Marc Lasalle, Paris<\/i><\/p>\n
\u201cSince 1965 I have never lived through a presidential election like this. There are no more axes, no more rules\u201d, says Socialist Party, PS, first secretary, Jean-Christophe Cambad\u00e9lis. \u201cNothing is stable anymore. It is a great chamboule-tout (coconut shy),\u201d adds PS MP Jean-Marie Le Guen. Indeed, nothing has been going according to expectations for the two major French parties, the PS and the Republicans (Les R\u00e9publicains, LR).<\/p>\n
Initially, everybody expected a duel between the current president, Fran\u00e7ois Hollande, and the previous president, Nicolas Sarkozy but, within a few months, both were knocked out of the contest; Hollande by his unprecedented unpopularity and Sarkozy by the trail of scandals that accompanied his career. They were soon followed into oblivion by other major figures like Alain Jupp\u00e9, Manuel Valls, Arnaud Montebourg and C\u00e9cile Duflot.<\/p>\n
Today, the two leading candidates are not supported by either PS or LR and the prospects for the election in April are as open as ever. There is a real possibility that the Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, could add to the series of populist reactionary victories after Brexit and Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
This electoral mayhem facing the political \u00e9lite reflects a much deeper instability and divisions in French society and points to two radically opposite consequences of the 2007-2008 financial and economic crisis; on the one hand the recent rise of FN and, on the other, the largest workers‘ movement against a left-wing government for years, the movement against the El Khomri law.<\/p>\n
So, too, does the recent movement against police violence against young people, especially those from immigrant backgrounds. Serious disturbances broke out after four policemen, using a truncheon, anally raped Theo, a black youth, on February 2 in the northern Parisian banlieu of Rose-les-Vents. Subsequent internal investigation exonerated the officers, members of the Specialised Ground Brigades, BST, and described this barbaric attack as an \u201caccident\u201d. Such repression, and the total police impunity, continue under the \u201cleft\u201d Hollande as they did under the right-wing Sarkozy.<\/p>\n
A \u201csocialist\u201d President<\/p>\n
In 2011, workers took to the streets in a great upsurge of class struggle to block another attack by Nicolas Sarkozy against pensions. Although they did not win, they severely weakened Sarkozy for the 2012 presidential campaign. Moreover, they pressured the major trade unions, contrary to their tradition, to openly campaign for the socialist candidate, Fran\u00e7ois Hollande. He was elected on 6 May 2012 by 51.64 per cent to 48.36, becoming only the second Socialist President since 1958. On top of that, in the following the parliamentary elections, the Socialists won 280 seats.<\/p>\n
Supported by the Radicaux de gauche (Left Radicals) and other smaller parties, the PS secured a comfortable parliamentary majority for Hollande, 315 seats. Thus, Hollande had no political pretext for not trying to carry out his programme, other than the fact that the bourgeoisie, French and German, did not approve of it.<\/p>\n
That programme seemed to promise a distinctive break with Sarkozy and, indeed, the predominant austerity policy promoted by Germany within the European Union. He criticised the faceless financiers who he claimed had, \u201ctaken control of the economy, of society, and of our lives\u201d. He claimed: \u201cMy enemy is finance\u201d, and pledged that his would be a \u201cpresidency that would end privileges\u201d (\u2018pr\u00e9sident de la fin des privil\u00e8ges\u2019), in contrast to Sarkozy’s appointment of millionaire friends to high office. He even advocated that fetish of Attac, a European Tobin tax, \u201ccovering all the exchanges, all derivative products\u201d, and a European \u201cplan for growth\u201d, based on progressive taxation and redistribution.<\/p>\n
In fact, once elected, the new president ripped off the left mask of his election pledges with indecent speed and revealed his true face as a good friend of the bosses. In the decisive first years of his office, the radical left proved quite incapable of challenging him to stick to his pledges or of building a powerful left alternative to stop him when he did not.<\/p>\n
The five years of Hollande\u2019s presidency were thus marked by a series of attacks against the workers, such as the VAT increase, increasing taxes on households by more than \u20ac50 billion, whilst at the same time extending a major package of fiscal aid for the bosses (estimated at \u20ac40bn. per year). The weak recovery from the 2007-08 crash petered out and unemployment rose to 10 per cent, one of the highest rates in Europe. In addition, Hollande and his premier, Manuel Valls, launched a series of measures to abolish labour protection regulations. Together with the continuation of imperialist interventions in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa and racist measures such as dismantling Roma camps, this generated dissatisfaction, anger and a sense of betrayal in the working class and minority communities.<\/p>\n
However, the worst was yet to come. After the terrorist attacks in 2015, a state of emergency was declared and prolonged again and again. Hollande tried, albeit without success, to pass a law borrowed from the far right toolkit, depriving terrorists with dual citizenship of their French nationality. While the practical effect of that law would have been close to zero, the real significance was symbolic: it was a way to stigmatise immigrants and to associate them with terrorists.<\/p>\n
A few months later, in the spring 2016, Hollande, probably trying to prepare his re-election campaign, imposed the final piece of his labour deregulation, the El Khomri law. It was this that triggered a major social movement with over 15 days of strikes, blockades and mass demonstrations. This was the most serious mobilisation since the strike waves against the 2007 and 2010 attempts at pension \u201creform\u201d under Sarkozy.<\/p>\n
The Rise of Marine Le Pen and the FN<\/p>\n
This series of betrayals contributed enormously to the deep discrediting and loss of trust in the traditional French parties. While the vanguard was disoriented, layers of the more isolated and desperate working class, together with the petty bourgeoisie, turned towards the populist and racist Front National, FN. During the Hollande years, the FN has risen to become the first party, with over 30 per cent of the votes in recent regional and European elections.<\/p>\n
Echoing a phenomenon seen in the Brexit vote and Trump\u2019s election, the FN vote is particularly strong in the French \u201crust belt\u201d in the North, with Lille as its main city, a traditionally working-class and left-wing voting bastion. Here, most of the industries; mines, steel and textiles, have closed, leaving the area impoverished and with a high unemployment rate and attendant social problems. In the last years, under Marine Le Pen’s leadership, the FN has increasingly oriented itself not just towards the urban petty bourgeoisie and the small farmers but to these layers of the working class.<\/p>\n
She claims to defend public services; health, schools, post offices, and pensions, which have come under attack from successive governments. In doing so, she has appealed to what she calls the \u201cinvisible\u201d people (she means the \u201cnative\u201d French, of course) against \u201cthe system\u201d. In themes that echo Trump\u2019s campaign, she is promising to \u201crestore our freedom and control over our destiny by giving the French people back their sovereignty\u201d, and to \u201crebuild France\u201d and \u201crestore the country\u2019s greatness\u201d. She promises to slash the number of people entering France to 10,000 a year, about one tenth of the current number, to promote national identity in schools by language laws, and end birthright access to French nationality. She promises to give priority in employment to French citizens, imposing \u201can additional tax on the hiring of foreign workers\u201d.<\/p>\n
Le Pen also details various measures to protect French firms from foreign competition, despite EU rules. She wants to \u201cfree\u201d French firms from \u201cEuropean constraints\u201d and force the state to purchase from French companies. Foreign investment in the country would be strictly controlled, via an \u201cEconomic Security Agency\u201d.<\/p>\n
At the moment, she is credited with 25 percent of the vote in the first round. Her greater influence is largely due to the inability of the working class parties to propose any alternative to the continuation of neo-liberal \u201creforms\u201d and, on the other side, to the weakness of the radical left. The growth of the FN represents a real danger for the French working class.<\/p>\n
For decades now this party, with its historic roots in French fascism and far right populism, has been spreading its racist propaganda, according to which the immigrants are the real cause of all the evils: unemployment, criminality etc. These are of course complete lies but, without a serious political alternative, they convinced millions to vote for her as a solution. The FN has been able to latch onto and turn to its own advantage two historic weaknesses of the major working class reformist parties, the SP and the French Communist Party, PCF, French patriotism and republican secularism. The former goes back to the Tricolour waving of the Popular Front of 1936-1938 and the wartime resistance movement, while the latter is an accommodation to the dominant ideology of the French bourgeoisie.<\/p>\n
Today, FN voters are no longer afraid of openly declaring their intentions and Marine Le Pen is gradually consolidating the construction of a party with thousands of officials elected in local elections. There also signs that the FN is making deeper inroads into French society. For the first time, the bosses organisation, MEDEF, has opened its doors to the FN to hear about its economic programme. A ring of well known intellectuals, including the writer Michel Houellebecq, the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, the journalist Eric Zemmour, for example, have openly defended racist propaganda. Their obsession is that French national identity is threatened by immigration and Islam. While they do not openly support FN, the impact of their propaganda is clearly visible, helped by the national trauma provoked by the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks and killings.<\/p>\n
Whether or not Le Pen pulls off a shock victory in the second round, which would certainly top Brexit and Trump\u2019s victory as proof positive of an international right wing tsunami, even as a loser she will have shifted the agenda of politics strongly to the right. Like Trump, she has done it in part by demagogic espousal of social and anti-neoliberal themes and highlighting of deprived areas and decayed industries. This is where the smug complacency of the established politicians of right and left rings hollow and tempts voters to knock them off their posts<\/p>\n
Exposure and mobilisation against the FN, and the anti-immigrant and national chauvinist poison it is trying to inject into working class communities, must be an essential component of the programme of resistance the revolutionary left should be advancing.<\/p>\n
The \u2018respectable\u2019 right<\/p>\n
In autumn 2016, Les Republicains (the main right wing party) held their primaries. It was a race for the most anti-working class programme. The three main candidates, Nicolas Sarkozy, Alain Jupp\u00e9 and Fran\u00e7ois Fillon had a very similar core programme; decreasing by up to 500,000 the number of state employees, returning to the 39-hour week, increasing the retirement age to 65, increasing VAT and implementing further attacks against the labour regulations.<\/p>\n
Contrary to expectations, the winner was Fran\u00e7ois Fillon, previously prime minster under Sarkozy. He is an utterly reactionary bigot, posing as a country gentleman, dreaming of becoming the French Thatcher. One of the reasons for his victory was the support he got from the reactionary movement \u201cManif pour Tous\u201d, an alliance of socially reactionary forces, right wing Catholics and fascists, including Marine Le Pen’s even more right wing niece, Marion Mar\u00e9chal Le Pen, which organised four huge demonstrations in 2013 against the law legalising same-sex marriage, practically the only progressive measure introduced by Hollande.<\/p>\n
In an interview, Fillon explained how he would implement his programme: a series of \u201cexecutive orders\u201d in July\/August 2017 would be his \u201cblitzkrieg\u201d against social rights, reinforced by two referendums in the autumn to rally support for his bonapartist presidency.<\/p>\n
For several months, given the discredit of the reformist left, the victory of Fillon looked completely certain but the situation suddenly changed when it was revealed that he employed his wife and two of his children on apparently non-existent jobs, with new revelations every week. Such election time scandals are of course nothing new in bourgeois politics and France makes something of a speciality of them. Nevertheless, the reaction to it this time has been very strong and it seems it would be very difficult for Fillon to impose sacrifices on the whole country whilst having shamelessly profited from the system himself.<\/p>\n
An \u201coutsider\u201d, who could now make it into the second round, according to the polls, is Emmanuel Macron. Though now \u201coutside\u201d the two party system, he is a deserter from the Socialists, he is hardly outside the French elite since he is a graduate of the National School of Administration, ENA, and a proteg\u00e9 of Fran\u00e7ois Hollande. By profession a banker and specialist in finance, he formerly worked for Rothschild and Co. Under Hollande, he was first involved in writing a long report on how to \u201creform\u201d the French economic and political system, by attacking citizens‘ social rights, then, as Minister of the Economy, Finances and Industry, he started implementing his own recommendations. With his loi Macron, he deregulated the department stores, opening them on Sundays and then continued with a more general deregulation of labour.<\/p>\n
The El Khomri law, aimed against the labour protection laws, was actually inspired by him rather than the minister after whom it was named. This abolished union restrictions on working hours and other protections for workers, leaving most of the regulations open to site-by-site renegotiation, where workers are clearly at their weakest and can be forced to accept harsh sacrifices under pressure.<\/p>\n
As a candidate, he would like to continue this anti-working class task. For instance, he declared that more young people should \u201cdream\u201d of becoming billionaires. Also he has praised the Uber model as a way of giving a job to everybody, especially in the banlieues. Of course, he cannot propose all his plans openly, as he is trying to position himself at the centre and to attract voters from both right and left. Therefore, he masks them with a wall of attractive promises like the improvement of workers\u2019 wages, by reducing the contribution to the social security.<\/p>\n
In the same vein, unashamedly, he has titled his recent book \u201cRevolution\u201d. His central theme is to \u201cfree labour and the spirit of enterprise\u201d. No wonder then that he is the favourite candidate of big business and finance or that he collected part of the money for his campaign in the City and has refused to make public the list of people supporting him. He is being boosted by the media, totally controlled by the same few big capitalists.<\/p>\n
This is very similar to what Matteo Renzi did in Italy when he also claimed to be against the political \u201csystem\u201d, only to try to impose both labour deregulation and his own agenda of undemocratic constitutional reforms. Standing without the PS support at the beginning, Macron attracts more and more PS leaders, like S\u00e9gol\u00e8ne Royal, eager to get a seat on the bus of the possible next president.<\/p>\n
Another incarnation of the heritage of Fran\u00e7ois Hollande, similar in some senses to Macron, is Benoit Hamon. While Macron embodies the bosses‘ best friend that Hollande turned out to be; Hamon represents the deception that Hollande practiced on French workers in order to get elected. He is a pure product of the PS school of bureaucrats, like many others he was trained in the ranks of the PS-controlled student union, UNEF, and represents a cynical move towards the left. At least this was his tactic to win the PS primaries in which many PS voters voted for him to eliminate ex-premier Manuel Valls, who was standing on a law and order ticket.<\/p>\n
Hamon\u2019s main promise is a universal income (revenu universel) for everybody. Although this sounds progressive and egalitarian, in practice it would prove less attractive. First of all, the proposed allowance of \u20ac600 is barely above the current benefit level, which is \u20ac450, and certainly would not represent an adequate standard of living. More importantly, it is ultimately a passive and demobilising alternative to mounting a serious fight by both employed and unemployed workers to reduce the working week and, thereby, increase the jobs available at real wages. Despite its apparent radical character, the universal allowance, taken by itself and not connected to other demands, is merely a way to make the worst aspects of capitalism such as precarit\u00e9, mass unemployment and social exclusion, more acceptable without touching the core of the system.<\/p>\n
The novelty of the situation is that Hamon seems far behind Macron and is not at all certain to be in the second round. The support of several PS figures for Macron, the refusal of Valls to support Hamon, indicate severe tensions between the two wings of PS, the bourgeois liberals, like Macron, and the social-democrats, like Hamon. It is even possible to imagine an open split between the two wings, or a general move of the majority of PS to the right, into a pure and simple bourgeois party, as happened in Italy with the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n
The most radical candidate of the left is Jean-Luc M\u00e9lenchon. He made a personal decision to declare himself a presidential candidate over one year ago; thus presenting his own Parti de gauche (PG) and its ally the Communist Party with a fait accompli. No longer standing as the Left Front candidate, he launched his own campaign as that of a network where he alone makes the policies.<\/p>\n
Its programme is a pot pourri of left-reformist demands, like sharing wealth among everybody (partage des richesses), increasing the minimum wage, reducing the working week to 32 hours, nationalising some banks and a massive programme of investment to boost the economy. Compared to his campaign five years ago, it is a populist and left nationalist one. Taking up his programme for a Sixth Republic, the platform calls for new citizens\u2019 initiatives, use of referenda, rights to recall MPs, guarantees of media pluralism, the constitutional embodiment of the rights of people at work, protecting common property, \u201cair, water, food, health, energy, the means of life\u201d, lowering the voting age to 16 and, more dubiously, an obligatory nine months \u201cservice citoyen\u201d for the under 25s, paid at the minimum wage.<\/p>\n
What have gone are all references to the working class, replaced by \u201cthe people\u201d and \u201cthe Nation\u201d as against against the \u201c\u00e9lite\u201d and the \u201ccaste of the privileged\u201d and the front of parties is replaced by a \u201ccitizen-movement\u201d or network called Unsubmissive France (la France Insoumise). This m\u00e9lange is based on the neo-populist theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and the practice of the Spanish Podemos and its leader Pablo Iglesias. In addition, M\u00e9lenchon declares himself to be \u201ca French independentist\u201d and proposes a return to national sovereignty, with measures like withdrawing from the European treaties and NATO, \u201ca war machine at the service of North-Americans\u201d, and implementing an ecologically and solidarity-oriented protectionism.<\/p>\n
While some of these nationalist tendencies were always present in his ideology, it is clear today that he is trying to surf on the new wave of national chauvinism, after Brexit and Trump\u2019s victory. A whole chapter of his programme is entitled \u201cFor the independence of France\u201d, as though France were an oppressed and not an oppressor nation. It inevitably suggests that other imperialist powers, especially Germany, are the enemy, and leads him to abandon the defence of free movement for migrants. Mixing progressive reforms with this nationalist poison, this \u201cpopulism of the left\u201d can only weaken the class-consciousness of French workers and thus open the way for the populism of the right. A vote for M\u00e9lenchon is not a class vote in any sense of the term.<\/p>\n
In Part 2 of this survey, Marc Lasalle will deal with the parties of the French \u201cfar Left\u201d.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Marc Lasalle, Paris \u201cSince 1965 I have never lived through a presidential election like this. There are no more axes, no more rules\u201d, says Socialist Party, PS, first secretary, Jean-Christophe Cambad\u00e9lis. \u201cNothing is stable anymore. It is a great chamboule-tout (coconut shy),\u201d adds PS MP Jean-Marie Le Guen. Indeed, nothing has been going according to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7724,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[138,12,1],"tags":[104,193,192,15],"class_list":["post-5130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-europe","category-uncategorized","tag-archive","tag-climate-activism","tag-climate-change","tag-france"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7724"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6549,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5130\/revisions\/6549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}