On June 30, France is electing a new legislature. President Emmanuel Macron called for snap elections after the European elections on June 9, in which his party was trounced by the far-right opposition of Marine Le Pen. What is his plan?
Macron is taking a very risky gamble, and a number of his political allies have expressed surprise and concern. He hopes that by dissolving the National Assembly and opening up a situation where the Far Right might actually come to power, the electorate will be gripped by fear and rally around his party. Winning a new majority, after his defeat in the European elections, would give him renewed legitimacy.
Macron was counting on his opponents being divided. But the traditional Right has imploded, with one part announcing an alliance with Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), while the other part might completely disappear. The left-wing opposition had been divided, and Macron thought it would be incapable of uniting in just three weeks. Yet within just a few hours, the various left-wing parties reached an agreement — a superficial one, but enough to complicate the situation for Macron.
The government has been in a weakened state for some time. The idea of dissolving the National Assembly had been raised several times, but Macron was waiting for the right moment. We’ll see if this gamble works for him, but at the moment everything is pointing in the opposite direction.
RN is projecting confidence that it will be able to install the next prime minister. Is that realistic? And what would RN do in office?
No one can say with any certainty what will happen on June 30 and then on July 7, when the run-off elections take place. It does seem certain that the RN will win a number of districts. In all likelihood it will have the largest parliamentary group. But the question is how big its victory will be.
To elect the prime minister, RN needs a relative majority. But Jordan Bardella, the RN candidate, has said the party will form a government only if it wins an absolute majority. Obviously, we can’t trust such statements, and RN may nonetheless try to form a government anyway.
The RN has been quickly abandoning all its “populist” economic promises. It no longer calls for the repeal of last year’s pension reforms, and it dropped the proposal to eliminate VAT taxes on basic necessities. The party’s economic policies have become more pro-business, in line with those of neoliberal governments of the traditional Right.
In the last few days, however, RN has stepped up its racist attacks on foreigners, including those with dual citizenship, whom it wants to ban from strategic government posts. It has reiterated its plan to eliminate droit du sol (birthright citizenship) and replace it with droit du sang (the “right of blood,” citizenship based on ethnicity).
An RN government could be similar to Giorgia Meloni’s in Italy. The profoundly Bonapartist character of the French political system, however, could give the RN greater freedom to adopt racist, repressive, and anti-worker policies. In other words, the RN, despite moving to the center, remains an enormous threat for workers, especially workers who suffer racist oppression.
Macron himself is not up for election — he was elected to a five-year term in 2022. But the National Assembly picks the prime minister. Can you explain how the Fifth Republic works?
In this Bonapartist system, it’s the president who picks the prime minister. Since the 1980s, however, if the majority of the National Assembly has been from a different party than the president. He leaves it to the Parliament to elect the prime minister. In France, a divided government like this is called “cohabitation”: a president from one party appoints a prime minister from another one.
The system for electing the French legislature is quite different from that in the European elections. The European Parliament is elected by proportional representation. The National Assembly, in contrast, has single-seat constituencies with two rounds of voting to elect each deputy. In every district, the two (or sometimes three) most popular candidates from the first round go to a run-off.
In the second round, alliances can be formed to prevent a particular candidate from being elected. Macron is counting on this mechanism to reduce the RN’s electoral strength, with “republican barriers” against RN candidates in the second round. For this to happen, Macron’s candidates would need to form alliances with the Right but also with the Left — it remains to be seen if this will happen.
Center-left and left parties, including the Socialist Party, La France Insoumise (LFI), the Greens, and the post-Stalinist Communist Party, have announced the formation of an alliance. What is their program?
They named their alliance (of convenience) the New Popular Front (NFP), in reference to the Popular Front of 1936. Taking Marx’s classic phrase, the earlier front was a tragedy, but this one has already proved to be a farce. While the NFP is presented as a front to stop the Far Right or even “fascism,” day-to-day reality shows that this is an agreement between apparatchiks to save their parliamentary seats.
The spirit among the NFP member parties is not one of comradeship but rather of competition to determine who can hegemonize the institutional Left. The NFP’s “right wing,” led by Socialist Party figures like former president François Hollande, is determined to weaken Jean-Luc Mélenchon of LFI, and they have not hesitated to join a smear campaign portraying him and the Far Left in general as antisemitic.
Mélenchon and LFI, for their part, are trapped by an electoralist strategy that forces them into alliances with bourgeois formations like the PS. That’s why they have agreed to a very “moderate” program. It makes concessions to the PS’s warmongering regarding Ukraine. It backpedals on economic questions like lowering the retirement age. It says nothing about French imperialism, and it glosses over the issue of police violence. In other words, it’s a program that is entirely compatible with the interests of the French capitalist class and their imperialist state.
There is a slim possibility that the NFP could come out ahead in the elections. We can’t rule this out. In the end, though, such a moderate program would only accelerate the Far Right’s rise.
The Trotskyist organization Révolution Permanente, sister group of Left Voice, is running candidates in the 93rd Department. Why are you running? And what are you proposing?
We decided to run in Saint-Denis, a very proletarian area, precisely because the situation is so alarming for the working class, the youth, and all oppressed people. We believe it is important to present a voice independent of all bourgeois forces to defend the interests of working people. The NFP has nothing to offer — as is shown by the fact that they are running Hollande as a candidate.
Our main candidate is the train worker Anasse Kazib — not a professional politician, but someone who is very familiar with the lives of millions of working people. He is the son of Moroccan immigrants who grew up in the Parisian banlieue, the capital’s poorer suburbs. He represents everything the RN hates.
In a situation where the Far Right is on the rise, it’s important to have voices that support working-class struggles and denounce French imperialism, especially its complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We want to be the voice of all those who oppose the neoliberal counterreforms that are worsening the masses’ living and working conditions. We want to be the voice of queer activists and young people in the poor neighborhoods facing police repression.
We believe it’s impossible to oppose the Far Right in an alliance with forces like the PS who paved the way for Le Pen and her party. It’s impossible to fight the RN alongside people who support police brutality, the criminalization of Palestine solidarity, and new racist laws to take away people’s citizenship.
Regrettably, this has not been the policy of all parties that claim to be anticapitalist. The New Anticapitalist Party — L’Anticapitaliste (NPA) of Philippe Poutou, for example — has decided to join the NPF and align itself with parties that have governed for France’s imperialist bourgeoisie. As Révolution Permanente, we tried to rally the forces of the Far Left that remain independent of the NPF, but unfortunately both Lutte Ouvriere (Workers Struggle) and the NPA refused to form such a front and decided to run on their own.
Whatever the outcome of the elections, we are going to have to prepare for some very tough battles in a political situation that has shifted sharply to the right.
Originally Published: 2024-06-27 13:07:02
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