Political timing doesn’t get much luckier. As around 200 people were gathering to listen to a discussion on La France Insoumise (LFI) in Bethnal Green, word came through that the French parliament had rejected an austerity budget and Macron’s government had collapsed. The mood was definitely on the upbeat side.

An obvious question might be “who on earth can organise a meeting of 200 people on a Wednesday night to listen to a discussion about French politics?” The surprising answer is “the same people who organised a meeting about Belgian politics in the same venue a couple of weeks before.” It was in fact the fifth of a series organised by the Pelican Collective, a venue which offers “countercultural events, fundraisers and socials, talks, workshops and film screenings, alongside community meals, coffee mornings and more.” They also seem to be in favour of joy, but let’s not hold that against them in view of the other excellent things they do.

Before getting onto the politics of the event, a word on the composition. With a handful of exceptions, it looked to me that everyone was under forty and I recognised maybe three people. This was a group of people too young to groan when a chap with an American accent announced himself by saying “My name is Jeff and I’m a member of the Spartacist League.” My recollection is that Jeff argued that the LFI is useless and leading the French working class to defeat.

Another striking thing was when one of the event organisers spoke about the venue and how the political spaces for radical politics, even rooms in pubs have vanished. He asked the audience to put their hand up if they had a living room. I saw fewer than half a dozen hands go up. However, this audience is really enthusiastic about a political project to the left of Labour and is engaging with debates around other experiences and what is possible.

Stathis Kouvelakis, formerly of Syriza and now active in the LFI, was the only person on the platform I knew. I’ve forgotten the names of the other two people on the platform and will add them when I find them. It would have seemed odd to take notes and apparently the centre is getting grief from the Daily Telegraph.

Fighting Islamophobia

The speakers summarised the evolution of La France Insoumise over the last several years. Unlike other left formations, it has drawn lessons from Syriza’s betrayal of the Greek and European working class when it capitulated to the EU and is programmatically committed to challenging its reactionary, neoliberal aspects. This is very different from the English nationalism which drove Brexit. The LFI is committed to building support in working class migrant communities and has identified Islamophobia as the heart of French populist and state racism. It is anti-imperialist and has had a high profile opposing the Gaza genocide. This has led to significant internal tensions. The French Socialist Party, which is currently part of the New Popular Front, of which LFI is the main component, has a long history of supporting Zionism and Palestine is one of the sticks with which the ruling class is trying to delegitimise the LFI. Le Figaro, for example, offered an unhinged masterclass in this sort of propaganda.

For my money, the least satisfactory part of the discussion was on the internal life of the LFI and its lack of democracy. This was justified on the basis that it is a rapidly evolving organisation with a very heterogenous membership which ranges from someone who liked a Tik Tok video to Trotskyists and all points in between. But that is a subject for another day.

Those poor centrists

The Economist called the vote against Macron’s government “a grubby political compact Marine Le Pen, boss of the hard-right National Rally (RN) party, joined forces with a left-wing alliance dominated by a former Trotskyite, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to squeeze the life out of France’s centrists.” Boo hoo. I am more inclined to agree with the NPA who say that the economic and social crisis have created a social crisis of a sort not seen for decades. Both LFI speakers were firm on the point that there is much more to politics than parliamentary procedures and that the real fight will be in the mobilisations that will follow.

As the meeting was one of a series exploring what to do next in Britain, the chair encouraged people to offer views on that and it was striking that there is a genuine open-mindedness on the subject. Inevitably there was a demand that Corbyn pull something together, but despite the man’s many virtues, that is a bit like arguing Mick Jagger is the future of music. I had much more sympathy with the woman who said that new times require new leaderships. Just where this political leadership will come from is the idea that the group behind these meetings seems committed to exploring. The MPs who lost the Labour whip were not mentioned at all, even though they seem to me like an obvious starting point. No one is quite sure where the Greens might fit into this process, though to be fair neither are the Greens.

So, we seem to be in for exciting times in France and well done to the organisers of this series of meetings for allowing the experiences to be shared and ideas explored in an open and pluralistic way.