The Return of l'Histoire

...Under French law, workers are entitled to long leaves, on full salary, if they serve as offi cers of unions or political parties...

...Much will depend on the NPA’s long-term relationship with the Socialists...

...And he knows how to make the most of it...

...Royal wasn’t having it...

...While the Socialists can still win local elections—they creamed Sarkozy’s party in municipal elections in March—they currently have no national leaders capable of prevailing in national elections, whether for president or parliament...

...But there was an unintended consequence: The Communist party, the junior partner in the government, started to erode...

...In last year’s election, Sarkozy defeated a charismatic, if somewhat eccentric, Socialist, S?gol?ne Royal, who took 47 percent of the vote...

...It turns out you can’t be a revolutionary party and a governing party at the same time...

...Bertrand Delano...

...In fact, though the public doesn’t know it, this is largely a fraud...

...Tellingly, he was co-opted to the LCR’s Central Committee in 1996, before he went to work for the postal service...

...The strategy worked beautifully in 1981, when Mitterrand was elected president and the Socialists secured a majority in the National Assembly...

...After 1945, the Socialists supported NATO and European integration, whereas the Communists aligned themselves with the Soviet Union and resisted European unifi cation as an “American capitalist plot...

...Besancenot’s private life is even more intriguing...

...The reference is to the far-right National Front, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, which exerted undue infl uence in French politics from 1983 to 2007...

...The week after the election, Fran?ois Hollande, the Socialist party leader and the father of Royal’s four children, separated from her—both personally and politically—and made it clear that he intended to be the party’s next presidential candidate...

...Besancenot, moreover, never actually worked much as a mailman...

...On May 6, in an interview with Rouge, the LCR magazine, he praised the “internationalist” dimension of the Cuban Revolution...

...Besancenot later separated from her, but remained Krivine’s prot?g...

...gets only 13 percent, S?gol?ne Royal 9 percent...

...Last spring, shortly before launching the NPA, he visited his “friends” in Havana, where he “met with various militants...

...With his boyish face, broad smile, and big eyes, Besancenot appeals to his generational peers, women, and even older people, who tend to see him as their virtual son...

...The Castro regime, of course, was a Soviet proxy for some 30 years, from the early 1960s to 1991...

...He is fi rst and foremost a Revolutionary Communist League apparatchik who joined the working class at the party’s request, fi rst as a supermarket warehouse worker and then as a mailman, in order to acquire the politically necessary proletarian credentials...

...Technically, he still qualifi es as a mailman and earns less than 1,200 euros a month...

...Her contacts in the French media have apparently been crucial in her common-law husband’s meteoric rise...

...Michel Gurfi nkiel, a French writer and journalist, chairs the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Paris...

...The PC fell from 20 percent of the national vote to less than 5 percent today...

...The chief reason for Besancenot’s popularity is that, like Barack Obama (to quote Michelle Obama), “he’s cute...

...He got a job with the French postal service in 1997, when he was 23...

...In the beginning, its main task was to help the KGB infi ltrate New Left groups, including Trotskyite parties, both in Western countries and in the Third World, and to make sure they aligned themselves with the Soviet Union, not China...

...According to a recent OpinionWay/Le Figaro/LCI poll, 17 percent of the French are considering supporting him...

...This accounts for both the spread of Castroite regimes in Latin America in recent years and the consolidation of a global anti-Western alliance, from Hugo Ch?vez in Venezuela to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran...

...She owns an apartment in Paris on the exclusive Left Bank, where she lives with Besancenot...

...Moreover, 65 percent of all respondents say they have a “very positive” opinion of him...

...Incidentally, the same holds true on the right: Rama Yade, a lovely young woman of Senegalese descent, is one of the most popular and media-friendly ministers in the Sarkozy government...

...The last great Socialist leader, Fran?ois Mitterrand, although himself a moderate, if not a closet conservative, determined in the 1960s that the Socialists would have to enter a coalition with the Communists in order to win elections...

...Younger Socialist comers, like Pierre Moscovici, a former minister for European affairs, and Julien Dray, Royal’s former ?minence grise, stepped into the fray...

...And Havana continues to serve as a capital in exile for many of them...

...He coauthored a book in praise of Che Guevara in 2007...

...The KGB networks, however, have continued to operate, both inside and outside Russia...

...But Le Pen was never Mitterrand’s poodle...

...He went to college—Nanterre University in Greater Paris—and earned an M.A...

...That would secure it a voice in local and regional assemblies and seats in the European parliament, though not necessarily a breakthrough to the French National Assembly, given the complexities of French electoral law...

...Another reason for Besancenot’s popularity is that he is supposedly working class...

...gets 19 percent, Socialist chairman Fran?ois Hollande 10 percent, and Royal 9 percent...

...But what if another party of the left were to replace the Socialists, or even just give them some competition...

...Then he met his current companion, St?phanie Chevrier...

...And as for the recently paroled Jean-Marc Rouillan, the former head of Action Directe, a terrorist group responsible for several murders in the 1970s, Besancenot let it be known that the two had lunch together recently...

...Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the FrenchGerman icon of the 1968 student revolution in France and a leader of the German Green party, backs him...

...Some former Communists have joined the Socialist party, but most true believers have opted for an array of far left groups: no less than three Trotskyite mini-parties, a chaotic Green party, and some other cult-like splinter organizations...

...Besancenot is both...

...Until recently, this would have seemed far-fetched...

...Today, Besancenot describes Cuba as a “truly progressive” society...

...What Sarkozy seems to be saying is that Besancenot’s New Anticapitalists in turn will divide and weaken the French left, and thus help the right win the crucial 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections...

...He is getting support from all sides...

...The Return of l’Histoire The New Anticapitalist party breathes (poisonous) life into the French left BY MICHEL GURFINKIEL Nicolas Sarkozy’s greatest stroke of luck so far in his brief tenure as president of France has been the disintegration of his principal opposition, the Socialist party...

...Besancenot’s popularity has already borne fruit: the transformation of the tiny LRC into the suddenly chic New Anticapitalist party...

...The Soviet empire disintegrated in 1991...

...Later on, Cuba was assigned an even more ambitious mission: to supervise and coordinate guerrilla and terrorist networks, including Islamic networks, under KGB guidance...

...He has been on leave almost continuously, either as a union activist or as an LCR fi gure— assistant to an LCR member of the European Parliament, party spokesman, or presidential candidate...

...First, he has no working class background at all...

...Bov?, the self-styled “organic farmer” who made his name attacking McDonald’s, jumped on board too...

...Consider his actual, unauthorized biography...

...While ostensibly anti-Socialist, the party actually helped the Socialists win elections by dividing and weakening the French right...

...After majoring in literary studies at the Sorbonne, she lived and traveled extensively in Latin America...

...Likewise, Besancenot is not going to be a Sarkozy man in partibus...

...So does, apparently, Nicolas Hulot, the French Al Gore (a TV anchorman who launched a big “nonpolitical ecology awareness” movement two years ago...

...His parents were solidly middle class (his father was a high school teacher and his mother a school psychologist...

...It is widely believed that Mitterrand himself (who maintained ties with the far right throughout his career) engineered the whole thing, seeing to it that the National Front received help of many kinds and encouraging the media to cover it...

...Bertrand Delano?, the popular mayor of Paris, meanwhile declared his own candidacy (he describes himself as “socialiste et lib?ral,” loosely translatable as “libertarian socialist...

...A radical activist, Chevrier, 38, is also a top editor at the publishing house Flammarion and reportedly makes 10,000 euros a month with numerous perks...

...That allows him to dress casually when he’s on TV, use down to earth language, and dismiss other guests as “members of the elite...

...Not to mention Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille, who, as minister for social affairs 10 years ago, masterminded the statute that makes it illegal in France to work more than 35 hours a week...

...The president himself is reported to have described the New Anticapitalist party as “our own National Front trick...

...From its very inception in the 1960s, Krivine’s Revolutionary Communist League was closely tied to the Castro regime in Cuba...

...Not only would she run again, she insisted, but she would wrest the party apparatus away from Hollande...

...It may also explain the current attempts to resurrect hard left parties in Europe, whether Die Linke in Germany or the NPA in France...

...Meet Olivier Besancenot, the 34-year-old mailman and spokesman for the small Trotskyite Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) who has just emerged as the founder and leader of the New Anticapitalist party (le Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, NPA...

...Upon her return to France in the late 1990s, she continued to maintain close ties with Castroite intellectuals in Cuba, Latin America, and Europe and was actively involved with the Fondation Copernic, an antiglobalist think tank that paved the way for the NPA...

...His early rise within the LCR was due in large measure to the fact that he was living with a daughter of Alain Krivine, the group’s founder and head, who himself ran for president as a Trotskyite in 1969 and 1974...

...To whom—one may ask, then—do Krivine, Chevrier, and Besancenot ultimately answer...

...Marie-George Buffet, the secretary general of the party, gets about 1 percent in the polls...

...In any event, commenting on the recession in France last month, Besancenot expressed confi dence that things were ripe once more for “good old revolution...

...Pollsters say the NPA may draw from 10 to 20 percent of the vote...

...Even more important, Cl?mentine Autain, once the great hope of the moribund Communist party and a feminist activist, has signed up with the NPA...

...Chevrier, too, has connections with the Cuban regime...

...Politics being what it is, Besancenot’s rise is seen for the moment as a plus by the Sarkozy camp...

...Clearly, Besancenot’s aim is to reunite the former Communists and restore their political weight...

...Among Socialist and other left-wing voters, Besancenot’s rise is even more dramatic: Twenty-six percent already see him as the “best opposition leader,” whereas Delano...

...This has not escaped the talk show hosts, who are eager to have him on the air as often as possible, as if he were a rock star or supermodel...

...For most of the 20th century, the French left was split between the Socialists, who remained committed to democracy and the rule of law, and the Communists (PC), who called for the dictatorship of the proletariat...

...This was his real job, and it was much better paid than his nominal job at the postal service...

...As a European Parliament assistant, he apparently made 5,000 euros a month...

...Not any more...

...in contemporary history...