Among those moves: increasing the progressivity of the French income tax by adding new tax brackets that will subject ultra-high incomes to higher overall tax rates, establishing a meaningful tax on vast accumulations of wealth, and setting a limit on how much the already rich can inherit.
The New Popular Front legislative contract also aims to turn French corporations into something more than wealth-accumulation machines for the execs who run them.
Those corporate accumulation machines have of late been running in overdrive. One current French CEO, the LVMH luxury giant’s Bernard Arnault, is now sitting upon the world’s third-largest personal fortune. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index puts his latest net worth at just under $200 billion.
Fortunes like Arnault’s would shrink significantly if a New Popular Front administration gets to take power. The Front’s legislative contract promises to “make employees real actors in economic life by reserving for them at least a third” of the seats on corporate boards and expanding the worker “right of intervention” in how companies operate.
The legislative contract the Front is proposing would, in still another egalitarian move, “create a right of pre-emption to allow employees to take over their business in the form of a cooperative.”
The New Popular Front’s vision extends outward to Europe as well. The Front’s legislative contract calls for taxing Europe’s richest — and corporate “superprofits” — at the continental level to increase the budget resources available to the European Union.
None of this agenda, of course, will ever see the light of legislative day unless the New Popular Front maintains enough unity among its four prime partners — France Insoumise, the Parti Socialiste, Les Écologistes, and the Parti Communiste — to top the far-right.
“It’s going to be either the far right,” as Greens party leader Marine Tondelier puts it, “or us.”
France’s most recent public opinion polling has the New Popular Front gaining on the ultra-right Rassemblement National, the National Rally party that Marine LePen leads, with the Front now up to almost 30 percent of the vote and the National Rally hovering just a few points above that.
Meanwhile, in many districts across France, candidates with president Macron’s center-right party now appear likely to not even win enough votes in the June 30 first round — at least 12.5 percent of the total cast — to make it into the July 7 second.
And if the New Popular Front should win, then France just might be able to resume its role as a global egalitarian beacon. Back in the 20th century, the top 1 percent’s share of French wealth fell from 56.7 percent of the nation’s total in 1905 down to a mere 15.8 percent in 1984. By 2022, that 15.8 percent share had rebounded up by over half, to 24 percent.
What does France’s future now hold? We’ll know much more in just a few weeks.
