the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
April 30, 2026
The following article was translated from an article appearing in Lutte de Classe #255, April 2026, the political journal of Lutte Ouvrière, the French Trotskyist organization.
Lutte Ouvrière presented a total of 280 slates in the March 15 elections. This included 266 slates of candidates in 243 different municipalities, thirteen Parisian arrondissements, three Marseille sectors, and seven Lyon arrondissements. We also had slates in the 14 constituencies of the Lyon Metropolitan Area. Our slates were present in 38 of the 42 municipalities in the country with more than 100,000 inhabitants, as well as in several dozen medium-sized cities, and they addressed 10 million voters, or approximately 21% of the electorate. For the first time, we presented slates in the towns of Hérouville-Saint-Clair (Calvados), Périgueux (Dordogne), Douai (Nord), Goussainville (Val-d’Oise), Bar-le-Duc (Meuse), Lorient (Morbihan), Méru (Oise), Lormont (Gironde), Villefranche-sur-Saône (Rhône), and Kourou (French Guyana). The Trotskyist organization Combat Ouvrier (Internationalist Communist Union) presented six slates—one in Martinique and five in Guadeloupe (both French departments in the Caribbean)—compared to three in 2020. They obtained a total of 1,574 votes (2.47%).
Our slates included some 11,000 candidates, almost all of them workers: factory workers, office workers, warehouse workers, home care aides, hospital staff, security guards, etc. While a number of these candidates were from the work, family or neighborhood circles of Lutte Ouvrière militants, many others were met during door-to-door operations organized over several months in working-class neighborhoods.
Admittedly, our results, detailed on our website and in our weekly publication, are very much in the minority, just like those obtained in the legislative and presidential elections. Lutte Ouvrière received a total of 79,440 votes, or 1.29% of the votes cast. In 2020, during the previous municipal elections, they received 44,762 votes, or 1.46%, when voter turnout was very low. These scores are admittedly modest, but here and there they exceed 5%, even 10% of the vote, as in Audincourt (16.02%) and Hérimoncourt (17.61%) in the Doubs department, Fourmies (13.25%) in the Nord department, Clermont (21.48%) and Margny-lès-Compiègne (17.81%) in the Oise department, and Le Grand-Lucé (10.07%) in the Sarthe department.
The good scores obtained here and there are often linked to local circumstances, with the Lutte Ouvrière slate, for example, being the only opposition slate. In any case, all these figures reflect our presence, and it is noteworthy that in the various municipalities, we often obtain our best results in polling stations in working-class neighborhoods. We now have 24 municipal councilors, compared with 16 in 2020.
These small numbers show that, in a context marked by the rise of reactionary ideas, a communist and revolutionary current can be present, through great effort, in major urban areas and many medium-sized cities. Even as a very small minority, the militants of Lutte Ouvrière are there to denounce the march toward war, the capitalist stranglehold on society, the decline of the working class, and the divisions maintained between French and foreign workers. And there are tens of thousands of workers ready to vote for slates defending these ideas—in other words, to vote for their camp.