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Disappointing result for New Anticapitalist Party in French regional elections

Marc Lasalle

But the resistance to the crisis continues to grow says Marc Lasalle

Three years after his election, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has suffered his first serious defeat on the electoral terrain. In the two-round regional elections (March 14 and 21) the Right obtained only 36 per cent of the vote in the second round while the left parties scored 54 per cent, giving them control of 21 of the 22 metropolitan regions. Sarkozy’s party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), only gained 27 per cent in the first round, its lowest since the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958. Eight ministers participating in the elections were badly defeated.

The Socialist Party (PS) will hope that this victory will be a springboard for the presidential elections due in 2012.

This result shows a clear rejection of Sarkozy’s politics by the masses. Indeed the deep capitalist crisis has unmasked the lies behind Sarkozy’s promises. For instance he claimed to be the “President of buying power” and his election slogan was “work more to earn more“. Today, unemployment is at the highest level (9.6 per cent according to official figures) with a record 418,000 newly unemployed people in 2009. Almost one million jobless workers will come to the end of their benefits in the coming months and will be pushed even further towards the poverty line.

The wave of resistance against workplace closures and other effects of the crisis during spring 2009 was squandered by its reformist leaders, obtaining no significant victory. This time, the workers used their vote to inflict a blow against Sarkozy’s arrogance. Already in the first round, the “useful” vote for PS was very high. However, this does not come from any deep illusions in the PS regional governments as a bulwark against the effect of the crisis. The workers saw the PS as a primitive tool of their class struggle to deprive the reactionary president of his electoral mandate.

The big disappointment was the score of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) – a mere 2.7 per cent. But this in an important sense reflected the NPA’s lacklustre campaign. After months of heated internal discussion, the party remained deeply divided on the political content of the campaign and the electoral blocks it should make with the reformist parties – the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Left Party (Parti de Gauche/PdG). A substantial minority wanted an alliance with the PCF and PdG on a reformist platform and announced that whatever the party decided they would be campaigning for them. Refusing to confront this sabotage of party discipline showed a terrible weakness on the part of the majority leadership around Olivier Besancenot.

In the end, in almost half of the regions, the NPA stood on left unity lists with other minor forces. Thus the NPA had no clear line for the country as a whole. The main slogan “Change all, abandon nothing” (Tout changer, rien lâcher) was vacuous – empty of any political meaning. The demand for free public transport is hardly an adequate response to the everyday problems of workers. Most of the NPA’s propaganda was virtually indistinguishable from the left reformist parties.

What was clearly lacking was a fight to publicise a nation-wide action programme combining the fight against unemployment, against cuts in public services and against state racism. More than 50 per cent of the voters abstained, among whom were many workers and youth that have recently supported the NPA. The NPA’s obvious lack of dynamism, its inability to propose a clear working class anticapitalist solution to the crisis, greatly lowered its profile. In the coming months, up to the second Congress in November, the NPA will need to undertake a fundamental self criticism and re-define its political strategy. It will have to choose between becoming a junior member in alliance with the left reformist parties or to build a party based on deepening the class-wide resistance and winning the vanguard to a revolutionary anticapitalist action programme.

While Sarkozy promised to continue his reforms, and most notably another attack against the pension system, French workers took to the streets in great numbers (over 800,000 across the country) on March 23, just after the second round. This was a “day of action” called by the main union federations, mainly to show their muscle and prepare for negotiations with the government. The mobilisations – strikes in Paris metro, IKEA, TOTAL, teachers, etc, – show that the combativity of the masses has recovered from the disappointments of last summer and confirms an upswing of class struggle in the last few months. The task of revolutionaries is to explain how we should organise from below and take control of our movement out of the hands of TU bureaucrats. Only a determined and massive movement will stop Sarkozy’s attacks, stop the site closures and defend our gains.

Racism and Islamophobia

The government election campaign was conducted under the sign of state racism. Eric Besson, minister of “Immigration and National Identity” launched a nation-wide debate on National Identity; what it means to be French today? In the midst of the economic crisis, this question hardly stirred mass enthusiasm. Its aim was to win over Le Pen supporters, to convince them that the government was already implementing a hard line anti-immigrant policy. However it meant that all kind of racist, anti-immigrant, islamophobic clichés got an official platform..

This cynical and reactionary manoeuvre backfired. By means of this “debate” the government identified immigrants as responsible for the crisis. Reactionary voters preferred a sincere racist to an opportunist one and voted for the old fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front (FN). The FN’s score allowed it to recover a prominent place in French politics after poisonous leadership splits and several years in the doldrums. In the 12 regions where the FN got over the 10 per cent hurdle, and was able to stand in the second round, it pushed up its vote to an average 17 percent nationally. In the south in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur) Le Pen himself scored 24.9 percent and in the north, his daughter won 22 per cent of the vote in Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

Another cause célèbre in the election was that the New Anticapitalist Party stood a Muslim woman candidate who wears a hijab. The background to this was the hysteria whipped up by Sarkozy with his commission to discuss whether the wearing of the burqa in public can be banned, as the wearing of the hijab in schools has been. The NPA fielding such a candidate led to a media uproar, drawing in not only the racist right but also secularist leftists (inside the NPA as well outside it).

Many on the French left are repeatedly thrown into confusion by the “veil” issue – regarding it as “a symbol of women’s oppression,” undermining the secular constitution, etc. This is to confuse substance with symbols. The substance is that in France – and across Europe today – the right is targeting Muslims. Today the Muslims are the Jews of the 1930s. Imagine if then the left had responded to anti-Semitism with calls for Jews to abandon their religious dress, or refused to defend their right to wear it in the schools, the universities, the courts etc. We should defend the right of Muslim women, when they wish to do so, to wear the hijab or the burqa anywhere in public life.

In the coming months and years, the French workers movement must consistently oppose government and police racism, attempts by the FN to capitalize from its election success. We must also denounce all instances of Islamophobia even if this dons the veil of secularism and feminism.

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