After two weeks of negotiations, Barnier has finally formed a government. Most right-wing leaders, who usually rush in for high positions, have this time preferred to stay on the sidelines, sending their second fiddles instead to take their places on this sinking ship!
There's no telling how long this interim government will last - probably no more than nine months, the legal deadline before the National Assembly can be dissolved. And no one can tell either what new maneuvers and in-fighting will ensue. But we do know what the government’s policy will be.
To guarantee the capitalists’ profits in this time of crisis, Barnier will attack the workers, and in particular immigrant workers, those who occupy the hardest, least-paying and most precarious jobs.
The appointment of Retailleau, a right-wing fundamentalist Catholic in favor of toughening immigration laws, to the Interior Ministry is a pledge to the RN, without which Barnier could not remain in power.
Presenting his government's action plan, Barnier declared that his priority would be to redress public finances, referring in a catastrophic tone to the 3,000 billion-euro debt. But who is responsible for this debt? And who has benefited from these billions of euros?
Definitely not the workers, whose standard of living has plummeted! And those billions haven’t been used to finance understaffed hospitals either, where patients can spend hours on stretchers in the corridors of emergency departments!
The situation of nursing homes, daycares, schools, transport, housing – all the services that are most essential to the population – is catastrophic. They have suffered directly from the cost-cutting policies that all the governments have pursued in order to hand out billions to the big capitalist corporations and guarantee the profits of their shareholders.
If anybody’s responsible for this disastrous situation, it’s those politicians!
They are incapable of managing society properly, because they’re only good at kneeling before the capitalist vultures and parasites. They don't give a damn about the problems of the working class. For all these people, as for big business, workers are nothing more than pawns in their game, a raw material that is there only to generate profit.
To try and make people believe that it won’t only be the working class making sacrifices, Barnier has talked of introducing a tax on the ultra-rich and of increasing levies on the profits of big business. Seriously? Who can believe that this government, led by a conservative politician and with Macron clones in charge of finance, will ever want to make the rich pay?
And in any case, capitalists have a thousand ways of getting around this type of measure. Not to mention the fact that they know full well they'll get back a hundredfold, in the form of exemptions and subsidies, the little they might be forced to pay to the state.
So, Barnier and his ministers will pursue the same policy because it’s the one dictated by the bourgeoisie. At the head of industrial and financial empires, of immense media groups with newspapers and TV channels, the capitalists are the true masters of society. And they can impose their roadmap to all governments, whatever their political stripe.
Indeed, big business did not wait for the appointment of the new government to launch its offensive. Attacks on workers have never ceased. Factory closures, redundancies and job cuts are taking place at Valeo, Casino, Bonduelle and many other companies that don't make the headlines.
To face up to those attacks, workers will have to fight with their own methods, through demonstrations, strikes and factory occupations. To defend their living conditions, workers will have no choice but to wage their own class struggle.
As long as the bourgeoisie owns the companies and all the levers of economic and social life, there can be no good government. The capitalist class must be stripped of its power through expropriation. To achieve this goal, workers will need their own party, made up of men and women determined to overthrow the system.
Nathalie Arthaud