Democratic and Republican Left

The Democratic and Republican Left group (French: groupe de la Gauche démocrate et républicaine) is a parliamentary group in the National Assembly including representatives of the French Communist Party (PCF).

The electoral record of the French Communist Party (PCF) in 2007 was marked by dismal performances, first in the presidential election in which the party's national secretary Marie-George Buffet stood as a candidate supported by the PCF within the framework of an anti-liberal alliance; she was routed in the first round, receiving just 1.93% of the overall vote, a result deemed "catastrophic" for the party. The party's result in the subsequent legislative elections was similarly middling: though it outpaced the projections of pollsters, which placed it between only 5 and 15 seats, it still fell short of the threshold of 20 deputies, then required for the formation of a parliamentary group in the National Assembly. As a result, Alain Bocquet, outgoing leader of the preceding communist group in the assembly, demanded on 18 June that the requirement for the number of deputies to form a political group be lowered to 15 from 20 then needed, with a total of 15 deputies elected under the PCF label in the legislative elections (not counting PCF dissident Maxime Gremetz or PCF associate deputies Jean-Pierre Brard and Jacques Desallangre). Bocquet, referring to the recent election of Nicolas Sarkozy in the presidential election, added "if the president of the Republic is a democrat, he will prove it", further arguing that "contrary to all predictions, the conditions for the constitution of a communist group in the National Assembly have been met, and their recognition is only a regulatory formality".