Supporters were held up for hours, sprayed with tear gas and harassed by the police… the League of Champions final turned into a fiasco. Thankfully, there were no deaths to report! Having wrongly blamed the Liverpool supporters, those in charge are passing the buck from one to the other. And who will the government hide behind this time?

Macron is a great one for self-promotion. The final was originally meant to be held in Russia but when a new venue had to be found, Macron boasted of “French know-how” in organizing major events. Well look at how that worked out!

And to Macron’s “French know-how”, we can now add the mark of Lallement, the Paris chief of police, a truncheon-happy tear gas addict. He thought he could deal with problems the same way that he dealt with the yellow vests or suburban youths: just lash out at them.

Once again, the government has been overwhelmed by the situation. In point of fact, the government is overwhelmed in every field: the hospital crisis, the lack of personnel in national education, skyrocketing prices. It’s out of its depth in the economic crisis and the resulting breakdown of society.

The whole system is a complete shambles. There’s no money to ensure that society functions in a relatively normal manner. There’s no money to pay decent wages to hospital staff or to run local councils and their services. But billions are accumulating in the pockets of the bourgeoisie.

The abundance of money they have feeds speculation and sends prices sky high: the cost of a footballer, the cost of real estate and, with the war in Ukraine and the threat of sanctions and shortages, the cost of raw materials, from oil to wheat.

Society is falling apart. The way to put it back together again is for workers to fight to ensure that the wealth created belongs to the productive class.

The billions made must be used to increase wages, to recruit in both the private and public sectors, in hospitals, schools, public transport. They must be used to pay retirement pensions and finance young people’s studies. They must allow the masses to flourish by making culture, sport, leisure activities available to all.

Whether it’s in our daily life or in the way the world works, the political leaders are driving us to disaster. So the working class must find the will to act on its own behalf. It must reconnect with the collective struggles that are its strength. We can’t expect anything from those in power or from state institutions, it’s up to us to get organized, to fight to gain respect but also to change the whole of society.

In order to assert this, Lutte Ouvrière is presenting candidates in every constituency in the legislative elections.

Every candidate represents the working class: most of them are still working, others are unemployed or only have temporary or part-time jobs. Others are retired or are still studying.

Every status is represented: private and public sector workers, self-employed workers too. They are factory workers, postal workers, home helps, bus drivers, nurses, forklift operators, maintenance technicians, office workers, teachers, mechanics, taxi drivers, free-lance computer techs… Just like the working classes, they come from all over the world.

None of them are professional politicians. None of them will sell their political convictions or their revolt against the system to make a career for themselves. They have the same worries as working-class families, the same day-to-day problems. If they are elected, they will be far better representatives of the working population than the smooth talkers who, in their overwhelming majority, come from privileged backgrounds or from a long line of politicians.

Left-wing, right-wing, extreme-right-wing candidates are fighting one another to run capitalism despite it being a system that condemns us to exploitation, to inequalities, to crises and to war. Voting for Lutte Ouvrière candidates is a way of stating clearly that the system must be overthrown.

It’s also a way of rejecting racism and nationalism, all the ideologies that set workers one against the other. And it also asserts that workers, who are, after all, the ones who make society function, are capable of running it far better than the big bourgeoisie whose only goal is profit! On June 12, let’s be as many as possible to vote for the Lutte Ouvrière candidates!

Nathalie Arthaud