In the second round of the French Election the Gaullist Nicoloas Sarkozy defeated Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal. Marc Lassale, of the League for the Fifth International in Paris, looks to the future, arguing that great class battle lie ahead. Far from mourning the defeat of “its candidate” workers and youth must prepare to defend themselves against the neoliberal onslaught and build a new workers party to lead the struggle.
The response of the youth of the banlieues to the election of Nicolas Sarkozy with 53 per cent of the votes was straightforward. “This means war!” They are right: war not only on the immigrant communities in the ghetto-like outer suburbs but on young people and on workers in general.
Sarkozy is undoubtedly the most right wing politician to be elected president since De Gaulle. Not that his predecessor Jacques Chirac did not try his hand. Three of his prime ministers – Alain Juppé, Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Dominique de Villepin – were forced into humiliating climbdowns on packages of neoliberal reforms in the face of veritable popular uprisings of workers and youth; in 1995, 2003, 2005 and 2006.
Sarkozy has sworn he will not back down like Chirac did. Politicians like George Bush, Angela Merkel, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have applauded him for this. They see him as the man to bring France fully into the neoliberal club. He will launch brutal attacks from his first days in the Elysée Palace. He has already worked out a programme of radical “reforms,” a “break” with the so-called French social model, which has survived more than a decade of assaults on it. This did not prevent him engaging in demagogy about “honouring labour” and even protecting French workers from outsourcing. This was clear from his first campaign declarations, where he announced his intentions to restore traditional right wing values: “work, order, authority, moral and national identity.”
Despite the repeated rejections of such reforms on the streets, how could he win more than 18 millions voters for his programme? First Sarkozy was able to rally together an alliance of different social classes from the big bosses of Medef (the employers association) down to the petty bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, peasants). The lure: tax cuts for business, small and large, and promised attacks on employees and trade union rights. To bosses, big or small alike, Sarkozy promised to boost their profit by measures taken out of the economic textbooks of neoliberalism: longer hours and a slashed social wage for the workers, less taxes and social security payments for the patrons. On top of this he added a generous dose of racism and chauvinism.
For several years now, he has courted the reactionary voters of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National. He did this while in government with a series of repressive laws, by praising police brutality and using abusive language against young people from immigrant backgrounds in the banlieues. During the campaign he proposed the creation of a Ministry of National Identity and Immigration. His anti-immigrant message also contained lots of demagogic stuff about “’protecting the French labour market”. No wonder the old fascist Le Pen petulantly accused Sarko of stealing his racist programme.
However the attractiveness of this programme to the reactionary strata does not explain the whole story. The opposition, the alternative to him was incredibly weak and unconvincing. Facing Sarkozy was Ségolène Royal, a right wing “social liberal” candidate. She believed that Blairism, would enable her to beat Sarkozy in the race to be the “reformer.” She was wrong. Her program of traditional social democratic promises was insufficient to enthuse the working class whilst her neoliberalism proved insufficient for the bosses.
While many workers voted for her, it was more as barricade to stop Sarkozy than out of any enthusiasm for her programme. Worse, she could not really challenge Sarkozy on his neoliberalism because she shares so many of his ideas and didn’t wish to frighten off the ruling class. An example of this took place in the only face-to-face debate between the two. While Sarkozy proposed his plan to slash the number of workers in the public services, she simply replied that she wanted to halt the increase in the state debt. Instead of challenging Sarkozy on his record of repressive reactionary laws, she criticised him for not being effective in reducing crime.
She could not state that the society Sarkozy proposes is repugnant because what she proposes is very similar, although her methods for achieving it are different. She proposed to do it by means of class collaboration, by drawing in the union bureaucracy, by “reforming” the unions so that the latter are even less under the pressure of their members, so the leaders can sell their hard won gains. Sarkozy, for all his promise of talks with the unions, threatens them with a head on confrontation, hoping fear will split them and enable him to take them on one by one and defeat them.
Sarko’s onslaught
Sarkozy will strike hard from the very first weeks. He has promised to slash taxes for the rich. He will undermine the 35-hours working week by cutting restrictions on overtime, under the cynical slogan “work more to earn more.” He will try to undermine the right to strike of rail workers by instituting a “minimum service” law for public transport. This will make strikes illegal for two hours at the beginning and end of the working day. The cheminots, who have humiliated many right-wing governments, are the “guards regiment” of the French labour movement. Sarkozy thinks if he makes an example of them other sectors will crumble fast.
He has also pledged himself to reform the benefits system by forcing the unemployed to accept any work no matter how poorly paid, and by scrapping the pension “privileges” enjoyed in the public sector. He will attack also young people by coming up with a general scheme for removing protective regulations on their jobs- a de facto return to the CPE. He will attack immigrants by instituting tough new restrictions, with quotas for skilled labour of which there are shortages. Sarkozy says he will be is tough on crime and illegal immigration, imprisoning and deporting as he did as Minister of the Interior.
In the field of foreign policy Sarkozy has said the USA could “count on our friendship” and that he will restore good relations wit the White House – i.e. he will give more overt support to its imperialist “war on Terrorism.” He is also being hailed in Brussels as the man to overcome the “French NON” to the European Union Constitution by recasting it as a mini-treaty, not putting it to a referendum. No wonder European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has said.
"I have every confidence that Nicolas Sarkozy, whose convictions I know and whose strong beliefs are known to all, will play a driving role in resolving the institutional question and in consolidating a political Europe.” For “political” read “neoliberal”.
To defend this neo-liberal order, the police and the CRS will be given free rein in the banlieues and the working class quarters armed with vicious new powers.
The Fightback
How can we stop this onslaught? We can only do it if we unite, workers, immigrants, youth, in the factories and workplaces, on the streets, in active and militant defence of each and every sector under attack. The revolutionary left, especially the LCR whose candidate Olivier Besancenot, has already called for militant resistance to Sarkozy, should use the tribune of the parliamentary elections, to summon mass meetings in every city and town and in the banlieues. The first point on the agenda should be how to stop Sarkozy’s plan.
The most cowardly forces in the trade union and political wings of the labour movement will of course counsel caution, the need for “preparation”, the need to win the masses, build a consensus, to wait for Sarkozy to exhaust his democratic mandate. To reach a consensus on the lowest, least combative level would be a disaster. It would be to accept a strategy of disguised surrender.
Indeed the experience of the great strikes and social movements since 1995 is to place no blind confidence in any of the trade union leaders. Repeatedly the have sold these movements out or sold them short of what they could achieve. Sarkozy’s victory is itself a punishment for letting him off the hook last spring, when a general strike – a real possibility – could have driven the right from power. The union leaders need to be controlled by the democratic delegates of the rank and file
Our class enemies are organized and efficient. They have a plan and all state forces at their disposal. We have millions but they will count as nothing unless we organise them. We must set up permanent resistance committees or coordinations in every town. If any sector is attacked we must be ready to fight back with our strongest weapons: solidarity strikes, blockades, mass demonstrations.
Indeed on the key issues of the right to strike, the 35 hour week, the rights of youth to full legal protection and the minimum wage the trade unions must be won to the call for an all out and indefinite general strike. To organise such a full scale nationwide struggle, we need a national coordination, with accountable and revocable delegates from the unions –locally and nationally – from school and university students, from the youth of the banlieues, from the organisations of the unemployed and the sans papiers. To defend such militant actions, we must form defence squads, mobilising workers, youth, and whole communities
Related to the need for an effective fightback is the need for a alternative to Sarkozy’s neoliberalism, to the “social liberalism” of Royal or for that matter the washed out neo-Keynesianism propagated by the PCF and the withered left wing of the PS. Without a positive alternative we cannot win a decisive victory and drive our attackers from power for good. We believe that we need a new party which is both anticapitalist and revolutionary. But we need to discuss and debate this with all the fighters against Sarkozy, even in the heat of the battle. Why? Because such a party must also be a mass party, one gathering in its ranks tens or hundreds of thousands of the best fighters from all the sections of the working class and the oppressed. Intense class struggle like the one we face in the months and years ahead will be the best conditions in which to convince them that what is needed is a revolutionary party, the crucible in which such a party can be forged.
The international dimension
Whilst the governments of Europe and North America are cheering on Sarkozy some commentators are apprehensive. A think-piece in the Financial Times, the organ of the City of London was worried about the scale of upheaval it might provoke.
“The Thatcher reforms (..) took place in a country with little or no revolutionary tradition, (…) By contrast, Mr Sarkozy has to force through reforms in a country that loves to talk about “solidarity”. He also has to deal with a population brought up to regard street protests as an honoured part of the national heritage. (…) He must hope that France’s revolutionary tradition will now be honoured in the history books, rather than on the streets.” (FT May 8)
We must do all we can to realise the City gentlemen’s worst fears. Workers across Europe and the world will look to the struggle opening in France. Many of them face identical struggles. We can certainly count on their sympathy and we must call directly for their solidarity. We must link up into a worldwide struggle against common enemy which is global – capitalism