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Both the conservative Les Républicains and the Socialist Party (PS) have been hit hard by the rise of Emmanuel Macron and his centrist party. The PS is in particularly dire straits, polling at only around 5 percent. If it falls below that threshold in the election, it will not send any MEPs at all to the next Parliament.
“The risk is that the left is so deeply divided that there won’t be any French person to represent it in the Parliament,” said a staff member from the French delegation of the center-left Socialists & Democrats (S&D) bloc in the legislature. “What we're facing is a catastrophe.”
According to POLITICO's latest projection based on opinion polls, the party that won 13 seats in the last election would drop to five seats in the next Parliament — as part of a 133-strong Socialists & Democrats group. That's a serious comedown for the party that has produced pioneers of the European project such as François Mitterrand and Jacques Delors.
“We are going to lose a lot of MEPs,” said Christine Revault d’Allonnes-Bonnefoy, a Socialist MEP who has been mentioned as a possible candidate to lead her party in the May election. “Right now, we are doing the job, we’re getting on with things. It’s not enough, but I don’t have any magic wand to change things.”
Center-left parties are struggling across much of Europe but they are finding the going particularly tough in France, where the left has fractured into multiple parties and movements.
MEPs like Isabelle Thomas, Guillaume Balas and Edouard Martin have quit the PS to join “Générations-s,” a left-wing party created by former Socialist presidential candidate Benoît Hamon. Others like Emmanuel Maurel joined the far-left France Unbowed led by former MEP Jean-Luc Mélenchon. [...]