rehabilitate NATO as a “peacekeeping force.” Similarly, Zohran Mamdani in the United States walked back his prior support for defunding the NYPD, keeping their budget intact and gutting several public services in the city budget. Because these parties don’t fundamentally challenge capitalism, they are forced into situations where they must counterbalance their popular support against the pressures of capitalist institutions.
As revolutionaries, our strategy is not to gain political power by winning as many “progressive” or “friendly” politicians into office as possible. Rather than subordinating class struggle to electoral campaigns, we subordinate our electoral campaigns to the development and broadening of class struggle. The greatest example of this comes from elected Congresspersons Myriam Bregman and Nicolás del Caño, members of our sister organization the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS) in Argentina, who consistently vote against military and police budgets, use their platforms to agitate against the repressive government of Javier Milei, and lead movements in the streets against the capitalist system there. It is the movement of the working class which can win the measures we so desperately need, not electeds that we endorse and trust to “do the right thing” once in office.
Electoral “Hurdles” and How to Overcome Them
Most elections in France work under a “two round” system, where many candidates can present themselves during the first round and the top two advance to the next. This allows for greater party diversity than in the United States, but the dynamics are the same: most votes go towards either the (Center) Left or to the (Center or Far) Right, leaving workers and the oppressed without true representation in government. Like the U.S. government, France is a historically imperialist power, still maintaining political control over a dozen colonies, economic control over many of its former colonies, and regularly beating the drums of war and rearmament against threats to French capital.
There are remarkable parallels between French and U.S. political parties as well: the Democrats and the PS, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and LFI, and the Republicans increasingly resembling the RN. In both countries there have been increasing levels of police and state repression against movements and marginalized peoples, and in both countries there lacked a serious organized force which can organize the working class to fight capitalism — until now.
There are a number of oft-repeated cliches circulated against the idea of organizing independently of the capitalist parties in the United States. This includes an inflated sense of the hurdles imposed by the two-party system, and an overemphasis on winning elections in order for socialists to get anywhere in U.S. politics. In reality, it is not that hard to win local elections on an independent ballot line — even Bernie Sanders, who unfortunately today serves as a cheerleader for the Democratic Party, was able to become mayor of his state capital and eventually a U.S. Senator by running as an independent. What matters a lot more than tactical decisions around electability are the politics one chooses to run on, and how big of a movement their policies can inspire. This is especially the case when “lesser evilism” as an argument for centrist candidates is weaker than ever, as their continued failures in office pave the way for the Far Right to take power in the future.
Our comrades in RP have shown that it is not impossible or idealistic to contest elections between these major parties — either in the United States or in France. In just a few years of its existence and the first time it has participated in local elections, RP won thousands of votes across the country and secured two seats in the city council of a major city. They did so by standing firm on a bold anti-capitalist platform while striving to connect their communities and workers already engaged in struggle. They presented candidates that did not look like professional politicians, but were ordinary working people who were willing to accept a salary no greater than the average nurse or teacher.
A working class party that fights for socialism can also play a role much greater than winning electoral races in a few places. This kind of party can centralize and coordinate movements, including the fight for tenants rights against landlords, solidarity campaigns with Palestine and the people of Iran, rapid response networks against ICE detentions, and more. DSA itself has led the struggle in many of these campaigns nationally in workplaces and communities, and a growing number of rank-and-file members are questioning the organization’s ties to the Democratic Party. Those campaigns could become centers for the building of a mass socialist party that does not give an inch to liberalism or the far-right, and advanced the struggle for working class independent on its own terms.
The strength of the socialist movement doesn’t come from its ability to replicate the electoral strategy of its opponents, but from its ability to embolden and take advantage of the great power which we contain collectively as the working class. Instead of electing people who we hope will carry out change on our behalf, we strategically run our own members in elections to serve as tribunes of the people, who understand far better how to solve problems in our communities than our managers and politicians. When working class people understand this and are willing to come together to fight those who would prevent us from taking control of our society, they can be the greatest political force on Earth.
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