2007 will be a turning point in French politics. After five years marked by heavy attacks from various right wing prime ministers, met by fierce resistance from the workers and the youth, the second presidential term of Jacques Chirac will come to an end. Probably in no other country of Western Europe has the working class been so effective in slowing down the neo-liberal attacks against public services, welfare and workers rights.
In 2003 the attack against pensions went through but the mass resistance against it crippled the then prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. In 2004 a first step towards privatisation of the electricity company EDF brought the country close to a general strike. In 2005 and 2006, the uprising in the banlieues and the student struggle against “cheap” and expendable contracts for the youth (CPE) turned premier Dominique de Villepin into a lame duck.
While the bosses are still actively campaigning for a new round of attacks, promoting even more précarité and exploitation for workers, they will now have to wait till after the presidential elections of 2007. The main right wing party the UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire – Union for a Popular Movement) has a natural candidate in Nicolas Sarkozy, champion of law and order, already campaigning by using racist demagogy to gain support from Le Pen voters: the situation however is less clear in the camp of the left parties.
After having won 19 out of 21 French regions in 2004 local elections, the Socialist Party (PS) hopes to surf to power on the mass discontent with the right wing attacks –a struggle it did little or nothing to build or support. Nevertheless it has serious chances of winning the next round of elections. On November 16 the PS candidate will be chosen by the membership of the party. This has soared to over 200,000 (with 80,000 joining in the last year alone), as PS has rejuvenated its membership with so-called 20-euro membership cards. With a few clicks on your PC, you can join the PS without ever entering your local branch office.
The three PS candidate of this internal campaign are Segolène Royal, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius. The three of them claim to stand for a new orientation in politics. And they have good reason to do so. The three of them are Mitterrand creatures. They came to power in the eighties and learned then the vicious tricks of a reformist politician: to speak left and to act right: to seek election as a workers candidate and to govern according to the needs of the bourgeoisie. Now they all want to appear as completely “new”, even against the “establishment” in the case of Royal, simply because they would like the voters to forget what they did when they were in power.
Segolene Royal clearly pushes this tendency to the extreme. Member of Mitterrand’s cabinet in the eighties, three time minister, she uses all the techniques of political marketing and has succeeded in creating around herself an aura of media popularity. Part of this success is due to the fact that she has no clearly expressed program of her own. On several points, she flatters the voters with meaningless but trendy formulae like “participative democracy”, she asks for contributions from the citizens that are all “legitimate experts” and she claims to “listen [to them] to act right”.
However, as it is shown by her insistent allusions, her program has a strong right-wing bias. She admires Tony Blair, clearly a way to push even further the break with the old social-democracy towards neo-liberalism. To this she adds a very French touch of nationalism that would not have been misplaced in the mouth of Marshal Pétain: “the tricolour flag and social security, this is what binds together our common belonging. Because here, the national and the social march together, and it is the state that guarantees this alliance”. This is summarized in her concept of “just order”, smelling very much of reactionary “moral order”. For instance she foresees the creation of new jails for the young, run by the army, so that they can “reconquer their self-esteem”! Likewise, the social benefit entitlements of the families of young offenders would be suspended in order to make the parents “responsible”.
So why is she also pushing for mass unionisation, mentioning the “obligation to join a union”? Far from dreaming of a mighty workers movement, Royal would simply like to put and end to the “archaic social relations” (read constant strike actions) so that bosses and unions could have “a collective capability of anticipating and accompanying economic changes”. This is the model of a class collaboration enforced by unions controlled by the bosses and the state. Finally, she calls for a “republic of respect, where French people would be reconciled with the private companies”.
Is Strauss-Kahn or Fabius offering an alternative to this turn to the right proposed by Royal? No. Strauss-Kahn, neo-liberal minister of finance in Jospin’s government, defends a social-democratic program of “small steps”. Everybody remembers that these steps were not even in the right direction when he was in power: Jospin government has the record of privatisation of public companies and applied the EU anti-worker Lisbon agenda.
Fabius, Prime Minister under Mitterrand, remembered for applying “rigueur” and imposing a wage freeze, is another uncharismatic technocrat. With incredible cynicism he recently sought for some “left” credibility by campaigning for the No vote in the referendum on the EU constitution. However, in the end, he preferred not to split from the PS. He presents himself as “the candidate of the pouvoir d’achat (real wage)” but his proposal to push the minimum wage (SMIC) to 1500 Euros in 2012 sounds radical but is an empty promise in practice. Simple adjustments for inflation would bring the SMIC to the same value even under a right wing government.
On the crucial question of equal rights for immigrants, all PS candidates stand on the same line given by the PS program: “We will have a hard line against illegal immigrants. Our country cannot accept all those who wish to come.” While a campaign against deportation of children and their families has mobilised massively across the country, the PS clearly intend to continue a repressive racist politics against immigrant workers.
Clearly, workers and youth cannot expect a real step forward from any of the PS candidates. Worse, they will all apply the bosses’ agenda of more privatisation, less public services, less money for school and health system. Intervening in the electoral campaign defending an anti-capitalist action program is an urgent task for revolutionaries in France, together with organising the resistance against the government attacks.