Yesterday, the new head of the French Communist Party, Pierre Laurent, was interviewed for an hour on France Culture. There was a panel of journalists, and one of them asked him this question (which made the host of the show laugh a bit).
Two points of background:
1. Dominique Strauss-Kahn is currently the head of the IMF, but he's also the leading figure on the right wing of the Socialist Party, and he'll be running for president in 2010. This raises, among other things, the question of how the PC and other left parties will react if DSK faces Sarkozy in the second round. Support DSK, who espouses a more or less openly neoliberal type of politics?
2. The most direct translation of the adjective "left-wing" is "de gauche." If you said "John Smith is rather left-wing," it would be "John Smith est plutôt de gauche." Here I've translated "de gauche" as "on the Left."
> Q: Just a small question. Is DSK, the man - not DSK the IMF director,
> etc. - on the Left ("de gauche")?
>
> A: He's on the left in the sense that...actually, there are within
> the French Left today people who have gradually converted -- and there
> are some in the leadership of the PS --- to the idea that we must
> inscribe the project of the left within the horizon of neoliberalism,
> within the rules that the globalized capitalist system has imposed in
> recent years. I believe that this is a dead end. And what's happening
> now with the crisis, and with what's going on in Europe, demonstrates
> this. And this is a debate that has been running through the Left. So
> I'm not going to say those people aren't on the Left. There's a debate
> that's running through the Left: can a Left politics be practiced
> that's inscribed in that framework, or not? I don't think it can.
> There are some people on the Left who think it can.