Friday, July 05, 2024

France: We Need a Popular Front Based on the Social Movements
July 3, 2024
Source: New Politics




In the recent elections to the European Parliament, the far-right National Rally (RN) did so well in France that French President Emmanuel Macron decided for some incomprehensible reason to call snap elections to the French parliament, elections that could change the dominant party in the government. In the first-round elections held on June 30, the RN almost doubled its previous total, receiving 33% of the votes. But in only 76 constituencies out of 577 did a party win an absolute majority, so the remaining 501 will be determined in another round on Sunday, which will pit the top two candidates in that constituency, as well as any candidate with more than 12.5% of the total number of registered voters. About 300 constituencies are facing potential three-way races. Jean-Luc Melanchon, the leader of the left New Popular Front alliance, which placed second in the first round with 28% of the vote, has pledged that the left would stand down in any district where it placed third. On the other hand, some of Macron’s centrists, who got only 21% in the first round, have been telling their supporters to reject both the right and Melanchon’s France Unbowed, the largest of the left parties. The following article puts the second-round election in the broader context not only of parties but of the social movements. – Editors’ Note.

The results of the 1st round of the French legislative elections have disappointed those of us who were hoping for a miracle. However, the polls conducted the day after the European elections gave 35% to the National Rally (RN) and 25% to the New Popular Front (NFP). After three weeks of campaigning, the gap has narrowed to 33.1% for the RN and its allies and 28.0% for the NFP. The gap has thus been reduced from 10 to 5 points. The count is certainly not there yet, but a dynamic is underway.

With a view to the 2nd round next Sunday, we must not give up on a possible victory for the NFP, in particular by trying to mobilize the 33% of abstentions – and among them the 43% of young people aged 18 to 24, whose age group voted 48% for the NFP. However, it must be admitted that a relative majority for the NFP is very unlikely today, given the data from the first round.

Preventing an absolute majority for the RN


On the other hand, it is still possible to prevent the RN from winning an absolute majority of seats in the National Assembly, although this will not be an easy task. Indeed, the demonization of the NFP by the Macronist right (20.0% of the vote) and the Republicans (6.6%), as well as by most of the media, makes it more difficult for their candidates to withdraw and transfer their votes to the NFP when they come third.

This objective is not comparable to that of electing Macron to defeat Marine Le Pen in the second round of the 2022 presidential elections, firstly because a victory for the RN was unlikely then, but also because a second Macron presidency could only prepare the RN wave that we are witnessing. Today, the challenge is to prevent the far right, on the verge of power, from taking control of the state apparatus and using it to its advantage.

The results of this 1st round are a wake-up call for the left. The RN won 9.3 million votes (10.6 million with its allies). 57% of the blue-collar workers and 44% of the white-collar workers voted for the extreme right. This thunderclap, which had been widely announced, must lead the popular and democratic forces of the left to unite in order to fight the evil at its roots. It’s five minutes to midnight!

What responsibilities?


There is no need to recall the responsibilities of the “left” governments, which have not stopped pursuing right-wing policies since the 1980s. But the radical left must also question its inability to build a broad political force, outside the electoral period, beyond the big cities, rooted in the working class and democratically organized on the ground.

It is not enough to proclaim the New Popular Front to win back the hearts of those who have felt abandoned by the left for several decades. But its programme must outline a horizon of expectations capable of capturing the minds of the broad masses. To do this, it must defend economic and social justice through concrete measures, including the restoration and expansion of public services and social security. These have been sacrificed by the neo-liberal policies of austerity and privatization, which are causing an explosion of social inequality and social exclusion.

How can we fail to understand that a growing number of modest people today consider it more realistic, in the absence of any prospect of a break with the order of things, to exclude immigrants from an ever-diminishing redistribution of social benefits than to tax the profits and wealth of the capitalists more heavily?

Left counter-populism

Etienne Balibar has recently proposed some ways of transforming the New Popular Front from a desirable virtuality into a concrete instrument of repoliticization and to the rebuild a “people of the left”. To do this, he conceives of it as a “counter-populism” based on the self-activity of large sectors of society, whereas far-right populism relies on the passivity of the people and the following of leaders.

What can be done? He suggests starting with the main social movements that have shaken French society from below in recent years. If they have been more or less stifled, they have not been destroyed. Of course, they cannot be reduced to homogeneous social groups or ideologies, but their strength lies in the fact that they were “popular”, by embodying in struggle the demands of the situation and the moment.

Offensive struggles that show the way


What are these movements?

1) “Nuit debout”, in 2016, combining the defense of workers’ rights against the Hollande-Valls law and the demand for participatory democracy.

2) The “yellow jackets”, in 2018-19, combining the defense of purchasing power, the symbolic occupation of territory and democratic aspirations (demand for a referendum by popular initiative).

3) The mobilizations of care and social workers in the face of the Covid-19 crisis, against the lack of resources for basic public services, supported by large sections of the population.

4) The revolts in the suburbs against institutional racism and police violence, which affected the whole country in June 2023 and are being extended by forms of self-organization in the neighborhoods.

5) The mass movement against the pension reform, in January-March 2023, which mobilized the whole country and contributed to the reconstruction of an inter-trade union that gave voice to the class struggle.

6) The “Earth Uprisings” and other mobilizations against the exploitation of land and the depletion of groundwater for intensive agriculture, which are the main ferment of internationalism in today’s world.

7) Feminist movements that are not reducible to MeToo, even if this issue has revealed the importance of the fight against incest, rape and virilistic brutality for all women today.

For my part, I would add the movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people, led by numerous self-organized grassroots collectives, which combines the fight against racism in France with international anti-colonial solidarity.

The movement from below to overturn the status quo

These movements, although certainly heterogeneous, have in common the ability to go from the defensive to the offensive and to transform anger or despair “into the affirmation of a right, solidarity and the desire to transform the ‘world’ towards equality and justice”. Each of them, in his or her own way, draws “a concrete utopia without which there is no emancipatory politics” (Balibar).

The constitution of a united social front presupposes the lived perception that the demands of each of these movements have a universal scope because they respond to common causes. But this perception can only be achieved through the shared experience of many activists on several of these fronts, through their mutual exchange, as well as through their meeting shoulder to shoulder in the context of the broadest mobilisations, such as the one in defence of pensions.

In this context, more than ever, the anti-capitalist left must reject abstract slogans and sectarian constructions, seeking to defend a set of demands that start from the essential concerns of the social sectors in struggle, to propose unifying responses that break with the logic of capital and the bourgeois state. To form a popular front with the social movement is to support, to paraphrase Marx, the movement of those at the bottom that abolishes the current state of affairs.


 FRANCE

Combating the major risk

TUESDAY 2 JULY 2024, BY LÉON CRÉMIEUX

The far right is on the brink of an absolute majority following the first round of early parliamentary elections in France.

Whatever the absurd scenario imagined by Macron in announcing of the dissolution of the Assembly on the evening of the European elections, the practical effect is rolling out a red carpet under the feet of the Rassemblement National, giving it the chance to win a majority of seats on 9 July.

Since last Monday, the whole of the workers’ movement and the social and political forces committed to democratic rights have been up in arms to prevent the extreme right of Pétain and the fascists of the Militia from returning to power in France 80 years after their emulators were ousted, and from applying a policy of “national preference”, racist discrimination and the undermining of social and democratic rights, while at the same time being subject to the interests of the big capitalist groups, like the regimes of the same ilk in Argentina, Italy and Hungary.

In the coming weeks, it will be time to draw all the political lessons from the last few years, which have seen a steady rise in the far right, but the first observation is simple:

The Rassemblement National and its allies from the Républicains and Reconquête won 33.18% of the votes cast, more than 10 million votes. The Nouveau Front Populaire won 28.1%, and Macron’s candidates 21.60%.

This result came three weeks after the European elections in France, which saw the RN list already well ahead with 30.5% of the vote, more than double the list of the presidential camp, with 14% of the vote (led by the president of the Renew Europe group, Valérie Hayer). The lists of the four parties of the former NUPES (LFI, PS, Greens and PCF) came in behind in scattered order, even though they totalled 30.7% of the vote.

Faced with a fractured left, the RN has been able to capitalize on its place in the French political landscape over the last two years.

Like many other far-right forces in Europe, it has applied the “respectabilization strategy” to appear as a force that respects the institutions and, above all, is prepared to govern in compliance with European rules, following the example of Giorgia Meloni. This does not prevent the RN from making an intensive effort to inculcate in its cadres the fundamentals of defending the European identity of the New Right and GRECE, with the Iliad Institute.

All this smoothing work went hand in hand with the desire to appear as the only force in opposition to Macron during the social movements that have marked the last two years, in particular the mobilization against pension reform in the first six months of 2023 and the farmers’ movement last winter. This was accompanied by an editorial line in the major press organs that played to the full this de-demonization.

On the other hand, for various reasons, for the past two years the components of NUPES have not built this alliance of left-wing parties as a common militant force, accompanied by the search for militant convergence with the forces of the social and trade union movement.

Since 2022, even during the mobilization against pension reform, the left was present on the streets and in the assembly to block the extension of the retirement age, but without coming forward united around a plan of social measures commensurate with the most powerful mobilization in 20 years and without taking any united initiative to assert itself politically during the movement.

Worse still, the parties making up the NUPES openly announced the end of their alliance at the very moment when, after pensions, inflation and growing job insecurity made it even more urgent to build a front for a policy in line with social needs. As a result, neither in working-class neighbourhoods nor in rural areas, and independently of the grassroots work carried out by many activists, did the left emerge as a national force capable of changing everyday life and claiming to embody a political alternative to Macron and the far right.

What’s more, the government never stopped trying to legitimize the RN as a respectable opposition and to demonize France insoumise as a threat to democracy, even pushing part of the left to “break with Mélenchon”.

The concerns of the working classes are obviously first and foremost purchasing power, wages and energy prices, health and housing, and the loss of public services, particularly in rural and suburban areas and in the working-class neighbourhoods of large conurbations. All this at a time when social injustice, a tax policy and budgetary choices that benefit the upper classes have further accentuated inequalities. At the same time, gender-based violence and state violence continue to make themselves felt on a daily basis, with the only response being a police presence and an Islamophobic, security-oriented discourse targeting the racialized working classes.

The far right was therefore at ease in developing its discourse, often developing the themes put forward by the government itself on immigration and insecurity (the RN itself set the tone for the latest immigration law last January). What’s more, it has surfed on the anxiety-inducing climate distilled by the 24-hour news media, whose editorial line echoes the far-right’s theses on the insecurity-immigration nexus.

A SUICIDAL DISSOLUTION

Macron was blocked in the National Assembly by his lack of a majority, limiting his room for manoeuvre, but faced with the disavowal of the European elections he made a suicidal political calculation.

At the moment when the RN was riding the wave of its electoral victory and his own party had just suffered a magisterial disavowal, the choice of dissolution was quite simply suicidal, offering the RN an ultra-short campaign for which they could benefit from the same breath of air that the president’s parties have often benefited from in France. Since 2002, the presidential election and that of the assembly have been held in quick succession, a few weeks apart giving an almost automatic advantage to the president’s party. Macron was offering a similar situation to the RN on a platter. He might have hoped, with a disunited left, to play the saviour once again against the far right, himself provoking the electroshock of the threat of Bardella and Le Pen taking the helm of state.

But from Sunday evening, the reaction came from social movements, trade unions and in particular Sophie Binet [leader of the major trade-union confederation the CGT], calling for a Popular Front against the RN. While various calculations were still at work, this unitive pressure from militant networks imposed unity on the left to fight the threat together.

Against all expectations, given the problems and tensions accumulated over the previous months, the union was built with a programme taking up part of that drawn up for the NUPES and also echoing a joint declaration by the CGT, Solidaires, FSU and CFDT trade union forces. In less than a week (there were only five days in which to submit candidacies in 577 constituencies), the agreement, the programme and the distribution of constituencies were completed. The pleas from Macron’s camp for the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Greens not to put this new Popular Front into practice had no effect.

From then on, Macron’s scenario collapsed like a house of cards, and it only took a few days for his "primed grenade", as he described it to someone close to him, to explode in the middle of the Macronist camp.

POPULAR FRONT ONLY ALTERNATIVE TO RN

The Popular Front emerged as the only alternative to the threat posed by the RN, thereby appearing as the incarnation of its rejection by the vast majority of trade unions, social movements and associations. Destabilized by its defeat at the European elections and the lack of understanding of the presidential manoeuvre, the candidates of Macron’s coalition Ensemble went into the campaign without conviction.

On the right, the LR (Les Républicains) party exploded in mid-air, with its own president, Éric Ciotti, rallying to the RN as did Marion Maréchal, the spokeswoman for Reconquête (the party created in 2022 by Éric Zemmour), accentuating the polarization of the far right.

In just a few days, the hight stakes of this election led to an unprecedented mobilization of the electorate. Turnout was 66.71% of registered voters, the highest since 1997.

This surge in turnout was reflected in a high level of mobilization, albeit divided between the three blocs. Two contradictory phenomena emerged:

Although there was no surge in the RN vote which, having absorbed the bulk of the Renaissance (Macron’s party) electorate and two-fifths of that of the LR, nevertheless garnered 33% of the vote; there was a territorial homogenization of the Rassemblement national, clearly more marked in rural areas: out of 577 constituencies, the RN and its allies elected 39 deputies in thefirst round, led in 260 constituencies and were present in the second round in a total of 443 constituencies.

Macronism collapsed, with only two deputies elected in the first round, leading in the second round in 68 constituencies, and in a position to stand in a total of 321 constituencies (before the withdrawals on Tuesday evening).

The New Popular Front elected 31 MPs in the first round, are leading in 128, and qualifying in a total of 413, far more than in 2022. What is most notable is the urban concentration of the vote for the NFP. Twenty-one of the 31 elected in the first round were in the Paris region, particularly in Paris (where it should win two-thirds of the 18 seats) and the neighbouring districts. Similar successes, albeit to a lesser extent, were recorded in Marseille, Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse, Nantes and Strasbourg. The vote was otherwise concentrated in Brittany, the South-West, the Massif Central, Martinique and Guadeloupe and Réunion, with 6 out of 7 constituencies.

These results therefore show strength in the working-class districts of major cities and weakness among working-class populations in rural and suburban areas.

The second round poses the problem of building a democratic front to prevent the RN from obtaining an absolute majority of 289 seats in the National Assembly.

The Front populaire has clearly positioned itself by withdrawing its candidates who had come third against the RN.

The LR, who came out on top in the second round in only 19 constituencies, generally refused to position themselves between the Popular Front and the RN, while being clearly courted by the RN.
The Macronists, meanwhile, are split down the middle, from the point of view of their leaders, between the Ni Ni position of Edouard Philippe, the former prime minister, and those of voting for the Popular Front put forward by former ministers such as Clément Beaune. Gabriel Attal, the outgoing prime minister, said he wanted to "block the FN". A new splintering, a sign of the movement”s agony. Tuesday saw a succession of withdrawals by Ensemble. By 4 p.m., the number had risen to 75, out of the 325 candidates standing for the movement in the second round. This would leave around 100 constituencies with three candidates.

During this week, tens of thousands of activists have been mobilized and the trade union movement has multiplied its statements against the threat of a RN majority.

We must not rule out this possibility, because in all cases the number of RN elected representatives will be between 250 and 290, even if the upper range falls with the withdrawals. It is therefore the task of the moment to avoid this risk and – even if the worst is avoided, to maintain the mobilization on the left and not dissolve into a new combination in which Macron no doubt hopes, one last time, to be in the driving seat.

Thus there remains the question of mobilization and building a social and political front of resistance to the far right and all the combinations that would apply its policies. The worst thing we could do would be to repeat the splintering seen in recent years. The primary responsibility will therefore lie with the social and trade union movement to maintain a front of national and local unity of militant forces in workplaces and neighbourhoods, to oppose the abuses of the extreme right and, more than ever, to assert the demand for a united and radical alternative based on social needs.

2 July 2024

P.S.

If you like this article or have found it useful, please consider donating towards the work of International Viewpoint. Simply follow this link: Donate then enter an amount of your choice. One-off donations are very welcome. But regular donations by standing order are also vital to our continuing functioning. See the last paragraph of this article for our bank account details and take out a standing order. Thanks.

No comments:

Post a Comment