The reason Marxists oppose Popular Fronts was set out by Marx as far back as 1850, and Marxists have had plenty of experience since then to see Marx's warning played out time and again. A Popular Front involves the Marxists effectively dissolving their own independent organisation and programme. Superficially, they may continue to exist, but, in practice, the Marxists subordinate themselves to the organisation and programme of the Popular Front itself. Given that the whole point of any tactic of Marxists, in making alliances with centrist, reformist, let alone bourgeois forces, is to expose them, and to win a majority of workers to their own banner, anything that requires you to abandon your own organisation and programme is to be avoided at all costs.
As Marx pointed out, in 1850, the liberal petty-bourgeois, when they are engaged in a class struggle against the old landlord class, need the support of workers. But, they have no interest in achieving the specific interests of workers, quite the contrary. As soon as the struggle has achieved their ends, they want to bring it to a halt, and particularly, if it continues, and the workers seek to push on to the fulfilment of their own ends, the petty-bourgeois will certainly want to bring proceedings to a halt, even doing deals with their old enemies, against the workers to achieve it. The same is true of the liberal bourgeoisie when it comes to fascism. Generally, the ruling class has no need of fascism, because its rule is secure via the operation of social-democracy.
Its only at specific times, such as in the 1920's and 30's, when capitalism enters a period of crises of overproduction of capital, resulting from shortages of labour reaching such a point that wages have risen to squeeze profits, and when powerful workers organisations resist attempts to replace labour with capital, resulting in workers occupying factories, and introducing workers' control (Italy), or electing mass Communist Parties to parliament that could form Workers Governments to challenge capital, and support workers (Germany et al), that the ruling class looks to the fascists, and their specific talents, to physically break-up the workers organisations, and, thereby, to push through the attacks on the workers, to break their resistance, and enable labour to be thrown out of production, pushing down wages, and raising profits.
So, when the ruling class itself resorted to the fascists in the 1920's (Italy) and 1930's (Germany et al), it is ridiculous to propose a Popular Front alliance of workers and bourgeois parties, to fight it, because the bourgeoisie, and specifically the petty-bourgeoisie, has already gone over to the fascists! To the extent that some liberal politicians continue to act as though they are still the representatives of those classes, is simply a delusion on their part. As Trotsky pointed out, in relation to the Spanish Popular Front, those liberal politicians actually only represented a “ghost class”.
For those who are enamoured of parliamentarism, that, of course, is of no concern, because they view politics only in this limited sense of winning parliamentary votes, and parliamentary elections. But, as Italy, Germany and Spain showed, amongst others, when it comes to fascism, what happens in parliaments and elections is more or less irrelevant. What is important is not the superficial alliance of politicians and parties, but the actual line up and alliance of social, i.e. class forces. In France and Spain, in the 1930's, as the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie had gone over to fascism, the bourgeois liberal politicians themselves owed their election only to the fact of standing under the cover of the Popular Front, and the votes they obtained from communist and socialist workers. That was of no advantage to the actual Communist, Centrist and Socialist Parties, who could just as easily have stood under the banner of a United Front.
What the Popular Front did was to limit the ability of the revolutionaries to put forward their own Marxist programme, and, instead, subordinated them to the programme of the liberals, who would withdraw from it if it adopted any more radical programme. The same thing has been seen with other Popular Fronts, and even Popular Frontist organisations, such as the SWP's creation of the Anti-Nazi League, or its Respect abomination. Starmer's coup inside Labour is a reflection of the same thing, as the search for votes from the Right, inevitably, leads to a subordination even of social-democratic ideas to the ideas of the reactionary Right.
The processes which lead to the growth of far right and fascist forces are not ones that arise overnight, or during an election campaign, but are created over many years, as the social-democrats, liberals and reformists fail to offer the masses any solution to their problems. The more the liberals, social democrats and reformists view things purely in electoral terms, the more they seek to unite in popular fronts to bolster their votes, thereby, creating a momentum to the right. As they adopt ever more right-wing policies to draw in additional parties to their right, the more do they emphasise their own bankruptcy, and concern only to hang on to their lucrative parliamentary careers.
What happened in France was also an example of that. The Left and the social-democrats, after years of offering no solutions, were reduced to rumps, and, in response to the advance of Le Pen, they were left with no alternative but supporting Macron as such a catch all. But, inevitably, Macron also failed to provide any way forward, and so strengthened Le Pen even more, whose party, now, also has sizeable representation in the Assembly.
And, the same is true in Italy. For years, the liberals, the social democrats and the Stalinists (who are themselves merely social-democrats) have provided no real answers for Italian workers, and they have repeatedly fallen into Popular Frontist alliances and coalition governments, each one failing to provide any solution, and falling apart, as some new crisis erupts. The most obvious manifestation of that is the Democratic Party itself. Wikipedia describes this popular frontist hotch-potch as follows,
“The PD was established in 2007 upon the merger of various centre-left parties which had been part of The Olive Tree list in the 2006 general election, mainly the social-democratic Democrats of the Left (DS), successor of the Italian Communist Party and the Democratic Party of the Left, which was folded with several social-democratic parties (Labour Federation and Social Christians, among others) in 1998, as well as the largely Catholic-inspired Democracy is Freedom – The Daisy (DL), a merger of the Italian People's Party (heir of the Christian Democracy party's left wing), The Democrats and Italian Renewal in 2002. While the party has also been influenced by social liberalism and Third Way progressivism, especially under Matteo Renzi's leadership, the PD's main ideological trends are social democracy and the Christian leftist tradition.”
In other words a Popular Front of Stalinist, social-democratic and liberal parties all combined in the one party. But, in line with the strategy proposed by Paul Mason, in which even these broad, catch-all, parties are still not broad enough, and need to form an alliance with parties even further to their right, the PD, did just that. In the period 2013-18, it was in government as part of an even wider “centre-left” Popular Front, and remained in that alliance in 2016-2018, whilst the alliance itself failed to win a majority.
Feeling the need of all such Popular Fronts to reach out to ever wider layers to their Right, they then allied with the right-wing populists of the Five Star Movement, in 2019. In 2021, the logic of this Popular Frontism reached a peak, as they joined the National Unity government of Mario Draghi. Draghi himself, of course, as a technocrat, fresh from having stoked astronomical inflation across Europe by the printing of vast quantities of Euro money tokens, during his time as President of the ECB, as well as having crucified the economy of Greece, was not even elected, but simply imposed as Prime Minister from above, in a government that included even the far right forces of the Northern League and Forza Italia that are part of the new far right government! That is Popular Frontism, lesser-evilism, and “my enemy's enemy is my friend” taken to the level of absurdity.
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