COVID is tearing through the population, filling our hospitals and overwhelming our ambulance services. Elective surgeries in Victoria and New South Wales have been cancelled, and emergency waiting rooms are overflowing, leaving even non-COVID patients waiting dangerously long times to be treated.
It’s a disaster—and a disgrace that nothing was done to prepare the system for such stress. But we should never forget how bad it was prior to the Omicron wave, and even prior to the pandemic. The system was already in crisis.
In COVID-free Perth, the avoidable death last year of young Aishwarya Aswath at the Children’s Hospital highlighted the problem of dangerous workloads. Aishwarya died of sepsis because the emergency room was understaffed and essential triage staff were taken away from their posts to assist with the massive workload on the emergency room floor.
Every nurse or doctor who read about the case knew exactly the situation the staff were in, because we experience it every day, in hospitals all over the country.
Similarly, in South Australia last year, during its COVID-free run, paramedics were frequently sounding the alarm on “ramping”—ambulances having to wait with patients outside emergency rooms because there are no free beds. Josh Karpowicz from the ambulance union said at the time: “The solutions are clear: there needs to be an immediate and substantial increase to ambulance resourcing and in-patient bed capacity across the state”.
The story is the same in all states. Ambulance ramping is frequently cited as a major issue in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. The main culprit is the lack of emergency room beds.
Overcrowded hospitals and emergency rooms in New South Wales have long angered nurses and paramedics. In June 2019, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that patients were experiencing drastic increases in waiting times compared to previous years.
In fact, a quick Google search for articles from before the pandemic returns hundreds of stories of burned-out, angry and frustrated nurses, paramedics and doctors, all sounding the alarm on the dire state of our hospital systems and emergency departments all across Australia.
The narrative that our healthcare system has only just now buckled under the weight of COVID is misleading, and, ironically, lets the politicians off the hook. It’s not just that they “should have known” what the pandemic would bring; it’s that they knew long ago that the system was already breaking.
There have been extra funding announcements in recent times. But much of the extra money pledged does nothing to address the issue of beds and overcrowding. Much of it will go to public health spending and administrative costs, and what does make it to hospitals will go to overtime wages and so-called elective surgery “blitzes”.
It’s bandaids for broken legs. Imagine if a nurse did that. But politicians get away with it again and again.
In fact, the elective surgery blitzes and all of the catching-up work has actually made healthcare workers even more exhausted during the past two years. Even when there have been breaks in the pandemic, with periods of zero or near-zero cases, hospital staff have never stopped.
Elective surgery backlogs mean that, between COVID waves, we have been frantically catching up on lost time. All of the cancelled elective surgery lists need to be caught up eventually. And the workload simply piles up. More surgeries mean faster patient flows, higher turnover and more overtime.
For decades, there has been a trend to run hospitals more and more like highly efficient production lines, with shorter patient stays and therefore higher turnover. A study published in 2020 by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found that the number of hospitalisations was rising at double the rate of population growth. At the same time, the length of hospital stays was getting shorter and the number of day-stays was increasing.
It’s not uncommon to see young patients with appendicectomies (the surgical removal of the appendix) discharged on the day of their surgeries, hastened by frantic bed managers desperately trying to find beds for all the patients in the crowded emergency rooms.
Such rapid turnover of patients takes an incredible toll not only on nurses, cleaners and allied health staff, but also on junior doctors. The amount of time, effort and administrative work required to admit, and also to discharge, a patient means that junior doctors are working longer hours than ever.
In 2021, an Australian Medical Association survey found that junior doctors on average were performing sixteen hours of weekly overtime. This was overwhelmingly unpaid. Some junior doctors reported doing as many as 25 hours of unpaid overtime per week. This level of stress takes its toll. The Australian Medical Journal reported last year that one in five junior doctors had contemplated suicide. Among female doctors, the suicide rate was more than twice that of the general population.
None of this is going unchallenged. Paramedics and nurses have been involved in industrial disputes recently in New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia. Junior doctors in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia are engaged in massive class action lawsuits for unpaid overtime wages.
The pandemic may indeed prove to be the (very large) straw that breaks the camel’s back when it comes to how much healthcare workers are willing to tolerate. What we need now more than ever is a coordinated campaign across the country, involving all healthcare workers: a campaign to increase funding to the public hospital system, to divert the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being committed to military hardware, and to make our governments spend the money on our public healthcare system instead.

Eric Le Roy

COVID didn’t create the crisis in the health system—it just made it worse

More than 3 million people have already died in the coronavirus pandemic, and more than 12,000 people continue to die every day across the world. Despite all the talk about “COVID-normal” or the “post-pandemic normal”, and despite vaccines progressively being rolled out, globally, we are “approaching the highest rate of infection that we have seen so far during the pandemic”, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on 16 April. 
This is an urgent situation. Case numbers have increased in many parts of the world. In the US, the situation has temporarily stabilised—at more than 70,000 new cases and 700 deaths per day. In Brazil, more than 3,000 people are dying per day, and in India the situation is rapidly worsening, more than 200,000 new cases being reported per day.
Everywhere the virus takes hold, hospitals are overrun, and health systems and staff are pushed to the brink of collapse. Yet despite the alarm from scientists and medical professionals, governments remain reluctant to implement the full suite of public health measures necessary to end the pandemic. Indeed, economies continue to open amid claims that there is not enough money for the sorts of measures that are needed.
But money has been flowing during the pandemic. Global military spending was up by 3.9 percent (or US$60 billion) last year, despite the world economy shrinking by more than 4 percent, and annual spending is now approaching US$1.5 trillion. In the US, where both major parties decry the idea of universal public health care as unaffordable, President Biden is maintaining the Trump administration’s increase to military spending. The US spends more on its military than the next eight countries combined. 
India, where hundreds of thousands have died from COVID, is also increasing its military spending. According to the Indian government’s own statistics, military spending is five times higher than healthcare spending, accounting for 11 percent of the budget. This is utterly criminal in a country with such huge levels of poverty, and virtually no public healthcare system for most of the population.
The money is not going just to build weapons of mass destruction. Huge amounts of wealth are being concentrated in the hands of a tiny few. Forbes magazine estimates that the world’s 2,755 billionaires are now collectively worth more than US$13 trillion—an increase of more than $5 trillion over the last year. According to Oxfam, the combined wealth of the world’s ten richest men rose by US$540 billion during the pandemic—the charity claims that this would easily be enough to pay for vaccines for the entire global population.
Yet governments are moving in the opposite direction. “Globally, 459 million doses of vaccine have been administered, but 76 per cent of those are in just ten countries”, WHO Director-General Ghebreyesus said in early April. “The success of COVAX [COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access, which is meant to make sure everyone gets access to a vaccine] is at risk because of the demand that some high and upper-middle-income countries are putting on the global supply of vaccines.”
The Australian government, for example, has ordered 150 million doses of vaccine, despite the population being just 25 million and despite there being almost zero community transmission. Australian citizens can expect to be vaccinated well before people from other countries in the region, where the virus is running rampant.
Western governments are also putting Western pharmaceutical company profits before people, refusing to grant intellectual property exemptions to allow the mass production of vaccines.
The chair of Bangladesh-based Incepta Pharmaceuticals, Abdul Muktadir, told the ABC in March that the company could manufacture up to 800 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines annually. “If we get the ready-to-fill material or antigen ... we can make this vaccine available to our entire nation[al] population within two to three months’ time”, he said. “Then Indonesia or any other nation where authorities want to take the vaccination from us, we can give it to them within 2021.”
Yet the Australian government has helped to block such supply to most of the world’s population by prohibiting production. This profits-before-people approach will result in hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of unnecessary deaths by prolonging the pandemic for perhaps several years in some places, not to mention increasing the likelihood of further mutations.
“We are in a race against time to get global transmission rates low enough to prevent the emergence and spread of new variants”, the Lancet medical journal noted in a sobering assessment in mid-April. “The danger is that variants will arise that can overcome the immunity conferred by vaccinations or prior infection.” 
Some variants are already showing themselves to be more resistant, or evasive. The longer the pandemic goes on, the more mutations will develop. But at each step of the way—whether it was refusing to initiate lockdowns or institute mask mandates, failing to implement public health measures, failing to resource public health institutions adequately, prematurely ending public health orders or refusing to allow the mass production of vaccines—profits have, one way or another, been put before people.

The pandemic is getting worse, yet governments still refuse to act decisively 

We need the complete nationalisation of health care, taking the whole system back into public hands. This might seem radical, but the pandemic has shown both how irrational for-profit health care is, and how easy it would be to change it. 
In Spain – one of the worst affected countries – the government took all private hospitals and health care providers under state control to help deal with the COVID-19 crisis. In the US, private hospitals haven’t been nationalised, but they have received hundreds of billions of dollars in government funding simply to keep their doors open because rates of elective surgery have plummeted, cutting off their main source of income. In Australia, the Victorian government temporarily brought private hospitals under government control to enable a coordinated response to the pandemic across the health care system.
No more public money should be spent propping up the for-profit system of private health care. But arguing for a better, publicly run health system is just the start. In the era of neoliberalism and privatisation, demands for better health care have almost always centred on calls for no cutbacks or for more hospital beds. We have limited our vision of a better health care system to one in which we talk primarily about hospital funding.
Funding is important, but there is much more to good health than simply having access to a hospital bed. Outside of pandemics, very few people at any given time need hospitalisation. And ultimately, hospitals alone cannot fix the myriad ways in which the capitalist system makes us sick.
If we’re serious not just about treating ill health, but in preventing it, we need to look beyond the health care system to the nature of the society it exists within. Take air pollution as an example. Many studies, including one by Harvard University published in April, have linked high levels of air pollution to higher rates of death from COVID-19. And even without the pandemic, our cities are poisoning us. The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution causes 7 million “premature deaths” every year, a number that in any reasonable society would be cause for emergency action. We’ve known about the dangers of air pollution for generations, but little has been done about it.
The pandemic has also put a spotlight on inequalities in access to health care based on race and class. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics released data on 7 May showing that Black people are four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than the rest of the population. “These results show that the difference between ethnic groups in COVID-19 mortality is partly a result of socio-economic disadvantage”, the department concluded. Black people in the UK are more likely to be poor. Poor people in turn are more likely to die from the disease.
Similar statistics are coming out of the US, where poor and marginalised communities are overwhelmingly bearing the brunt of the death toll. In New York, the highest death toll per capita has been in the working-class Bronx, the poorest borough in the city.
Part of the problem is that many people getting COVID-19 already have other conditions and diseases of poverty. For example, the link between type 2 diabetes and poverty has long been established, as has the link between low income and smoking. Even the link between low income and cancer is becoming clearer as more and more evidence emerges of a correlation between poor diet, stress and cancer mortality. In fact, when it comes to most chronic diseases, being non-white and having a low income are leading risk factors.
The appalling state of aged care systems is another major problem. We know how badly the pandemic has ravaged the elderly, but many people may not realise that the public hospital system has more and more come to be used as crisis care for those failing to be properly looked after by the aged care system. Even before the pandemic, nursing home residents were neglected by a grossly understaffed system and dumped into public hospitals as soon as they required more than just a basic level of care.
A 2019 report from the New South Wales Aged Care Roundtable found that hospital admissions from aged care homes were increasing rapidly. The report concluded that there is a direct correlation between inadequate levels of staffing and lower skill levels in nursing homes, and rates of hospitalisation of their residents. That just might be the most obvious thing ever to have been observed by a research group, and it’s another example of a problem that more hospital funding alone cannot fix.
So yes, our public hospitals need to be better, and we should nationalise all sections of the private system without question. But creating a better health care system is about so much more than just hospital funding. It’s about creating a new and better society. That’s not an easy task, but it’s one that’s never been more urgent and necessary.

For-profit healthcare has to end. But so does our for-profit society

The state of Australia’s aged care sector is worsening every day, with overstretched staff forced to work harder and faster than ever before, inadequate training and stagnant wages. Residents’ expectations of what living in an aged care home should be are constantly being lowered. All the while, profits are tidy and the industry is booming.
The media have been full of stories of residents being handled roughly and sometimes abused and assaulted by frustrated aged care workers. These stories have made their way to the top of the news cycle, with politicians who care little about the welfare of the elderly attempting to generate much-needed political credibility by taking up the cause.
The best example of this is prime minister Scott Morrison, who last month announced a royal commission into the aged care sector. “I think we should brace ourselves for some pretty bruising information about the way our loved ones, some of them, have experienced some real mistreatment”, he said, “And I think that’s going to be tough for us all to deal with. But you can’t walk past it.”
This is an unpopular government, cynically feigning concern for aged care residents in order to get a bump in the polls. It was under this same Liberal government, when Morrison was treasurer, that funding to the aged care sector was cut, and conditions for workers and residents so shamefully deteriorated.
In last year’s budget, Morrison as treasurer proudly announced that the government would “achieve efficiencies” in the aged care sector of $1.2 billion over four years.
These “efficiencies” have not come at the cost of CEO salaries. Regis aged care provider CEO Ross Johnston won’t be suffering with his $1 million annual pay, nor will Japara CEO Andrew Sudholz, who comes in a close second with a $950,000 salary. These efficiencies will come, as they always have, from suppressing the wages of aged care workers and drastically increasing their workload.
Any talk in the media or by the political class of mistreatment of aged care residents by staff needs to take into consideration the incredibly stressful and dehumanising environment in which they work. To do otherwise is disingenuous and a deliberate attempt to avoid responsibility.
Blame must be laid squarely at the feet of the governments and CEOs who have deliberately starved the sector of adequate staffing and funding.
A touted “solution” to the crisis in the sector is to install cameras in the rooms of every resident. This idea has been floated by the current aged care minister, Ken Wyatt. How Wyatt might feel about having a camera installed in his bedroom to film his activities 24 hours a day is unclear, but it is telling of the political climate that such a punitive solution to a quite simple problem of understaffing is being taken seriously at all.
Working in aged care is hard. The work is heavy, it is physically and emotionally demanding, the pay is terrible, and the workload is increasing. The Nurses Federation, the Health Services Union and the Australian Medical Association have been arguing for years now that the sector needs better staffing, better pay and better training.
The recently announced royal commission will not tell us anything that we don’t already know. It will only seek to shift the blame and focus of this debate on to individual workers, while allowing cost-cutting governments to portray themselves as the good guys.

Be sceptical of aged care royal commission

Mass demonstrations and riots by the far right in the German city of Chemnitz in August have sent shockwaves around the world. Scenes of thousands of protesters, many giving Nazi salutes, marching through the historic city attacking people of colour and clashing with counter protesters have been seen by millions.
The march comes in the context of a pogrom-like atmosphere whipped up by mainstream politicians, media and local fascist groups, which blame immigrants for the killing of a man in the city. 
The racist riots come off a long history of far-right organising in the state of Saxony, where Chemnitz is located, and take place in the context of an increasing shift to the right in mainstream German politics over recent years.
Since the arrival of over one million mainly Syrian refugees in 2015-2016, there has been a growing mood of open hatred, scapegoating and marginalisation of refugees, Muslims and people of Middle Eastern background 
A key manifestation of this has been the rapid growth of the far right AfD (Alternative for Germany).
In a few short years the AfD has grown from a small and fringe party to one that has become the country’s second most popular. Polling conducted after the Chemnitz riots have put the AfD on 17 percent federally, ahead of the Social Democratic Party on 16 percent. Only Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) outpolls the AfD, with 28 percent support.
The AfD promotes itself as a party of German nationalism, arguing that Germans should not be made to feel ashamed of the country’s Nazi past. They strongly oppose refugees being accepted into Germany, oppose Muslim immigration, and blame these groups for social decay, poor public services and unemployment.
It’s little surprise that this argument has traction in the former east, of which the state of Saxony is part. 
Modern Germany has been formally unified for 28 years now, but in many ways remains divided.
The east remains far poorer than the west. Indeed, the GDP per capita in most eastern states is around €28,000, whereas in most western states it is above 35,000. In Germany’s wealthiest industrial cities such as Hamburg and Bremen, the average citizen has nearly double the income of the average east German.
But wealth is not the only divide, or the most significant. East Germany was under some form of authoritarian rule from 1933 until 1990 – nearly 60 years. The Nazis ruled from 1933 and quickly abolished all democratic institutions including rival political parties, trade unions, media and any elements of political and civil opposition. 
After the Nazis’ defeat, the east was occupied by the Stalinist USSR, which set up a vassal state under its influence – the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany – which was an oppressive dictatorship from its inception in 1949 until its demise in 1990.
With reunification, all of the modern institutions of West German capitalism were simply imposed onto the east as it was absorbed politically and economically, including in the state of Saxony.
Saxony has long been a hotbed of far right activity. In the 1990s, right wing movements converged on Saxony because it offered greater protection from the more aggressive surveillance and break-up tactics of the police in other states. And the state has been at the forefront of the recent revival of far right activity. 
The anti-Islam party Pegida has held demonstrations in Saxony’s second city, Dresden, every year since 2014. These have been the scenes of intense fighting between left and right. Notably, the right wing demonstrations have been protected by the police. The largest of these was in 2015 when 25,000 Pegida supporters marched.
Mainstream politics in Saxony is also more right wing than in the rest of Germany. Saxony has had a conservative government for the entirety of its post-reunification history.
The president of the state of Saxony is from the right wing of the CDU. He is known as an outspoken hardliner, and for using provocative language including using the term “Fatherland” to describe Germany, praising Hungary’s hard right government and railing against political correctness.
With the economic and employment situation so much worse in the east, and no left wing organisations or traditions to provide a credible alternative, the terrain is left wide open for the far right.
Nevertheless, there has been a heartening show of opposition to racism and fascism. After the Chemnitz riots more than 50,000 people attended a massive anti-racism concert in the city centre. In Berlin 10,000 protested, and there have been further rallies in support of migrants and refugees in other parts of Germany.
The sheer scale of the counter-protests in the wake of the Chemnitz riots is a cause for optimism in these seemingly bleak times, and vindication of the anti-fascist German slogan Wir sind mehr: “there are more of us”.

Right on the march in Germany

The crisis of funding in Australia’s aged care sector is resulting in a sharp deterioration in living and working conditions.
Researchers have reported that malnutrition affects “at least one in two residents in Australian residential aged care facilities”. The findings, published in the journal Nutrition and Dietetics, include that the average amount spent on feeding an aged care resident dropped from $6.39 to $6.08 per day from 2015 to 2016.
This is far less than is spent in other similar countries such as the US, the UK and Canada, and less than one-third of that in the highest-spending country, Norway.
Funding cuts of billions of dollars have occurred since the Coalition took office in 2013. But the aged care sector, which is largely privately operated and state subsidised, is hardly running short of cash.
According to the most recent survey of aged care profits conducted by Bentleys Chartered Accountants, the average profit made from each resident in 2015 was $6,278.
The Britain-based CEO of Bupa, which runs dozens of care homes across Australia, received a cool $3 million last year, while the company posted a 2016 profit of more than $500 million.
The CEO of Regis aged care, Ross Johnston, pocketed more than $1 million, while Andrew Sudholz of Japara was paid $950,000.
And while the CEOs and investment banks that part-own many centres make millions, the workers are pushed to the brink.
The Health Services Union recently surveyed its members working in the sector, and the complaints were many. One worker described the conditions as “dreadful”.
“You’ve normally got two staff to 35 people, including those with chronic needs and palliative care”, the worker said. “You’re pushed with work, you can’t fulfil all your duties in the 7.5 hours. It’s not fair on the workers [or] the residents.”
Another worker reported: “People had to be lying in wet beds for hours on end because there weren’t enough staff to change them”.
The sector has been aggressively cutting staffing budgets for years, hiring fewer staff and replacing nurses with lower-paid carers, who get as little as $20 per hour to look after more than a dozen residents.
As a result, hospital admissions from nursing homes in Victoria increased by a staggering 25 percent from 2016 to 2017.
The picture painted is grim. But there has been pushback, and workers have won pay increases and staffing guarantees as part of industrial campaigns recently in some places where union membership is higher.

Half of aged care residents malnourished – report

The recent French presidential elections have captured the attention of the world’s media. Aside from last year’s US elections, few elections in recent memory have attracted so much attention, commentary and anticipation.
In France, the stakes were high. Marine Le Pen of the fascist National Front had, until recent months, been polling ahead of all other parties. The mainstream centre left party, the Socialist Party, had been polling abysmally and scored a catastrophic 6 percent in the first round.
The candidate of the traditional right, François Fillon, was embroiled in scandals and, along with his Socialist rival, Benoît Hamon, failed to make it to the second round, leaving the run-off to be contested by Le Pen and the centre right, neoliberal Emmanuel Macron.
The political landscape on which this historic and unprecedented election has taken place is vast, complex and shaped by decades of economic stagnation, high unemployment, a mainstream centre left that has consistently attacked and betrayed its working class base and the rise and mainstreaming of Islamophobia.
The French economy has experienced mass unemployment since the mid-1980s. For the past 30 years, the unemployment rate has averaged 9 percent, youth unemployment hovering around 20 percent. The picture across France is varied. Some regions, such as those in the west and north-west, have fared better, while the industrial, manufacturing regions in the north have experienced unemployment levels chronically higher than the national average.
Since the early 1980s, when the centre left coalition government of François Mitterrand began implementing sweeping austerity measures, France’s social welfare and worker protections have come under sustained attack from government after government.
At times, the resistance put up by French unions has been phenomenal and victorious – such as in 1995 and 2006. But more recently, in 2010 and 2016, governments succeeded in passing pension attacks and anti-worker laws.
Although the capitalist class has not registered a truly comprehensive victory against workers and unions, the chipping away of rights and conditions has had an effect over time. Casualisation has increased, social welfare has been reduced, pension rights have been eroded, public housing has become harder to access – especially in smaller towns – and real wages have stagnated in the face of often obscene rental prices.
Socialist Party betrayal
The outgoing president, François Hollande of the Socialist Party, was elected in 2012 on a wave of resentment against right wing president Nicolas Sarkozy. Hollande’s election campaign was full of optimism, left wing rhetoric targeting big financial interests and promises to redistribute wealth and protect social welfare.
Sarkozy, having raised the pension age, and having used racism to distract from his neoliberal agenda, was so unpopular that when he lost his bid for re-election, the streets of France’s major cities became scenes of celebration.
But such optimism quickly turned to anger as Hollande emphatically betrayed his working class base. Not only did he fail to attack big finance or redistribute wealth, but he launched the single biggest attack on workers’ rights since 1995.
The “El Khomri law”, named after his minister of labour Myriam El Khomri, unleashed a wave of mass protests and strikes. Hollande ultimately used the undemocratic measure of presidential decree to bypass parliament and implement the incredibly unpopular measures. The desperation of Hollande to pass the law – and commit political suicide in the process – illustrates just how much pressure the ruling class brought to bear on the government.
The minister for the economy under Hollande, and one of the key architects of the “El Khomri law”, was none other than president-elect Emmanuel Macron.
Establishment backs Macron
Macron, a graduate of one of France’s most elite business schools, is well connected and well known in business circles. It was for this reason that he was hired by Hollande – and why he had the overwhelming support of the French establishment during the final weeks of his campaign.
Macron’s rise in popularity came at a time when more and more sections of the French establishment had been calling for grand coalitions, or unity governments, not dissimilar to those that have governed Germany in recent times, in order to pass the changes demanded by industry. Macron promises to build that style of government.
Labelling himself as “neither right nor left”, Macron has, in fact, made it clear that he intends to rule in the interests of big business. His program is presented, always vaguely, as one of optimism, job creation and cultural harmony. But his most detailed and thought-through policies are centred on tax reduction, attacks on workers and strengthening the European Union.
During his campaign, his only major criticism of the Hollande government’s hated “El Khomri law” was that Hollande left the law “too late in the term”, and that the changes were poorly marketed to the general population.
With the spectacular collapse in popularity of François Fillon, the establishment backed Macron as the safe bet. Even prominent members of the ruling Socialist Party, such as former prime minister Manuel Valls, publicly defected and declared their support for Macron well before the first round of voting.
The French were left with a situation where the two major postwar parties, as well as Macron, supported austerity.
Rise of the National Front
When all this history is considered and put into context, it is not hard to see why the National Front has been able to make significant gains in many working class electorates, and among low-wage workers who identify as “blue collar”. It has connected with the anger and uncertainty felt after years of betrayal.
But although the FN has been able to tap into anti-establishment sentiment, it remains a party rooted in fascist history, ideology and intent. It remains a grave danger to workers, the left, immigrants and Muslims in France and abroad.
Its historic base is concentrated in the south-east of France, where racist and right wing French settlers fled after being expelled from Algeria and the Maghreb following the collapse of French colonial rule.
The party, which has traditionally been pro-neoliberalism and openly anti-worker, has changed its tune under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, and now makes grand but vague promises to tackle “globalisation”, “precarity”, “the bankers” etc. All the while it blames Muslims, immigrants and refugees for ruining French culture and for taking jobs and houses.
The failure of the left in France and elsewhere to fight Islamophobia has meant that it has become part of the establishment furniture. So when the far right uses it as a tool of distraction and division, it doesn’t come across as the bigoted fringe.
The National Front has been able to interweave racism with appeals to people’s sense of economic insecurity. The clearest example of this was during the televised second-round debate between Macron and Le Pen, in which Le Pen consistently attacked Macron for being a part of the establishment and in bed with the bankers and the finance industry. She coupled this with attacks on immigrants, saying that the elite didn’t care about French jobs being lost to foreigners, and that the rich didn’t have to worry about the under-supply of public housing or mass unemployment.
Le Pen’s attacks resonated with those bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. Although she received 21 percent of the first round vote, 40 percent of voters identifying as “blue-collar workers” voted for the National Front in the first round. French historian Roger Martelli summed up the feeling:
“The territories whose inhabitants quite rightly consider themselves doomed to certain marginality and decline, and the popular categories left in an increasingly fragile condition by the retreat of the welfare state, have ended up getting used to the idea that the National Front is their last resort.”
It is exactly this feeling of despair and “last resort” that has brought a surge in popularity for the National Front in the “rust belt” regions of Pas-de-Calais and Aisne, where Le Pen scored more than 50 percent of the vote in the second round.
In a sign that the party is gaining traction, credibility and legitimacy, its vote increased substantially from the first to second round, from 21 percent to 34 percent. When Jean Marie Le Pen made it to the second round of voting in the 2002 presidential elections, his vote did not change, indicating that there was a mass voter mobilisation against him in a way that was nowhere near as stark this time around against the younger Le Pen.
Another feature of this election was number of blank votes registered. When the record 11 percent of blank votes and the very high 25 percent of abstentions are taken into consideration, the vote for the FN falls from 34 percent to 22 percent of the voting population.
An analysis of Macron’s vote does very little to back up the so-called “optimism” that the media has been heralding. Exit polls revealed that 43 percent of his voters voted for him only to block Le Pen. When this figure is considered with the high number of blank votes and abstentions, only about 20 percent of French voters voted positively for Macron’s program. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement or a sign of optimism about the new president.
Polarisation
This election has also opened up a space on the left. The radical left wing reformist Jean-Luc Mélenchon drew massive crowds at rallies across France during his campaign, and ultimately garnered more than 7 million votes. His program of taxing the rich, ending war, shutting down nuclear power plants, protecting workers’ rights and building more public housing connected strongly with urban voters.
Although Mélenchon was fourth overall in the first round, he came first in four out of France’s 10 most populated cities: Marseille, Lille, Toulouse and Montpellier. Mélenchon beat Le Pen in every major city except Nice. He also scored higher than 35 percent in huge areas of Paris, in parts of Lyon and Limoges and in the port city of Le Havre. Add to this the fact that more than 600,000 French people voted for one of the parties of the French revolutionary left, even further to the left of Mélenchon, and the polarisation becomes clearer.
There has been much written on the left about Mélenchon and his new party France Insoumise (Insubordinate France). It is still early days, and with the French legislative elections coming up in June, it is too early to tell if the support for Mélenchon will be sustained, but the very fact that his campaign was so popular in France’s big cities is a ray of optimism in an often bleak landscape.
The fight against Macron
The day after Macron’s election, unions organised mass protests across France in a pre-emptive warning to the new president not to further attack workers’ rights and conditions. This is a great sign that the union movement has not been completely demoralised by the election.
France has experienced mass protests, mass strikes and movements of millions of workers in the last several decades. The French working class has managed to cling to the idea, long gone in many other countries, that workers’ rights are human rights, and that a decent job with decent working conditions is something worth striking for.
All eyes will be on France in the coming months and years to see if the hope and radicalism stirred up by Mélenchon’s campaign, and the mass sentiment that he represents, can be turned into victories.

COVID didn’t create the crisis in the health system—it just made it worse

The pandemic is getting worse, yet governments still refuse to act decisively

For-profit healthcare has to end. But so does our for-profit society

Be sceptical of aged care royal commission

Right on the march in Germany

Half of aged care residents malnourished – report

Evaluating the French elections

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