The following article was translated from Lutte de Classe No. 242, September 2024, the monthly journal of our sister organisation, Lutte Ouvriére. It discusses the political situation after President Emmanuel Macron’s “snap” general election and the last-minute tactical manoeuvres which blocked the election of far-right Rassemblement National (RN) candidates, thus preventing a RN victory, but leaving no party with the majority required to form a government. With the post-eIection horse-trading well underway, the only agreement among the main political parties was that the attacks against the working class should recommence... This article looks at how left and right governments alternated in power in the past, going back to De Gaulle, who instigated the presidential system as a means to maintain bourgeois class rule.
Introduction for English-speaking readers
Since the article was intended for French readers who would know what happened in the election a few months ago, we provide a brief recap for our English-speaking readers...
Unlike the simple first-past-the-post system in Britain, the ballot to elect the 577 members of the National Assembly involved 2 rounds of voting, on 30 June and 7 July 2024.
As for the reason for Macron’s hasty decision to call this election, it was in response to the unprecedented success of the far-right Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, in the European parliamentary elections on 9 June. It had “performed beyond expectations”, wrote the newspaper le Monde, gaining 31.5% of the votes cast (on a slightly increased voter turnout of 51.8%), “a 40-year record for any French political party in the European elections”. Above all, this result was interpreted as an indictment on Macron’s government. So he decided to throw down the gauntlet, to either “confirm” or “deny” his and his party's crash in the polls.
However in order to try to prevent the RN from repeating its EU success, most of the political parties decided to form electoral alliances so that the electorate's vote for “parties with shared vaIues”as Macron put it, would not be split and thus let in an RN candidate.
Despite this, the first round gave a result which definitely did not augur well for the final outcome: there was a record high turnout of 66.7% - the highest for a first round since 1997 – and the RN got the largest share of the vote at 33.2%.
To block the RN from pushing its advantage in the second round of the election, Macron’s “Ensemble” (“Together”) alliance decided to withdraw third-placed candidates - except, apparently, in the case where it might help a leftist LFI - La France Insoumise - candidate to win! In fact La France Insoumise (LFI), led by the former Socialist Party MP, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, had formed its own left alliance, the New Popular Front (NFP) along with the Communist Party, Socialist Party, Greens, and smaller left groups like the New Anti-capitalist Party, NPA. And as it happened, despite withdrawing far more candidates in the second round than Ensemble, this Front managed to win the most seats.
A point to note is that, of course, the president of France hasn’t changed, because there is a separate election for president (instigated in the 1950s under de Gaulle as this article explains): so the politically centre-right Emmanuel Macron remains in place. He was elected in 2022 in a run-off against the far-right’s Marine Le Pen and will remain in position until 2027, unless some or other constitutional crisis leads to his resignation.
These were the final results after the second round: New Popular Front (NFP) won the 188 seats; “Ensemble”, won 161 seats and the RN won 142 seats. To win an outright majority, a party or coalition needed to secure at least 289 of the National Assembly's 577 seats. So all three of the main alliances fell short of a majority. The result was an impasse... as the article below discusses.
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After two months of farcical manoeuvring and negotiations, French president Macron finally appointed the right wing Republican Party nominee, Michel Barnier as Prime Minister. Readers in Britain will recognise him as the European Union's chief negotiator for Brexit. Apparently loyalty to the EU is not a contradiction for someone from the French conservative right!
A Barnier premiership was, unsurprisingly, given the thumbs-up by employers’ organisations; he had the right sort of credentials, having worked his way up through the bourgeois institutions of France and Europe. He was also “validated” by the leaders of the far-right party National Rally (Rassemblement National or RN), no doubt because at the end of 2021 he had called for a moratorium on immigration. But of course, the RN expects to influence the new government's policies. And these will be even more pro-business, anti-worker and xenophobic than those imposed by Macron’s slightly less right-wing government over the past two years.
However, in the absence of a clear majority in the National Assembly, the future of a “Barnier government” is likely to be difficult. This appointment in no way resolves the political crisis which has been brewing ever since Macron was re-elected to the Elysée in 2022; by then his party had already lost its parliamentary majority. And this crisis became even more acute when the RN secured a surprise victory in the European elections on 9 June this year. By deciding, like a poker player, to call early legislative elections in the hope of catching the parties off guard, Macron has made the situation even worse.
The way that the electorate voted (or didn't vote), and even more so, the manoeuvres of the political parties - the lightning formation of the New Popular Front (NFP) of left-wing parties which had been tearing themselves apart a few days earlier; followed by a “Republican Front", to try to counter the far-right Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen - resulted in a National Assembly divided into eleven parliamentary groups!
An increasingly unaccountable political personnel
While MPs had grouped themselves into these three rival blocs in order to be elected, none of which has an absolute majority, the ambitions and calculations of any one of them could lead to a splintering and re-composition at any time. However, the only real obstacle to the formation of a grand coalition government, called for by all those worried about political instability, is not however, differences in their political programmes!
Basically, despite the posturing of some MPs, all of them, including the RN and the left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI) which translates as “France Unbowed"(!), are respectful of the social order. They all swear that they stand for “the national interest”, which in a capitalist society, obviously means the interests of the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie, whose affairs they all aspire to manage. There is a continuum between the leaders of these parliamentary groups. They have, at one time or another, sat on the same parliamentary benches or even in the same government. In fact, when they have not governed together, they have succeeded each other in power, one completing the reforms begun by the other. So for instance, former Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, of Macron’s centre-right En Marche/Renaissance Party, oversaw the final passage of the much-hated pension reform (it increased retirement age from 62 to 64 years), which was launched back in 2013 under Marisol Touraine, then a Socialist Party Minister of Health and Social Affairs. Unsurprisingly, in power, all have obeyed the dictats of the bosses.
The only thing preventing these fractious MPs from governing together is their petty self-interest in the context of an unstable political situation. The most ambitious, along with their respective cliques, are aiming for the next presidential election - in 2027, or earlier, if circumstances force Macron to resign - and do not want to wear themselves out after just a few months in power. The others know that another assembly dissolution is possible in less than a year's time and do not want to get on board a ship that is sinking.
These disengaged politicians, with Macron at their head, therefore appear to be “all irresponsible”, as an editorial in the financial newspaper Les Echos [a French equivalent of the Financial Times] put it on 5 September. In fact, they are always irresponsible towards their voters, and first and foremost towards those in the working class, who are invited to vote every five years and then expected to allow themselves to be trampled underfoot without flinching until the next ballot. But they now appear irresponsible towards the bourgeoisie. At a time when the capitalist economy is going from crisis to crisis, when world growth is slowing down, when Germany, the locomotive of European industry, is in quasi-economic recession, when the world's stock markets are in danger of crashing at any moment, when the financial markets are controlling governments, particularly France, through their public debt, and when war is spreading, the French big bourgeoisie takes a very dim view of the fact that there is no stable government in place to run the state machinery.
Of course, in a rich imperialist country like France, the state machinery operates with or without ministers at its head. All summer long, the senior civil servants prepared the 2025 budget while the government was considered to have given up. To the delight of employers, this austerity budget will only need a simple validation by Barnier (no parliamentary vote needed). It provides for savings of £8 to £12.5 billion compared to the 2024 budget. He will be able to do this all the more easily because his chief of staff, Jerome Fournel, is the same person who worked for Bruno Le Maire (the French Chancellor) at the Ministry of Economics, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty.
The Olympics went ahead and the start of the new school term took place without any ministers in office. Hundreds of rectors, prefects, chiefs of staff, directors of public institutions and department secretaries continued to implement the decisions, laws and decrees made in the previous months without the country experiencing the slightest interruption. These senior civil servants are selected from the elite schools of the bourgeoisie and trained to ensure the continuity of the State despite the comings and goings of ministers.
On the other hand, an official government is needed to arbitrate between the conflicting interests of this or that group of bankers or industrialists; to defend tooth and nail the interests of French capitalists against their foreign competitors, including by preparing for war; to impose laws or decrees that set tax rates or regulate a thousand aspects of social and economic life, all of which are sources of profit for a myriad of companies in the construction, agriculture and catering sectors. As soon as Barnier was appointed, these various sectors demanded “action”.
A government is needed to “guarantee the continuation of the supply-side policy pursued since Emmanuel Macron came to power”, as formulated by the president of Medef (the French equivalent of the CB1) at its summer university at the end of August. In other words, it is necessary to pursue tax cuts for businesses, to continue extending working hours, push back the retirement age, freeze wages, reduce or abolish benefits for the unemployed, make living conditions harsher for workers - starting with the immigrant fraction - slash school or health budgets... so as to drain most of the wealth created into the coffers of capital. If it isn't toppled too soon, the Barnier government will do just that.
Continuous political instability
If the personality of Macron, who pretends to reign as if he were Jupiter, and the petty short-term calculations of a pathetic political class contribute to the prolongation of the political crisis, it has deeper causes. It results from the wear and tear of the parliamentary system against the backdrop of the ongoing crisis in the capitalist economy.
With varying degrees of success, depending on the era, the bourgeoisie in wealthy countries has adapted universal suffrage to their own ends and put in place systems of alternating government, enabling one party devoted to its interests to be replaced by another just as devoted, when it is too worn out. In France, in 1958, at the height of the Algerian War, after thirteen years of a parliamentary system made unstable and weak by inter-party rivalries, General de Gaulle, denounced “the confusion and impotence of [his political] power", and was thus given all the powers he needed to set up a presidential system. By concentrating a great deal of power in the hands of the President, and reducing that of Parliament, the Constitution of the Fifth Republic ensured political stability long after Algerian independence. De Gaulle’s political clout and his credibility within the army, acquired in the preceding period, naturally played a decisive role.
But with de Gaulle gone, worn out by more than ten years in power and weakened by the general strike of May 1968, the,Fifth Republic continued to serve the bourgeoisie. For decades, the right and left alternated at the Elysée and Matignon palaces [the residences of the President and Prime Minister, respectively]. When the rising hatred of the working class put into question the rule of the right, it made way for the left. From Mitterrand (left, Socialist Party) and Chirac (right, Conservative-Republican) to Sarkozy (right Conservative-Republican) and Hollande (left, Socialist Party), this alternating in power took place without any real disruption.
But for democracy to work, governments need to have a few crumbs to distribute. In a period of permanent economic crisis, when unemployment is massive, when the standard of living of the working classes is deteriorating, when employers are constantly attacking the living conditions of those who make society function, governments have nothing to give to workers except cuts to their social benefits. So politicians wear out faster and faster. Sarkozy and then Hollande failed to win re-election. The left-wing parties, whose electoral base was made up of the working classes, who had to be encouraged to dream, by the promise of a bright future by the grace of the ballot paper alone, held power alternately with the right for 40 years. One after the other, Mitterrand, Jospin and then Hollande betrayed their promises and submitted to the demands of finance and capitalists. The Left ended up completely discredited among workers.
As Hollande's advisor and then minister, the former banker Emmanuel Macron, was backed by the big bourgeoisie for the 2017 presidential election, having claimed to be “both right and left”! But he has offered only short-lived respite to bourgeois democracy.
New Popular Front comedy
After painstakingly agreeing on Lucie Castets (she was suitably educated in the French equivalent of Oxbridge) for the post of Prime Minister and then having the door slammed in their faces, the NFP parties are claiming that democracy has been “denied” to them and are denouncing Macron for a “coup de force”. These left-wing NFP MPs who now complain bitterly of “mistreatment” by Macron, had already lost what little dignity they might have had when they de facto saved the seats of dozens of Macronist and Republican MPs, including Borne and Darmanin, by stepping aside on the pretext of forming a “republican front”against the RN. The result of all these manoeuvres, and despite an electoral system which gave over-representation to the NFP (33.4% of deputies for 28.1% of the vote), is that with 193 deputies out of 577, left-wing parties are in the minority in an Assembly which is weighted massively to the right and far right.
Workers have no reason to shed any tears “in solidarity”with the NFP, nor is there anything to regret over the missed opportunity of a Castets government. While Castets said she would, if she was in office, make a modest increase in the minimum wage - to 1,600 euros (£1,300/month) – and reverse the pension reform, she also said repeatedly that this would only be possible in each case, if there was majority assembly support. Which means, in effect, abandoning the NFP programme. But even when left-wing parties have had an absolute majority, they have always backed down in the face of employers’ demands. If the Socialist Leon Blum invoked a so-called “silver wall” in 1936 (a policy to restrict the export of capital and limit currency speculation), his distant successors hide behind the “orthodoxy” demanded by the financial markets to build the budgets of indebted states. In Britain, the Labour Party has returned to power with a large majority. But using the excuse that the Tories have left the coffers empty, the new Labour Prime Minister has announced massive cuts; including cutting the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.
The “denial of democracy”, which is in fact real, quite obviously does not lie in the refusal to appoint Lucie Castets as Prime Minister or the refusal to entrust power to the NFP. It goes much deeper. It stems from the fact that the real masters of society are not the elected members of parliament or the president, but those who own capital. A few billionaires in finance and industry like France's Bernard Arnault or America's Elon Musk, a few thousand capitalists around the world, have more influence over the economy than elected MPs and presidents, including the economy of the United States. They own the major manufacturing, transport and distribution companies, and above all the banks. Our lives, ourjobs, our wages, our working hours, our days off and even our health depend on the bosses who exploit our labour far more than on the MPs who pass the laws.
In the ballot box, to elect a Member of Parliament, a boss’s ballot paper and a worker's ballot paper may have the same weight - provided they have the right to vote and disregarding voting methods, electoral district boundaries and disproportionate propaganda resources. But when it comes to deciding whether to close a factory or offer a simple pay rise, it's the bosses’ dictatorship that prevails. In the face of this dictatorship, the strength of workers lies not in the ballot paper, but in their indispensable role at the heart of the economy, which becomes clear when they go on strike. In order to impose large enough pay rises to prevent themselves from being impoverished by soaring prices, in order to prevent older workers from wearing themselves out, while young workers are stuck on the dole, in order to defend their living conditions and prevent society from disintegrating, workers will never be able to count on a government running the institutions of the bourgeoisie. They can only rely on their own collective strength.
The NFP's farcical respect for bourgeois institutions and for Macron’s “democracy” disarms workers, as do their appeals to the Constitutional Council. In the same way, their co-ordination of the mobilisations against retirement at 64 with the timetable of Parliament - as if this is the place where things are decided - disarmed workers in 2023. A fraction of the NFP's MPs are calling for new mass mobilisations against the government. But if and when workers find the energy and courage to mobilise en masse, it would be a real anti-climax if they did so only to bring to power parties that will attack them.
The RN acts referee while it sets a trap
The far-right Rassemblement National, ostracised by the alliance of all its political adversaries (an alliance which was pompously dubbed the “Republican Front”), was initially predicted to win the legislative election. Instead, it remains in opposition. Nevertheless, its parliamentary group has grown from 89 MPs (sharing 4.2 million votes in 2022) to 123 MPs, who gained 9.3 million votes in the first round in 2024 (in fact, if the votes of its Les Republicains-Ciotti allies are added, it got 10.5 million votes). This was a result which stood out more than any other in these elections. The barrage of criticism from their rivals on the right was far more motivated by a refusal to make way for these new pretenders to government, than by any ideological divide. By participating in this barrage to save the positions of his deputies, Macron may have missed, from a bourgeois point of view, an opportunity to smoothly integrate the RN into power, alongside himself in the Elysée and with Bardella (the young figurehead RN leader) placed in Matignon as Prime Minister instead of Barnier.
The closer the RN gets to power, the more it seeks to demonstrate that it can be a responsible and docile party of government. Borrowing most of Macron’s economic program in the run-up to the election, the RN confirmed the tax cuts planned for the rich and businesses, and postponed the repeal of the law on retirement at 64 to the distant future. While the RN may not be the preferred option of the bourgeoisie, which dislikes the unknown and prefers to rely on personnel of proven reliability, it remains a perfectly acceptable recourse for them. Significantly, some of the big bourgeoisie, such as billionaire Vincent Bolloré, are pushing for a right-wing alliance, as illustrated by the Republican Ciotti’s rallying behind the RN.
By pledging not to veto a Barnier government, the RN has just shown how responsible it can be. An objective ally of Macron, the RN is also a “referee” who will have a direct influence on the policy of the next government. Following in the footsteps of Darmanin (ex-Minister of the Interior and Overseas, equivalent to Britain's Home Secretary), whose “asylum and immigration” law was passed in January thanks to the votes and programme of the RN, Barnier has announced that he will be attacking immigration “again and again”. Singling out immigrant workers, or the unemployed as scapegoats, is a tried and tested way of diverting attention from the attacks on all workers. It underlines, if that were needed, the ignominy of all those (like the participants in the NFP) who claim to have set up a barrier against the RN by withdrawing in favour of the Right and the Macronists.
While this “barrier against the RN” may have prevented Bardella from taking up residence at Matignon, it has not reduced his influence among a large section of the working class, nor his reactionary political weight in the country. Because the RN criticises the closure of public services and talks about “insecurity”, and above all, because it appears as a party “which has never been tried”and who could “kick the anthill into shape”, the RN scored best in the most deprived working- class towns and regions. And by repeating, in an echo of so many others, including the “left” socialist Michel Rocard as early as 1989, that “we can't take in all the misery in the world”, that there aren't enough housing units, creche places or hospital beds for everyone, and that they should therefore be reserved for the French alone, the RN sows its toxic division within the working class. This is a deadly poison at a time when the working class needs its unity more than ever, in order to defend itself and to wage the battles which, if won, would offer a different future to society.
The pressure of reactionary ideas is not just on the government. It affects the whole of society: the smallest news item, the slightest aggression against a child, an elderly person or a policeman, is blamed by politicians and a multitude of commentators on the supposed laxity of the justice system, the lack of order and authority in the country, and the alleged misdeeds of immigrants. The electoral weight of the far right, supported by governments, can only strengthen fascist militants in the police and army, or racist groups preparing to take physical action against migrants, reception centres, mosques or young people of immigrant origin in local neighbourhoods. The racist demonstrations and riots that shook several cities in Britain this summer should be a warning: xenophobic rhetoric can lead overnight to violent acts and even a situation of civil war within our class, in our workplaces, or where we live.
The justice system and the police will not protect us from this violence, as left-wing politicians and trade union leaders who only talk about “republican values”claim. Worse still, encouraged by government policy, they will make it worse. To protect themselves from racist attacks, to defend those who are threatened, workers will only be able to rely on themselves, by learning to organise at the level of their workplaces or their neighbourhoods, on a class rather than a community basis.
The same goes for defending our demands in the face of the high cost of living, redundancies and unemployment, the intensification of exploitation and the growing chaos in society. As long as workers put their fate in the hands of bourgeois politicians, their short-term interests (wages, working conditions, retirement...) as well as their long-term interests (threat of war, future of their children, destruction of the planet...) will be trampled underfoot.
That is why they need to build a party of their own, a party that is implanted in their workplaces and in their neighbourhoods, a party that does not aspire to provide ministers to manage the state of the bourgeoisie, but a party of conscious workers who prepare for the confrontation with the capitalist class and for its expropriation.
9 September 2024