What we learned from the French elections
When French President Emmanuel Macron solemnly addressed his fellow citizens in early June, he promised that a snap election would provide a “necessary clarification”. Moreover, it would express his deep commitment to the democratic process as a solution to political deadlock: “To let the sovereign people have their say: nothing is more republican”.
By late July, little has been clarified, and the power of the “sovereign people” does not seem to be in evidence. An enormous surge in far-right support—10 million votes for the post-fascist National Rally (RN)—was matched and exceeded by an anti-fascist electoral mobilisation. Terror of an impending fascist government was converted into uncontrolled joy and relief for French leftists. Yet France’s parliament remains split into three blocs, with no clear majority. Since that moment of joy, France’s anti-democratic constitution has worked its dark magic to convert this social crisis into behind-closed-doors manoeuvring, to the advantage of the ultra-powerful presidency.
Gabriel Attal, Macron’s prime minister, resigned yet remained in power in a legally mysterious caretaker arrangement. After three rounds of parliamentary voting, Macron’s former speaker of the parliament, Yaël Braun-Pivet, was re-elected to her post. The pre-election status quo has reasserted itself and demanded a leading role in forming a new government. After the election results were confirmed, the daily news was converted into rolling updates on the latest backdoor deals that had been made and broken, the moves and countermoves between the various parties to try to form a new government. The “sovereign people” were pushed out of the picture.
The partisans of the New Popular Front (NFP) coalition, and in particular its biggest and most left-wing section, France Unbowed of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, have a claim to power. The left is now the biggest parliamentary bloc. Within that bloc, France Unbowed is the biggest section. By tradition and convention, it should lead the formation of a new government.
But even the tweediest conservatives seem to lose interest in tradition and convention when they might result in taxes on the rich and support for Palestine. Both RN and Macron’s supporters seem to agree that they will do anything to prevent a government formed by France Unbowed. During the electoral campaign, Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, made his principles clear in a television interview:
“If it came down to a two-way race between RN and France Unbowed where I live, I wouldn’t vote for France Unbowed. I love the police too much. I love the gendarmes too much. I love the state too much.”
Despite presenting the NFP as a threat as bad as, or worse than, the fascists, Macron’s machine relied on left-wing anti-fascist votes to keep its remaining parliamentary representation. Afterwards, it tried to undo the election results by breaking up the left-wing bloc and absorbing parts of it into the discredited ruling regime. The more “mainstream” (read: right-wing) members of the NFP coalition want to lead it towards political compromise and deradicalisation. So much for a necessary clarification; so much for the sovereign people.
This depressing spectacle should not be the end of the story. France’s elections occurred in a country shaped by regular, frequent, deeply rooted oppositional social movements. “Universal suffrage”, Vladimir Lenin wrote, “is an index of the level reached by the various classes in their understanding of their problems. It shows how the various classes are inclined to solve their problems. The actual solution of those problems is not provided by voting, but by the class struggle in all its forms”.
What can we learn from these elections about how the classes in France are inclined to solve their problems?
For insight into the French capitalist class, we can begin by considering Macron and his political machine. There is a good reason to start here. French economists Thomas Piketty and Julia Cagé recently published a systematic study of French voting patterns going back to 1789. They found that Macron’s base is “the most bourgeois in all history”. Like most conservative parties, Macron’s group finds its highest support among the wealthiest people, whether measured by income or property ownership. Unlike traditional conservatives, he and his party have almost no support among the poor, whether in the cities or the countryside. Macron truly is the “president of the bosses”, as the chants of striking workers put it.
Hence his authoritarianism. With no genuine mass support, Macron has forced through his program with raw state power. This runs the gamut from the physical violence of riot cops to the repeated use of article 49.3 of France’s constitution to implement laws without a parliamentary vote—most notably the hated pension changes. He has consistently tried to draw out the most authoritarian aspects of the French constitutional and legal framework, and normalise their application in political life.
However, Macron’s group does not rely solely on mechanical authoritarianism. It has a bigger plan for its project’s long-term survival, which is both more political and more insidiously undemocratic. Macron aims to transcend the old left-right split in politics and replace it with a new two-way division between liberals and nationalists. He has constantly attempted to disintegrate, split and anathematise the institutions of the left, while absorbing their most demoralised elements into the base of his own party.
Unions have been confronted and defeated. Left-wing anti-racist activists have been smeared as antisemitic terror-lovers. Almost any institution that might mobilise the oppressed against the rich has been targeted in one way or another. Meanwhile, Macron has anointed the far right as a legitimate opposition while demanding left-wing voters’ support in the face of the fascist threat. This is how the political representatives of France’s liberal capitalists have attempted to eradicate the left and pave the way for the growth of the far right.
What about the workers? It is well-known that fascist politics have penetrated the consciousness of French workers. But the picture is complex. More than half of French ouvriers voted for the far right in the European elections. But an ouvrier is not simply a worker. It is a blue-collar worker, of a kind that is shrinking as an overall proportion of the French working class. The ouvriers now make up only 20 percent of France’s population; bosses outnumber them. They are ageing as France deindustrialises. The research of Piketty and Cagé shows that ouvriers now mostly live and work outside the big cities: factories and warehouses were pushed into the countryside, drawn there by cheap land and access to motorways, but also by the bosses’ desire to isolate blue-collar workers from the leftist influence of city politics.
France’s ouvriers are now its older workers, its more isolated, the ones who live in areas more dominated by small- and medium-sized businesses, and who are more likely themselves to own some property. As France’s mainstream parties adopted neoliberalism, the fascists took their “social turn”, proposing to re-industrialise and revive France’s welfare state on a racial basis. Following this, their electoral base expanded and shifted from the urban middle class towards rural workers.
All this is no cause for complacency. Every working class will have its backward, even reactionary, currents. But the backward current in France’s working class is really big and really backward. It is no foregone conclusion that isolated workers should be reactionary, let alone fascist. And although those rural ouvriers provide the largest concentration of fascist support, fascist voters and activists are found at every level of French society and within every section of its working class. The question becomes whether the organised parts of the French working class can resist and reverse this tendency.
Among French trade unionists, it’s a different story. Polling by Harris/AEF Info shows that only 19 percent of union-supporting workers support the fascists, compared to 37 percent of non-unionists. Among the powerful and influential General Confederation of Labour (CGT), there is real cause for concern: 27 percent of its supporters vote for RN, a very dangerous development indicating a major problem. Still, a large 61 percent majority voted for New Popular Front candidates in the last election. The CGT represents many blue-collar workers in regional industrial hubs and could mount a counterattack on the development of right-wing politics in the working class.
Among supporters of the FSU, a union representing mostly teachers, 74 percent support the NFP, and only 4 percent support RN. This confirms the argument by Piketty and Cagé that the left finds its strongest support among the professions intermédiaires—highly educated but badly paid and precarious workers like teachers and nurses, who mostly rent, live in big cities and tend to work for public institutions. They are generally younger, live among bigger concentrations of other workers and are more politically aware.
These figures do not simply represent voting blocs that can be expanded and consolidated to the advantage of left-wing politicians. They represent organised and class-conscious workers, many of whom have recently been on strike against Macron’s neoliberalism and have mobilised politically against fascism. That energy must be translated into action.
The recent electoral victory against the fascists was only a temporary reprieve. The growth of far-right sentiment in the working class makes a fascist government more likely, but it also risks making the working-class movement more disorganised and powerless in the face of attack. The electoral results show a huge desire to resist and reject the growth of fascism. The recent history of France’s strike movements shows that the anti-fascist trade unionists can lead the entire working class, and indeed much of the nation, against the country’s political elites. If they took up the fight against both racism and the French bosses, they could halt and reverse the advance of far-right politics in society as a whole.
In this, probably their biggest obstacle is the trade union bureaucracy. Despite much tough talk, France’s union bureaucrats have shown no desire to rise to the level of the current crisis. They allowed recent general strike movements to dissipate despite the rank and file’s willingness to go further. This contributed to the sense that France’s social problems will be resolved only through parliament, terrain that fundamentally favours right-wing politics. The left reformists of France Unbowed have refused to challenge the failings of the bureaucracy, instead hoping to curry favour with historically hostile union leaders and consolidate their voter base. In this, they have been successful: the CGT’s new leadership under Sophie Binet broke with long tradition to endorse the NFP in the elections. For reformist leaders, whether in the political parties or the trade unions, class struggle is valuable only insofar as it translates into a good result at the ballot box.
Yet for all their limitations, and for all the efforts of France’s establishment to lock the crisis within France’s constitutional puzzle box, the struggle may develop nonetheless. On the night of the election, after the left was shocked by its own success, Jean-Luc Mélenchon spoke to the crowds of France Unbowed supporters in Place Stalingrad. He demanded the right to form a minority left-wing government.
“Those loudmouths who’ve blathered all week about an ‘ungovernable country’: they will have the responsibility to bring down the government”, he said. “And I bet they’ll be wise enough not to do it. Because it would be a grave error to think this electoral victory is like all the others. The politics from before will not continue. The people have come out: the working-class neighbourhoods, the youth.”
It was a threat: if you bring down our government, there might be social chaos. It was also a promise: let us form government, and there’ll be no problem.
The threat is a legitimate and powerful claim. The French ruling class has persisted in winding back democracy to force neoliberalism onto an unwilling population. Its refusal to accept the electoral results is just the latest example, and the growth of the far right is one of the results.
The promise indicates the limitations of France Unbowed’s project. It has cohered and inspired a left-wing current in French politics but remains content to use this as a bargaining chip to negotiate more aggressively with its parliamentary rivals.
Friedrich Engels wrote that elections “informed us of our own strength and that of all opposing parties, and thereby provided us with a measure of proportion second to none for our actions, safeguarding us from untimely timidity as much as from untimely foolhardiness”. Now, the “untimely timidity” would be to wait for a parliamentary resolution to the threat of French fascism. Left-wing, anti-fascist sentiment dominates the most powerful and influential currents of France’s youth and working class. It should be put into action before it is too late.
