When a left-wing coalition came first this month in France’s parliamentary elections and upended a predicted victory for the far right, supporters filled the streets. Some cried, some danced. “The left has awakened,” a supporter said. “We’ve shown that something else is possible.”
Less than two weeks later, that seemed less certain.
Almost immediately after their victory, the parties in the coalition started fighting among themselves. Then on Thursday, their candidate lost the election for the president of the National Assembly, a vote that had gained outsize importance in a fragmented political landscape in which no party or bloc holds an outright majority.
Now, many are wondering what happens next.
“It’s going to be hard,” said Zahia Hamdane of France Unbowed, the far-left party of the firebrand leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on Friday. “I took it very badly yesterday.”
The alliance of four left-wing parties — Communists, Socialists, Greens and France Unbowed — was hastily pulled together after President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called for snap elections last month.
It called itself the New Popular Front, and at first its determination to prevent the surging far right from coming to power helped the parties set aside their differences.
After several days of negotiations that stretched into the early morning, the leaders agreed on a platform that included raising France’s monthly minimum wage, lowering the legal retirement age and making the asylum process more generous and smooth.
That cooperation continued even into the second round of the election. Candidates from the left, and some from Mr. Macron’s party, dropped out of three-way races so voters could focus on one adversary — the National Rally, Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant party.
The plan worked. The New Popular Front won about 190 seats in the assembly, followed by Mr. Macron’s party with 150. They sent the far right to the third place, an unexpected achievement that to many felt like a groundbreaking victory.
“We thought, finally,” Ms. Hamdane said.
But immediately, the problems started.
While formally it is in Mr. Macron’s hands to pick the prime minister, the left claimed that its victory gave it the right to propose a name — only it could not agree on who that should be.
France Unbowed, the biggest in the left-wing coalition, supported the candidacy of Huguette Bello, the president of the regional council of La Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean and a former member of its Communist Party.
The Socialist Party, the second-biggest party in the group, backed Laurence Tubiana, a veteran climate negotiator. But the parties rejected each other’s candidates, reflecting the deep differences between them.
The Socialist Party accused France Unbowed of being “radical” and uncompromising. France Unbowed said the Socialists had hegemonic ambitions and was unwilling to break decidedly with Mr. Macron.
When it came to the vote for the president of the National Assembly, the parties managed, at last, to present a common candidate, André Chassaigne, a Communist Party lawmaker.
“The people had faith, they followed it like the pope’s death,” Mr. Chassaigne told the French outlet Mediapart on Thursday. “We had rekindled hope.”
But after three tense rounds of voting, he was defeated by Mr. Macron’s candidate and incumbent president of the Assembly, who had also garnered the support of right-wing forces in Parliament.
That loss has further diminished the left’s chances of influencing Mr. Macron’s choice of a prime minister, even though representatives still maintain that they will come up with a common candidate.
“It’s a defeat for the left,” said Patrick Weil, a historian at the Sorbonne University in Paris. “And a big deception for their voters.”
He said the left’s “fighting like dogs” to come up with a name for the prime minister instead of negotiating with the centrists in the National Assembly led to the result.
But Mr. Macron’s centrists had made it clear that they would not engage with the far-left parties within the coalition.
Pieyre-Alexandre Anglade, a lawmaker from Macron’s Renaissance group, said in the National Assembly on Thursday that centrist parties were ready to govern with the left “if they make the choice to leave their crazy alliance with France Unbowed.”
Others agreed. “Escape the Stockholm syndrome that the New Popular Front has become,” the independent senator Claude Malhuret said on Thursday in the Senate. “You deserve better than be treated like bedbugs.”
But even Socialist lawmakers who were not shy about criticizing their allies feared that leaving the alliance would be seen as a betrayal by voters.
“We can’t show the middle finger to the electoral results,” said Emmanuel Grégoire, the former deputy mayor of Paris and a newly elected lawmaker with the Socialist Party.
He and others blamed underhanded maneuvering by Mr. Macron and the right, whom the French people had not chosen to govern, for the outcome.
“A pact between losers,” Sarah Legrain, a lawmaker with France Unbowed, called it.
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