Emmanuel Macron’s re-election against neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen did not solve any of the political questions the election posed to workers and youth. This will not stop the growing danger of a far-right dictatorship. But this will not stop the working class moving to the left and entering into the struggle either.
As an indication of the development of French capitalism, the vote for neo-fascist Marine Le Pen, with 42 percent of the vote in the second round, has much more weight than the “liberal” label of re-elected President Emmanuel Macron. Le Pen has the largest far-right tally in French history, increasing its share of the vote by 9 percent since 2017. If she achieves the same performance during Macron’s second term, Le Pen will be elected in 2027.
But above all, Macron relies for the final analysis on the same far-right forces in the banks and police apparatus as Le Pen. Macron, the first president to applaud cooperative dictator Philippe Petain when he fired police against the “yellow vests”, appointed Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, a sympathizer of French Bétain labor, for the enactment of an “anti-separatist” law targeting Islam.
In his second term, which has put him under the label of brutal austerity, Macron will thus continue to nurture nationalism and the far right. The Elysee announces via the media that it will increase the retirement age by three years, force work on RSA recipients, and halt unemployment insurance without playing the usual comedy of consulting with union bureaucrats. Newspapers wrote that the police would attack the May Day processions. The police governors read the original copy of the directives issued by the Elysee.
This gives reason for the appeal to workers by the Socialist Equality Party (PES), the French section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), to boycott the second round. PES insisted that the irreconcilable rejection of both Macron and Le Pen and the mobilization of workers to reject fraudulent elections between two far-right candidates would better prepare them for struggles against the next president, be it Macron or Le Pen. Indeed, Macron is now preparing to attack the workers.
The aim of the PES call was to introduce an active policy to tens of millions of workers in France who hate both Macron and Le Pen. In this sense, we can note that 3 million voters went on April 24 to vote blank or null.
A silent anger is rising among workers, spurred by a global capitalist crisis. Around the world, constant attacks on purchasing power and social rights, the far right of political life, the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic and fear of nuclear war surrounding NATO’s intervention against Russia in Ukraine are driving extremism. Workers. The crucial question is how to unite workers in France with their brothers and sisters at the international level against the policies laid down by Macron and Le Pen.
In the April 10 first round, 22 percent of first-round voters attempted to make the leftist opposition heard by voting for Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Having had 23 percent of Le Pen, Mélenchon was definitely eliminated. But his vote, which was largely concentrated among young, low-paid workers and working-class neighborhoods in large urban areas, put Melenchon and his party, La France insoumise (LFI) in a very strong position.
While students and high school students all over France demonstrated against Macron’s run-off, PES introduced an active leftist politics. Melenchon could have called on his constituents to strike and demonstrate against this second round, the repression of the youth, and the imminent threat of war. After the LFI won the working-class and popular neighborhoods of the big cities, this mobilization could not only bring the French economy to a standstill, but also mobilize workers internationally against inflation and war.
But Melenchon’s response was not to mobilize, but to demobilize his voters. Surpris par son propre soutien, qui avait explosé en quelques semaines, Mélenchon a dit le soir du premier tour qu’il ne se serait jamais plus candidat à la présidence et, appuyant tacitementFI Macron, a scandé à que pas voit une seule dev the pen. After a few days, he changed his tune. He called for an LFI vote in the June legislative elections to serve as prime minister under Macron or Le Pen. He claimed that this would fight for progressive policies against the president.
PES flatly rejects the political lie that workers can implement progressive politics under the neo-fascist regime. The LFI’s idea that Mélenchon could lead a “citizen’s revolution” under Le Pen or Macron tramples on Marxism and the basic lessons of twentieth-century history.
The corrupt institutions of the Fifth Republic, which Melenchon had previously criticized, gave the president exclusive control over foreign policy. But you cannot defend workers on national soil by attacking them internationally. Defending their lives and living standards requires stopping stimulus packages for the wealthy, a blank check for mass infection of the coronavirus, and pushing all the imperialist powers in NATO toward war with Russia. .
Only the struggle for a socialist revolution that expropriates the financial aristocracy can unite the workers of France with their class brothers and sisters internationally against these policies.
PES refuses to replace the LFI with the national program of a “citizen’s revolution” in the “age of the people” of the international working class struggle for socialism. It is an attempt to mobilize the reactionary historical legacy of Stalinism and its political allies of the French workers against today’s working class movement. This goes towards compromise not only with Macron, but with Le Pen’s chauvinistic social demagogy.
Against Melenchon’s courtship of representatives of the far-right in the French capital, one must quote Trotsky’s warnings about the Stalinist forces of the German Communist Party, led by Ernst Thielmann, in the years before the Nazis came to power:
It is hard to imagine a more shameful capitulation in principle than that of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which replaced the slogan of the proletarian revolution with the slogan of the people’s revolution. …of course, every great revolution is a people’s revolution or a national revolution, in the sense that it gathers around the revolutionary class all the living and creative forces of the nation and it rebuilds the nation around a new axis. But this is not a slogan, it is a social description of the revolution that requires precise and specific interpretations. And a word, it is a charlatan and a charlatan, the competition of Bazaar with the fascists, at the expense of the confusion that is planted in the heads of the workers. Fascist Strasser says: 95% of the people are interested in the revolution, so it is a popular revolution, not a class revolution. Thielman accompanies him.”
Against the populist demagogy of Melenchon, the Israeli Socialist Party has complete confidence in the revolutionary capabilities of the French and international proletariat. A class divide separates workers from candidates like Mélenchon or Le Pen who vote for them, often with skepticism, even disgust. The main task in France is to clarify the political and historical issues critical to winning workers and youth to socialism, thus building PES as an alternative to Mélenchon and pseudo-left parties, such as Olivier Besancenot’s NPA, who are uniting with him.
On this basis, PES stresses the importance of the international online observance of Labor Day by the International Committee of the Fourth International. Speakers from all over the world will discuss the foundations of the struggle of the Trotskyist movement today against the imperialist war and its cause, the capitalist system. PES invites workers and youth in France and abroad to participate.