The French left-wing parties announced this Thursday that have reached a final agreement to create a new ‘Popular Front’ ahead of the legislative elections on June 30 and July 7. The agreement includes unique candidacies in each of the country’s electoral constituencies, as well as a government program.

The union “has been sealed,” said a joint statement. “We have reached a political program of rupture, with a deployment for the first 100 days of mandateconcrete and realistic proposals so that the lives of the French people really change,” the joint statement says. However, the alliance has not yet agreed on who would be its candidate for prime minister, an issue on which considerable differences remain.

The alliance is made up of the Socialist Party (PS), the environmentalist EELV, La Francia Insumisa (LFI) and the Communist Party (PCF), which announced their intention to form a new Popular Front last Monday, a few hours after the President Emmanuel Macron announced the dissolution of the National Assembly and the calling of early electionss. The announcement of the final agreement came after several days of intense negotiations on the number of constituencies in which each party will compete, but also so that each of the formations received a sufficient number of districts with real possibilities of obtaining a seat.

Former socialist president François Hollande, who held the Elysée between 2012 and 2017, expressed his satisfaction with the agreement, since “the left has the duty to unite” in order to stop the extreme right. “Since the Liberation (from the Nazi occupation in 1944/45) never has the extreme right been so close to coming to power,” Hollande warned in an interview on the TF1 channel. This possibility “creates a danger” and “is not only a problem for France, but for the image of France and for the proposals that France can make in Europe,” he stressed.

“We must do everything possible to prevent the extreme right from coming to power in France”Hollande insisted. The name of the union takes that of the Popular Front, a coalition formed in 1935 by several left-wing parties to respond to the expansion of fascism in Europe and which achieved an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies in the 1936 elections, although it disappeared in 1938. .