A little more than two weeks after being elected mayor of Paris on March 29, Emmanuel Grégoire kicked off the first major initiatives of his term. The Socialist, who won the municipal elections heading a left-wing coalition (excluding the radical-left La France Insoumise), has called a Paris City Council meeting on Tuesday, April 14, with four priorities on the agenda. According to information obtained by Le Monde, the initiatives to address include sheltering people living on the streets, the housing crisis, after-school care and the possible sale of the Parc des Princes stadium to Paris Saint-Germain (PSG).Yes, Paris also has a socialist mayor. From the current Socialist Party (PS) that has been around since 1969, co-founded by François Mitterrand, which served as President of France from 1981-1995. The PS is part of the Socialist International, a formal but loose alliance of various social-democratic parties, which includes Spain’s Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). Of course, socialist politics in France was around long before 1969!
On these last two issues, the new mayor of the capital immediately signaled a break with his predecessor, Anne Hidalgo, who had allowed these matters to stagnate during her final years in office. [my emphasis] (1)
Parliamentary governments like those in Europe tend to have multi-party systems, which means that their national, regional, and local governments are often governed by coalitions of parties rather than a single one. This system often seem inscrutable to Americans. And Europeans often find the two-party systems that tend to predominate in Europe and America at least equally puzzling.
But both Britain and the US have winner-take-all electoral districts, also known as first-past-the-post systems. In other words, the candidate with the most votes wins, even if it’s not a majority. That was also the case in the 2024 US Presidential elections, where Trump won with less than a majority of the popular vote. (It was close, but not a majority.)
The reason that tends toward a two-party system can be explained by thinking of a vote on an ideological spectrum – although actual voters’ choices are messier than that. But take an example of a Congressional district in which 60% of voters are “left” or “center-left” and the other 40% “right.” If there are two left/center-left candidates in a general election who split the left-leaning 60% among themselves, while all of the 40% of “right” voters vote for a single candidate, the large left-leaning majority gets no Representative, while the 40% with the right-leaning majority gets to be the Representative.
This creates an obvious practical incentive for the “left” to each consolidate around one candidate who is closer to their general orientation. We could make a similar example with urban vs. rural preferences.
The recent emergence of a stronger democratic-socialist faction inside the US Democratic Party, mostly famously represented by Zohran Mamdani, follows a similar electoral logic. There are Democrats to this day who blame Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s critical loss of Florida in the 2020 Presidential race. As later studies showed, the actual election results reflected something different. For one thing, polls showed that Nader voters in Florida were more likely have take vote from Shrub Bush rather than from Gore. (Go figure!) And the later, statewide media consortium’s count of the statewide vote showed that Gore actually did win the election.
The Democratic Socialists of America have tended, like Mamdani did, to focus on winning within the Democratic Party in primaries and campaigning as Democratic nominees in the general elections. Such a dynamic is not unique to the Democratic Party. In 1964, the George Wallace Democrats and the howling-at-the-moon Goldwater Republicans were ideological soulmates. Although some of those impious Mean Libruls might question the “soul” part of that description!
Failing some kind of currently unforeseeable events, it’s highly unlikely that any new party would rapidly displace one of the current two dominant US parties. The US party system began in the 1790s with the current Democratic Party (then called the Republican Party and soon the Democratic-Republic Party) and the Federalist Party. The Federalist Party was basically decimated by the War of 1812 against Britain, because New England Federalist were widely perceived as sympathetic to the British. At the Presidential level, the Jefferson-Jackson Democratic Party had something like one-party rule for the first four decades of the 19th century. The current Republican Party was founded as a liberal, pro-democracy, anti-slavery party in 1854.
To the extent that we can equate the left-right spectrum of 1854 to today’s, the left-right alignment of the Democratic and Republican parties has completely flipped. Which is consistent with the ideological dynamic of countries with winner-take-all electoral districts as described above. (Politics is always messier than simply left-vs.-right. But that’s another part of the story.)
Politics is politics, so there will always be intra-party differences around issues, personalities, and priorities.
Back during the Cheney-Bush Administration, critics of it and in particular of their Iraq War started describing ourselves as part of the “reality-based community.” That’s an important foundation for any responsible and effective politics and policies.
What the successful DSA Democratic politicians like Mamdani and AOC and others are showing is that programs matter. A Medicare for All system is far better than private, corporatized media that can be owned and squeezed for every penny of profit by private-equity investors focused on short-term returns on investment.
And both sides within the party can reinforce the party messaging if they put their minds to it. DSA candidates can respond to criticism of “socialism” by saying things like, “Yeah, I’m a democratic socialist! That means I support Medicare for all and our public schools. My Republican opponent is opposed to both!”
The more traditional Dems can say, “I don’t call myself a socialist. But I support Medicare for All and our public schools. My Republican opponent is opposed to both. And I welcome the support of anyone who does supports them like I do.”
It does appear that with Trump’s explicit rhetoric this year calling the Democrats “communists” looks very much like an attempt to pump up a new, Joe McCarthy-type, sleazeball “Anti-Communism” campaign. Which is the kind of politics Trump learned from his political mentor, Roy Cohn. Who served as the lead counsel for McCarthy’s witch-hunt Senate Committee before he went on to become the top Mob lawyer in New York City. Democrats need to put some thought and energy into how they go about countering that without falling into the “don’t think of an elephant” trap George Lakoff warned about, i.e., reinforcing the other side’s narrative while trying to refute it.
Starting just after 25:00 in this podcast, Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that the politics of “anticommunism” in the US predate the Bolshevik Revolution. And, not surprisingly, the 19th century version had much to do with white racism. (And so does the Trump version!)
Notes:
(1) Bekmezian, Hélène (2026): Emmanuel Grégoire launches first four major initiatives of his term as mayor of Paris. Le Monde English 04/09/2026. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2026/04/09/emmanuel-gregoire-launches-the-first-four-major-initiatives-of-his-term-as-mayor-of-paris_6752248_5.html> (Accessed: 2026-13-07).
(2) Today in Politics-Explainer. Heather Cox Richardson YouTube channel 07/09/2026. <https://youtu.be/bxEawcvCle4?si=WMdkrG_F65NwgWr3> (Accessed: 2026-13-07).
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