Rokhaya: Thanks for the question Thomas! I doubt these statements about law and order will change centrist voters’ perceptions of LFI. They may reinforce their existing hostility.

There are differences between the proposals. Attal supported a possible state of emergency, administrative searches and house arrests, alongside soldiers guarding public buildings, targeted social-media shutdowns and expanded surveillance. Glucksmann has endorsed partial curfews, subject to constitutional limits; I have not seen him advocate a state of emergency.

Attal’s position follows the direction established under Macron. In 2017, his government brought emergency powers into ordinary counter-terrorism law; these were made permanent in 2021. UN independent experts warned that the ‘global security law’ threatened privacy, freedom of assembly and expression. The 2021 “separatism” law also tightened controls on associations through requirements to uphold broadly defined republican principles. Human Rights Watch has documented its chilling effect on civil society especially environmental, anti-discrimination and human rights organisations.

My sense is that centrist voters who prioritise order may find the latest measures reassuring, even at the expense of civil liberties. They may consequently see LFI’s opposition as further evidence of irresponsibility. For LFI supporters, these declarations may reinforce the conviction that the centre is increasingly adopting authoritarian responses associated with the far right. Chasing its voters on this terrain risks normalising the far right’s agenda and weakening freedoms that protect everyone.

Alexander: Hi Thomas, thanks for the question. I do disagree with your qualification of me as “centrist”. I want to pass the Zucman tax on fortunes above €100m and stop a lot of the really inefficient handouts to businesses (France’s Cour des comptes identified is €211bn overall) even as many of these businesses pay out dividends, and redirect some of that revenue to increased spending on health and education and green energy infrastructure.

I’d love to see a common corporate tax rate at an EU level to stop multinationals evading taxes by choosing low-tax jurisdictions, want strict regulation of AI and would love to require, at minimum, any datacentres to use 100% renewable energy and ban them from causing deforestation. I want to see trade sanctions placed on Israel over the genocide in Gaza, and blocking measures used to protect the ICC against Trump’s attempt to destroy it.

I am, however, conscious that a lot of these things necessitate going beyond any single nation state if the goal is to have actual impact. For example, the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme is responsible for decreasing CO2 emissions by 800 million tons annually, which is more than 2x the total of France’s yearly emissions. That makes it probably the single most important and effective piece of climate legislation in the world.

Any policy programme that is an ecological one would be about building on this and expanding it to more sectors, not opening the door to undermining it by undermining EU law as a whole. Especially at a time when Europe’s right wing parties are pushing to roll back and weaken climate targets.

The problem is, that’s exactly what Mélenchon’s pledge to simply “disobey” EU rules whenever he wants to would lead to. This was the Brexit fever dream: imagining that you could pick and choose what you wanted, and that everyone else would just carry on while you did so. But everyone has domestic incentives to “disobey” different things and in different ways. What about a state that decides it wants to do what Ireland does with corporate tax rates when it comes to the ETS and the carbon border tax (CBAM)

So, no, until it’s gone from Chapter 17 of his programme, my view on Mélenchon won’t change, because France exists within a broader environmental, economic, and geopolitical context; that context imposes all kinds of constraints; and pretending that you can just ignore or waive them away isn’t going to convince me.

But, moving on to your question about the government’s strict crackdown on protests and pledge to go hard into ‘law and order’. It’s quite clear that France has a tradition of far too heavy handed and violent police repression of protest movements, and that deploying riot police in this way from the beginning helped create the conditions for what happened on 17 October. I think the government is playing a very dangerous game by trying to ban protests and implement curfews this week, with terrible implications and precedents for democracy and maintaining fundamental rights (and in fact French judges have stepped in to restore some protests that the government attempted to stop).

Attal’s statements about supporting a declaration of state of emergency or calling out the army are alarming. They’re nowhere near the same category as Glucksmann’s response, which called for ending the police munitions that have maimed protesters (like the LBD and the grenade de désencerclement), “better adapting” crowd policing strategies, and imposing fines on social media networks for allowing content that incites violence to spread. You’re certainly free to criticise Glucksmann, but I don’t think it’s accurate to place those two responses side by side.

One thing on which I would caution the left comes from the US experience, where the left created a significant political strategy problem for itself when it latched on to the slogan “defund the police,” which, to be frank, plays completely into the hands of the far right who can point to a night of chaos and looting and say “well this is what absent police looks like.” That’s certainly not a defense of the way the US or France does policing – hiring 10,000 crowd mediators trained in de-escalation and having them be present at protests would be a far more productive strategy than immediately deploying CRS and teargas. But the RN would love for the debate to be “looting OR police”, and it’s the wrong debate to fall into.