How are French people reacting to Emmanuel Macron’s presidency?
His “extreme centre” neoliberal support base is stable, so he has a good hand of cards to get re-elected. The success of the vaccination campaign and of the vaccine pass (required to get into cinemas, restaurants etc.) have helped his ratings. Infection and death rates have been lower here than in Britain, for example. But if only a quarter of voters definitely want him back in, that leaves an awful lot of unhappy people. What those people decide to do is key. 
There is plenty to be angry about. Catholic charity Secours Catholique just reported that 10 percent of the population had had to use food banks last year. Macron has been pushing through Islamophobic laws, slashing taxes for the rich and making life harder for the poor since his first day in office. Recently, a new system was introduced for unemployment—you now have to work for six months rather than four to be eligible for payments (this in a world where short-term contracts are everywhere). He has also been talking about clamping down on unemployed people who are “not really looking for a job”. There is no evidence that there are many of these, but politically it is useful for the president to be loudly denouncing them.
However, Macron does have a bitter political pill to swallow. Millions on the streets and on strike forced him to shelve his huge flagship “reform” that would have destroyed the retirement pension scheme. The pension system in France has remained intact, if bruised, after 25 years of working-class struggle. In a recent major speech, Macron admitted (if we read between the lines) that he was too scared to relaunch this attack before next year’s elections. So as to have a new flagship project, he announced the building of a bunch of nuclear power stations.
A new president will be elected in April. What are the polls looking like?
Because of the two-round election system, candidates are above all aiming to get over 22 percent or so in the first round. In the French system, if no-one receives an absolute majority in the first round of voting, which will be on 10 April, the strongest two candidates go through to a second, run-off election on 24 April. The fragmenting of the vote should mean that 22 percent is enough to get through to the second round, and the more people who stay at home on election day, the fewer votes will be needed to get through. 
In 2017, in a field of eleven, Emmanuel Macron got 24 percent in the first round, while far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen got 21 percent. Almost one-quarter of those registered to vote stayed at home. Macron is hoping for an exact rerun, confident that he can easily win again in a second round against Le Pen.
<a href="https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/france/">The polls continue to show</a> the shipwreck of the traditional Socialist Party and classical conservative options. Declared Socialist Party candidate Anne Hidalgo gets around 5 percent. Given that the president before Macron was from the Socialist Party, this remains stunningly low. The traditional right Republicans haven’t yet decided on their candidate, but the most likely, Xavier Bertrand, stands at around 13 percent in the polls. 
The Greens just chose a candidate from the right of the party, Yannick Jadot, who is on 8 percent. Radical left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon is at 9 percent. The Communist Party, which backed Mélenchon in 2017, is fielding its own candidate, who is at 2 percent. A rebel ex-Socialist Party candidate gets about the same, while various Trotskyists get about 1 percent each. 
Macron is leading the polling at 24 percent. But the combined vote of the fascists is shocking. Marine Le Pen is on 18 percent and Eric Zemmour, a political journalist who has not officially declared his candidacy, is on 14 percent.
Who is Eric Zemmour?
A media personality openly claiming that France is threatened with destruction through immigration, he represents a part of fascist and hard right opinion that regrets Marine Le Pen’s move towards respectability. By throwing her father out of the organisation, changing its name (it was previously called the National Front), no longer flirting with Holocaust denial, and allying herself with some small non-fascist right-wing groups, Le Pen has been fairly successful in mainstreaming her politics—although she has been less successful at building a solid party structure. 
Zemmour appeals to hard racists. He says that it should be illegal to give babies first names like Mohamed or Fatima. He claims that Muslims are terrorising working-class neighbourhoods like mine. He claims that the French fascist Vichy government during World War Two tried to protect French Jews and asks people to be reassured that most Jews sent to their deaths by Vichy were of other nationalities. Not for the first time, he is in court accused of inciting racial hatred by saying that unaccompanied minors among migrants seeking asylum are “murderers and rapists”.
That he can get 1,500 people in Bordeaux to a public meeting, without the support of a party structure, is worrying. In his new book, France Has Not Said Its Last Word, on sale everywhere, he promises to slash taxes and social security and abolish environmental regulations. And he rails against the supposed dangers of wokeism and “gender theory”. Fortunately, there have been counter-demonstrations against Zemmour’s meetings in a number of towns, including Nantes, Bordeaux, Marseille and Geneva. These should be built everywhere.
Should we be pleased that Zemmour seems to be taking some voters away from Marine Le Pen?
Some desperate people on the left feel that way, but they are wrong to do so. Zemmour is normalising hard Islamophobia and fascist ideas and dragging much of the media debate to the hard right. News channel CNews invited Zemmour to discuss whether Western civilisation had forgotten how to be proud! These bad tidings follow a year in which the far right has successfully built support, very much helped by the context broader mass anti-vaccination demonstrations.
The rise of the far right has encouraged Macron to go much further in attacking Muslims, even though he himself was schooled in a branch of right-wing thought for which Islamophobia is not important. The government recently banned several Muslim organisations that fight Islamophobia, on the grounds that ... they fight Islamophobia! Justifications also included that some people had left anti-Semitic comments on the Facebook pages of the now banned organisations. The education minister has said that universities are in danger from hordes of “Islamo-leftists”, while Le Figaro, a mass circulation conservative newspaper, recently ran front page headlines about the “indoctrination of our children” by “LGBT ideology” and by “anti-racism”.
Many people have been inspired by France’s Yellow Vest movement. What are the Yellow Vests doing now, and have they had an impact on the elections?
The Yellow Vests were a broad, dynamic, leaderless movement that inspired millions and scared Macron. Today, the movement is many times smaller and is unlikely to produce a united response to the elections, though it could burst into action again at any time. 
France has seen some large COVID demos this year, in which both left wingers and right wingers have participated. I was at a film screening recently where the director called these protests a continuation of the Yellow Vests. Is he right?
The Yellow Vest movement was always contradictory, an alliance of poor workers and very small (sometimes penniless) businesspeople. So the anti-authority and individualist content was always strong (supporting destruction of speed radars, for example). Sadly, along with much of the radical left, certain sections of the remaining Yellow Vests have mobilised on an individual freedom basis against health restrictions that are necessary to save lives. This led to a mass mobilisation which was not hard for the far right to profit from: in Paris we have seen separate marches by anti-vax fascists, the biggest fascist marches for decades.
Who are the left candidates for president and what do they stand for?
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is standing for the Socialist Party. It does not seem that she will revive the Socialist Party’s very sick body. The Communist Party is standing Fabien Roussel, who is pitching to the right of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, emphasising his support for the police and for nuclear energy. At least three revolutionary left candidates are hoping to stand, including Philippe Poutou for the New Anticapitalist Party.
Mélenchon is the left candidate who really matters because he is the only one who might be able to run an insurgent campaign and persuade millions who were going to stay home to go and vote. This is how he got 19 percent and seven million votes in the 2017 first-round election. It was the highest ever vote for the radical left, with 24 percent of blue-collar voters and 22 percent of white-collar working-class voters choosing him. 
His program pulls the political debate leftwards: raising the minimum wage, retirement at 60, 100 percent renewable energy, huge investment against violence against women, generalisation of free health care and many dozens of other radical reforms. It opens up spaces for mass discussion on crucial questions, on which Marxists have things to say to other class fighters. And he has been loudly defending Muslims against Islamophobia for years, improving on his previous positions. His organisation, France Insoumise, is running a dynamic campaign. The YouTube channel has 600,000 followers, and the plan is to knock on a million doors over the next few months. Door-to-door canvassing is not a traditional tool in French elections. Mélenchon is an extraordinary orator; his mass meetings will be huge. 
France Insoumise calls for a “citizens’ revolution”. The Trotskyist candidates reply, “That would be the wrong kind of revolution”. They are kind of correct in the abstract—the question of overthrowing the capitalist state cannot be avoided. But the differences between a citizens’ revolution and other kinds of revolution are sadly unknown to 99 percent of French workers. Given that Mélenchon’s campaign and movement is not a membership organisation with strict rules to limit what activists can do, it seems to me obvious that revolutionaries can and should work within it, rather than chase after 1 percent of votes based on distinctions invisible to the working class in general. Marxists who work in the campaign for Mélenchon’s election have plenty of space for fraternal debate about reformism and the state, and to politically oppose other sets of ideas—like the deep green degrowth ideas, identity politics or animal rights ideas—which all have considerable influence.
Mélenchon is a left reformist candidate. I could amuse myself by listing 27 disagreements I have with him, but this would be unproductive. He is at present facing a major smear campaign that will accelerate as the months go by (we will hear that he is a megalomaniac, racist, anti-Semitic friend of Vladimir Putin and more). The lessons of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain must be learned: Mélenchon is under attack because he says neoliberalism is not inevitable, and that another world is possible in which human needs are put first. Those sections of the radical left who are tempted to bay with the hounds are doing our class a great disservice.
Whoever wins the presidency, social struggles will continue. What is on the horizon?
If Macron wins, he will try again for his juggernaut anti-pension “reform”, and there will be mass revolt. If Mélenchon should win (which is possible if it turns out he is in the run-off against Le Pen), the ruling class will pull out all the stops to prevent him from applying his program, and mass movements are also likely. However, my crystal ball is rather hazy today, so watch this space.
A version of this interview was first published at <a href="https://www.theleftberlin.com">The Left Berlin</a>. It has been edited and updated slightly.

John Mullen

As French presidential elections loom, the political space is cluttered

President Emmanuel Macron has let at least 112,000 people die of COVID-19 in France, and there are still around a thousand COVID patients in intensive care today. At every point, the interests of profit have been his priority. We’ve seen half-hearted lockdowns, called too late and lifted too soon, with much too little financial help for workers to make sure they could respect the rules, alongside criminally low investment in vaccination programmes, which started late and advanced slowly. Most of the deaths could have been avoided. Along with the running down of the health service over many years, this means there are plenty of reasons to be angry with Macron and with capitalism. But left-wing organizations here in France have been making dangerous concessions to vaccine scepticism which will help the far right to build.
In many countries, demonstrations against lockdowns or vaccines have been clearly far-right enterprises, but in France a vigorous row divides left activists. The last three Saturdays in July saw demonstrations in over 185 towns against the “Health Pass” recently announced by Macron. This pass proves you have been vaccinated, tested very recently, or have recovered from COVID, and it will be compulsory from mid-August to get onto long-distance trains, or into cinemas, restaurants, football matches, concerts and so on. On many of the demonstrations, slogans calling for Macron’s resignation were prominent. 
On July 24, an estimated 250,000 people took part in demonstrations around France, and at least as many came to a second round of protests a week later. There were no trade union banners, and the people present came from all parts of the political spectrum. Probably most of them didn’t see the protest in terms of left-wing or right-wing politics. Political organisations were generally not visible, most placards were homemade, and consensual chants of “liberté” were the most common slogan. When political activists were seen, they were generally from the far right or from the radical left. In Paris there were separate marches organised on both July 24 and 31: one set were led by fascist Florian Philippot, behind a banner reading “Vaccinated and unvaccinated united!”; the others were organised by Yellow Vest activists from the non-party movement which humiliated Macron so often from 2018 to 2020.
But in most towns there was only one march, which might have fascists present or not. In Orléans and in Bordeaux, far-right royalists openly joined the demonstration. In Poitiers on July 31 there was both an antifascist flag and a far-right royalist one at the protest, as well as newspaper sellers from the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA). At a protest in Toulouse, the biggest banner featured a slogan denouncing both the Health Pass and the attacks on retirement pensions.
Placards bearing anti-vaccine slogans were common: “We don’t want to be guinea pigs”, “Against sanitary dictatorship”, “Hands off my DNA!” or “My body, my choice”. But there were also placards accusing Macron of being a Nazi, slogans such as “No Pass, no pasaran” and even a few yellow stars with the word “unvaccinated” written on them, a disgusting attempt to compare the fate of unvaccinated people today with that of Jews in the Holocaust. Such symbols were denounced by all left organisations, but a poll showed that over half of those expressing strong support for these demos were “not shocked” by them.
Macron announced his measures on July 12, in a long speech in which he also pitched his re-election bid for 2022. The new law also makes vaccination a condition of employment for health and care workers. Macron’s aim is to facilitate opening up the economy as quickly as he can.
After the pandemic, many left-wingers have been waiting for an explosion of mass anger. Now it has come in an unexpected form, causing much confusion. Should we oppose the principle of the Health Pass? And should we participate in demonstrations even where the main tone of the rally is anti-vaccine, with strong support from the far right? And what about compulsory vaccination for health workers and care home workers?
Many on the left denounce the Health Pass as a dangerous further move towards authoritarianism. Others insist that it is an attack on individual freedom, and resistance requires forging unity between those who choose to be vaccinated and those who choose not to be. The 17 members of the French parliament from the radical left-wing France Insoumise movement claimed on July 24 that the Health Pass was “absurd, unfair and authoritarian” and was a step on the road to a society of “generalised surveillance”. According to the FI, the measure is meant to compensate for the incompetent management of the crisis by Macron’s government and the criminal underfunding of the health service over decades of neoliberalism. Compulsory vaccination of sections of the workforce was said to be a “violent” measure “undermining freedom”. FI members of parliament have organised a court challenge to the new law, with a ruling expected early August.
Some local FI groups have been joining the recent demonstrations, others not. The movement’s leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, did not directly call on his supporters to participate in the protests, but said that the demonstrations “should be listened to”. He also asked supporters demonstrating to distance themselves from the “excessive” slogans sometimes seen. “No, a freely chosen vaccine is not apartheid, a vaccination campaign Is not a Holocaust” he said. 
A wider alliance of radical left figures, organized by social justice campaign ATTAC and including national leaders of most union federations and left parties, set up a petition declaring that while “a massive vaccination campaign is necessary to fight this pandemic” the Health Pass and compulsory vaccination measures are “undemocratic and harmful”. The petition also denounces neoliberal attacks on pensioners and on the unemployed, as well as calling for the lifting of patents on vaccines. Another group of 200 lawyers, signed a declaration “We are neither in favour of vaccines nor against them, but we want freedoms to be respected”.
Similar arguments were put forward by the NPA, defending the idea of mass vaccination but opposing the Health Pass and any sanctions against unvaccinated health or care workers. The NPA leaflet on 28 July called perhaps a little timidly to “defend these ideas, including by joining in mobilisations everywhere where it is possible to popularise such policies”.
Another well-known French Trotskyist organization, Lutte Ouvrière, seemed to go even further in making concessions to anti-vaccine feeling. Their weekly workplaces leaflet declared: “Yes, vaccination could be a step forward if capitalism was not concerned with profit rather than the satisfaction of human needs”.
Only one significant left organization, Ensemble, openly declared it was not joining the demonstrations. The FI and the NPA left the decision to their local sections, usually depending on how prominent the far-right elements were on local rallies. And indeed, on 31 July, the NPA joined in in some towns such as Poitiers and Bordeaux, and refused to do so in others such as Bourges.
Opposing vaccination is contrary to the interests of workers, who account for the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths. Yet scepticism about vaccines is very strong on the left in France. Last January, a poll showed that only 59% of those identifying as left-wing intended to get vaccinated (as against 69% of right-wingers). Only 36% of supporters of the radical left France Insoumise wanted to!
Reluctance has been somewhat reduced since, but scepticism remains high in the country. It is is particularly high among non-white populations, who understandably mistrust the racist French state. In the French overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, vaccination rates are half those of the metropole. Stéphanie Mulot, a sociologist, explained “there is much mistrust of the French government … refusing the vaccine is an oppositional political position”. In professions where individualism is particularly prized, scepticism is also high: artists, theatre and cinema workers and musicians are often particularly vocal in the demonstrations. With few exceptions, left-wing leaders have done little or nothing to challenge vaccine scepticism among their supporters, and are today making mistaken concessions to anti-vaccine sentiment.
A recent opinion poll showed 35% of French people “felt sympathy” for the demonstrations against the Health Pass, while 49% were opposed and 16% indifferent. The survey showed that 46% of working-class people felt sympathy and 31% clearly supported the mobilization. Unsurprisingly, given their individualist orientation, 61% of business owners felt sympathy too. Sympathy was expressed by 38% of left-wing voters, 24% of right-wing voters, 49% of far-right voters and 50% of those who voted France Insoumise. However, the situation is complex, since another recent poll showed 69% of citizens thought unvaccinated people should not be allowed to work in health or in care homes (60% of working-class respondents in employment, 87% of retirees) and 62% are in favour of the COVID passport (a little over 50% of working class respondents in employment, and 81% of retirees).
Two urgent questions are posed. Firstly, can these demonstrations expressing anger against Macron be pushed in a leftward direction? Secondly, should the left oppose on principle the Health Pass and the imposition of vaccination as a condition of employment? Most left-wing organisations seem unsure about the first but sure about the second: hence the challenge to the law in court and the broadly-based petition. Left-wingers on the demonstrations insist that a mobilisation intended to defend individual freedom should not be left to the right-wingers.
For my part, I think the main body of demonstrators are campaigning because they do not want to be vaccinated. Although in form the marches resemble the early Yellow Vest marches, the Yellow Vests were marching against poverty, not in favour of a (wrong) individual choice. The popularity of the protests is a sign of a shift to the right. The far right is more likely to benefit than is the left. I do not think that adding demands about pensions to your placards will change much. The left should be campaigning for people to be vaccinated, and should not be presenting vaccination as purely a matter of individual choice.
Secondly, although any law passed by Macron will of course be applied in a discriminatory and authoritarian manner, is the left correct to oppose these measures on principle? Since Macron’s announcement, in 17 days, 4.7 million people in France got their first dose of the vaccine. The rate of vaccination doubled as compared to the previous month. This acceleration will save many lives. There is no point in denying this.
Just as for other health and safety rules, trade unions in other circumstances have campaigned for vaccination to be compulsory for working in certain sectors. In 2013, the CGT Trade Union here pushed for compulsory vaccination against leptospirosis for sewerage workers. Although there are obvious advantages to using persuasion, and Macron’s arrogance rightly makes people angry, is it a left-wing priority to mobilize against these measures? There is nothing inherently right-wing about compulsory vaccination, which was a Bolshevik policy just after the Russian Revolution. Do we really want to “respect” people’s right to put others in danger?
Is a Health Pass different in principle to alcohol testing for drivers or eyesight tests for bus drivers? And, in a world where my mobile phone, my credit card and CCTV cameras would allow state agencies to know huge amounts about me, if I were important enough to care about, it is not clear that the pass is a decisive step towards 1984.
Universal vaccination is absolutely in the interests of the working class. An impatience to see masses back on the streets has led much of the left to downplay the centrality of vaccination and make concessions to anti-scientific nonsense. This, sadly, will help the far right to build. This month’s demonstrations in Paris were the biggest ones addressed by fascist leaders for many years, and they faced no opposition on the streets. Last week, two vaccination centres were vandalised, and in Montpellier this week a COVID testing tent was attacked. A far right which has long had difficulty getting thousands on the streets is making the most of the situation.
We need a campaign for vaccination, and quality health care, for the whole of the world’s population.

Macron's COVID policy has been disastrous. But pro-"liberty" protests aren't the answer

In 2017, Marine Le Pen was defeated by Emmanuel Macron in the second-round run-off of the French presidential elections. She received 10 million votes, a terrifying figure that was 3 million more than her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, obtained in the second round in 2002. Macron, with his new jerry-built party, La République en Marche, won the presidency with 17 million votes, which included those of many left wingers hoping to block a far-right victory. 
The huge breakthrough for Marine Le Pen was possible because the traditional governing parties of the right and left, the Republicans and the Socialist Party, were burned electorally by their pro-business austerity politics. The Republicans received 7 million votes in the first round. The Socialist Party, leaving government, received only 2 million votes—a historic collapse. The radical left France Insoumise got 7 million votes. Ten million voters stayed at home for the two rounds, and 5 million citizens did not even enrol.
The mass reaction to Marine Le Pen’s success was disappointing. Almost twenty years earlier, when it was announced that Le Pen senior had got through to the second round, many thousands of people hit the streets. Demonstrations went on all night. Our revolutionary group held a dynamic public meeting in a cafe at three o’clock in the morning! Ten days later, on 1 May 2002, at least 1.5 million people demonstrated against fascism across the country, school students struck, and anti-fascist rallies were organised every day between the two electoral rounds. However, in 2017, when Marine Le Pen got to the second round, only a few hundred demonstrators were on the streets the same evening, and the first of May demonstrations between the two rounds were many times smaller than in 2002.
The difference between these two mobilisations is a sign of Marine Le Pen’s success. Over the ten years since she became president of the National Front, she has managed to bring the party into the mainstream. She changed its name to National Rally (Rassemblement National) because of the connotations of the old name. She expelled her father from the party because he was incapable of giving up his habit of regularly suggesting that the Nazi massacres for racial purity were no big deal. 
Although she insisted that she was clarifying and not transforming the party program, support for the death penalty and opposition to abortion disappeared from the manifesto. She switched the party’s official alliance in Europe, joining a less openly extremist grouping, the European Alliance for freedom, and abandoned the idea of leaving the European Union. She also built <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39870460">new stronghold</a> regions in the deindustrialised north-east of France, adding to her traditional regional base in the south-east. (A quarter of manual workers on the electoral lists voted Le Pen in the first round in 2017, while almost 30 percent of them abstained.)
Now, one opinion poll has found that one-third of French citizens would like to see Le Pen “play an important role” in the country’s future. This makes her the second most popular political leader in France. Another poll predicts that she might get 44 percent of the second-round votes if she is again in a run-off against Macron. She claims that she can become president in 2022 as a “people’s candidate”. 
How dangerous is she? Her program demands that France make a “patriotic choice” to replace the “globalist choice” made by other ruling parties. It defends bigger military budgets and promises 15,000 new police officers and 40,000 new places in prisons. It pledges tougher prison sentences, massive cuts in immigration, the banning of state health care for undocumented migrants and of social housing for non-French nationals. The manifesto insists that French nationality should be available only to children of French nationals, and a government campaign to encourage French families to have more children is proposed. All mosques suspected of “extremism” should be closed, the National Rally says. Given that Le Pen claims that a Muslim headscarf is “a sign of radicality”, one can imagine that few mosques would escape her definition of extremism.
Just as important as her program are her unofficial statements of intent. These include her expressed desire to ban the wearing of Muslim headscarves in the streets, her promise to “defend the workers by opposing the immigration, which brings down wages”, and her recent lies that “so many neighbourhoods now are controlled by criminal or Islamist gangs”.
The mainstreaming of her party has been so effective that National Rally representatives frequently appear on all the major TV political <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZZIIg462d4">talk shows</a>, on which journalists, with a couple of honourable exceptions, are ever more accommodating. Younger party spokespeople, the chirpiest and best-dressed Nazis in the country, are regularly treated as future decisionmakers on breakfast TV.
Yet Le Pen’s electoral rise does not reflect any automatic progress of fascism. There are several factors that make it difficult for the National Rally to grow. The main recent episodes in the class struggle in France have not gone their way politically. Take first the inspiring Yellow Vest movement (2018-19), for example. That movement began in regions and in social classes that show a high level of electoral support for Le Pen. 
The lively insurrectional mobilisations around the country could have become a real force for popularising the far right. But this did not happen. On the contrary, thanks to the tireless work of many hundreds of local left activists and trade unionists, the political tone of the Yellow Vest movement moved very much to the left. Indeed, protesting police violence became one of its main priorities, a cause Le Pen could not afford to take up. (Well over half of all police who vote, vote for the National Rally.)
The mass revolt over pensions was not good for Le Pen either. High levels of political class consciousness were expressed in the strikes and demonstrations against the new pension law in 2019 and 2020. The movement ended in victory for the working class—the measures have been shelved indefinitely (using the pandemic as an excuse). While defending pensions was at the centre of the political agenda, Le Pen had to keep quiet. On the one hand, defending pensions was so popular that she could not afford to support Macron’s law; on the other, her large base among small businesspeople did not allow her to support mass trade union action. 
The pandemic has not particularly helped Le Pen either: although millions have harsh criticisms of Macron’s management of the crisis, neither the far right nor the left succeeded in popularising the idea that they had a much more effective strategy against the virus.
Le Pen’s attempt to build a solid party structure in towns around the country is also fraught with difficulties. An oppositional party that received 10 million votes would normally be able to organise street demonstrations of tens of thousands. But the National Rally cannot manage it. In the 2017 presidential campaign, while Mélenchon of France Insoumise could attract more than 50,000 people on the Marseille dockside for a mass meeting, Le Pen’s biggest meetings were of a few thousand people. This year, Le Pen even abandoned the party’s habitual 1 May far-right demonstration in Paris, replacing it with an online meeting. 
In fact, the National Rally has considerably fewer members than it had several years ago. At the municipal elections in 2020, the party had difficulty recruiting candidates for town councillors (the party won 1,498 town council positions across France in 2014, but only 827 in 2020). The party has six members of parliament, compared with twelve Communist Party MPs and seventeen belonging to the radical left France Insoumise.
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Although Le Pen plans to pass through a stage of building an electorally based far-right party, as the far right in Italy or elsewhere has been able to do, her long-term fascist objective remains. The symbol of the National Rally is still the flame borrowed from the Italian fascist tradition. Just like her father did with his “jokes” about the holocaust, Marine Le Pen regularly provides knowing winks for the core of Nazi activists in France. When Génération Identitaire, a White Nationalist group, was banned here two months ago for hate speech, and for “building a private militia”, Le Pen defended them. 
And in April 2021, when a group of retired military generals called those who believed in “true French values” to be prepared for civil war, she immediately declared that they were right and that her party would welcome them with open arms. The generals’ open letter spoke of the “danger” of decolonial theories, which they claimed would cause a “race war”, and of the dangers of Muslim separatism and of Black Blocs. It concluded: “This is no time to hesitate. Otherwise, tomorrow civil war will put an end to this situation of rising chaos, and you [France’s political leaders] will be responsible for the thousands of deaths which will occur”.
The characteristic of the present period that has most helped Le Pen is the horrific and reactionary terrorist attacks carried out in France in the name of radical Islam (even though the attackers generally have few or no links to the mosques or to the Muslim community). The killing of a schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, (for “insulting the Prophet”) in 2020 and last month’s killing of a police station employee, Stéphanie Monfermé, were manna from heaven for the National Rally. 
More manna came in the form of racist initiatives by Macron and his ministers over the last year. A new law against “separatism” is just going through, which obliges all Muslim organisations to sign a charter of agreement with Republican principles. The aim is purely propagandistic—to tell the 10 million who voted Le Pen: “We distrust Muslims too, vote for us!” While the bill worked its way through the Senate, several amendments were approved, which, while having little chance of being in the law in its final form, have encouraged a vast racist talkfest in the media. One amendment is for children to be banned completely from wearing a hijab; another would prohibit mothers who wear a hijab from attending school trips along with other parents. 
Macron has also dissolved organisations such as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Against_Islamophobia_in_France">Collective against Islamophobia in France</a>, despite zero evidence that they have any sympathy for terrorists. Meanwhile, his education minister, Blanquer, declared that the hijab “is not welcome in French society”, and the minister of the interior, Darmanin, attacked supermarkets that sell halal food, while criticising Marine Le Pen for being “too soft” on the Muslim question!
This cynical ideological campaign claiming that Muslims want to separate from wider society is based entirely on lies. For example, there are ten times fewer Muslim families sending their children to religious schools than there are families sending their children to private Catholic schools! There are 9,000 private Catholic schools in France, and around 70 private Muslim schools.
Wider racist posturing is also part of Macron’s recipe for re-election. A moral panic hit the newsrooms when it was “revealed” that the national union of students (UNEF) sometimes organises meetings exclusively for non-whites, in the context of thinking about how to fight racism. In rigidly universalist France, this is often considered shocking, and the Senate recommended that the student union be banned. Astoundingly, some Communist Party and Green Party senators voted in favour of the proposal. In the media, the talk was of the terrible danger of “anti-white racism” taking over the country’s youth.
A second racist panic was organised around university teaching and research. The education minister claimed that “Islamo-leftism” was “a gangrene” in the universities, and that good honest intellectuals were being terrorised by decolonial studies merchants. The lie was effective—more than 60 percent of French citizens in polls said that “Islamo-leftism” in the universities needed investigating, even though the extremely establishment Council of University Presidents replied with the angriest press release in its history, accusing the minister of using “pseudo-concepts popularised by the far right”.
Given the divisions on the left and on the right, which mean that 9 million first round votes will no doubt be enough to get through to the run-off, Macron has every interest in putting far-right priorities at the centre of public debate. Jean-Luc Mélenchon was right to describe the second-round run-off between Macron and Le Pen in 2017 as “more of a duet than a duel”. “Macron represents the system, and Le Pen is its life insurance”, he commented. Macron, even though he came from a strand of the right that had not traditionally prioritised Muslim-bashing, is going full-on racist as a diversion from class struggle, and in this manner is laying the basis for a further increase in far-right support.
Marine Le Pen’s political weaknesses, (never giving support to popular class struggles such as the defence of pensions), and her organisational weaknesses (having difficulty maintaining local party structures and meetings), provide a lot of space for anti-fascists to reduce her support through information campaigns and determined harassment actions. There is right now no broad-based national anti-fascist campaign. Each left party denounces Le Pen and her racism, and some even campaign against Islamophobia, but there is a real need for something more. Anti-fascist meetings and rallies have for years been rare, localised and small. 
Yet the potential is clear: there have been inspiring mobilisations by newish (mainly non-white led) anti-racist networks in recent years, in particular against police racism. In addition, there are plenty of anti-racists among the young and among trade unionists, who might mistrust or not be attracted by political parties, but who would be ready to mobilise against the fascists. National anti-fascist initiatives are sorely needed. As this article was being written (4 May) a group of left MPs, movement activists and trade unions published a call for <a href="https://www.liberation.fr/idees-et-debats/tribunes/appel-pour-les-libertes-contre-les-idees-dextreme-droite-20210504_XRVRUYXD5RDGPG6YY2TWUV6MQY/">a national demonstration</a> against the ideas of the far right. This must become the basis for more ambitious campaigns.
Thanks to Susan, Daniel, Fred, Greg, Ray, Stéphane and Ian for comments on an earlier draft.

How dangerous is Marine Le Pen?

What was the context of the murder of a history teacher last week?
The horrific murder took place after the middle-school teacher, Samuel Paty, had shown in a civics class some of the infamous caricatures of Mohammed produced by a right-wing Danish newspaper some years back and popularised by Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine. The teacher was much appreciated by parents and pupils of all backgrounds. Not understanding that these caricatures are racist is common on right and left in France, and the caricatures are on the school curriculum, so showing them in class as illustrations does not mean that this was a racist teacher. He had shown them in previous years, but this year some parents complained, and the school inspectorate organised a discussion meeting of some sort. Naturally, no-one imagined all this would come to the ears of a teenage fanatic who lived 50 miles away and was ready to kill and die for this.
How has Macron’s government reacted?
This event happened at a time when the presidential elections of May 2022 are beginning to interest political parties. In the last elections, fascist candidate Marine Le Pen got ten million votes, so the pull to win over racist votes is extremely strong, in particular since all the traditional parties of the left and right are in deep crisis. President Macron is unpopular after the mass strikes of last year and his disastrous management of the COVID-19 crisis. Instead of opening more hospital beds and training more health staff in the few months respite between the two waves of the epidemic, the government has been going ahead with planned hospital closures! 
Macron has four aims in his exploitation of this tragedy: to portray himself as the spokesman of a united nation, to give the impression that he can be effective against such terror attacks, to win voters from Le Pen by attacking Muslims, and to divert attention from his vicious neoliberal austerity programme, which he has slowed down this year but has certainly not given up.
So he organised a national homage to the murdered teacher, who has been awarded a posthumous Legion of Honour medal—the highest official order of merit in France. A minute of silence will be observed in all schools immediately after the school holidays. His government is banning Muslim organisations accused of being involved with “political Islam”, a usefully broad expression which allows charities, legal aid organisations and anti-racist groups to be targeted. 
Interior Minister Darmanin is demanding the banning of several organisations. These include the Collective against Islamophobia, which helps provide lawyers for those defending themselves against Islamophobic discrimination at work or elsewhere. A mosque in Pantin, north-east of Paris, which in previous weeks had shown sympathy with criticisms of Samuel Paty’s teaching, has been closed—although there is zero evidence that the mosque leaders supported violence. In the days after the murder, Darmanin said openly that the interior ministry was hauling in many people unconnected with the murder investigation “because they wanted to get the message over”. Macron declared that “fear must now change sides”.
Last month, Macron began preparing a law “against separatism”, which is claimed to be about many groups, including white supremacists, but is in fact aimed at Muslims and creates a new crime of “separatism”. This is an invented danger. Muslims, for example, are far less keen on having separate schools for their children than are devout Catholics or Jews. There are in France 9,000 private Catholic schools, 300 or so private Jewish schools and around twenty private Muslim schools. This is theatrical gesturing hoping to retain or attract Islamophobic voters, (who may well have previously voted for the left or even the far left).
A number of political leaders from the traditional parties are now jumping on the racist bandwagon. The interior minister declared that he is shocked by halal or kosher sections in supermarkets. These, he said are based on people’s “lower instincts” and represent “the beginnings of communitarianism”. A few weeks ago, the same minister declared: “Islam in France must be certain that all its believers accept that the laws of the republic are superior to the laws of their god”. But it is common for believers in many religions to think of their god as superior to human institutions—this does not make them killers! Darmanin just wants a witch-hunt.
The traditional parties, both swept aside by Macronism in the last parliamentary elections, each has its own proposals. Ex-presidential candidate for the conservative Republicans, François Fillon, demands that Muslim headscarves be banned in universities. The leader of the collapsing Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, said that much firmer action against “Islamism” is required and that any parent “who questioned what was being taught” in school should be taken to court. The Socialist Party mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, wants there to be a special “secularism week” in every school in the country. 
In the eastern region of France, a booklet of caricatures of religious figures (“those most remarked upon”) will be distributed in every high school. Other regions will probably follow suit. The booklet will include anti-Catholic caricatures, but its main aim is Islamophobia. Town halls in major cities have been projecting on the walls of their buildings Charlie Hebdo cartoons, avoiding the most insulting ones, but portraying the mocking of Islam as a brave blow for freedom. On the front page of Le Monde, a daily newspaper, the renowned cartoonist Plantu compared the strength of Islamic terrorism in France today with the Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Former left-wing novelist turned racist ideologue, Pascal Bruckner, denounced on live TV a Black anti-racist journalist and activist, Rokhaya Diallo, saying she “had armed the killers” with her ideas. As the French Jewish Peace Union put it in its press release: 
“From denouncing a few fanatics, the discourse has moved onto calling entire groupings Islamist. Then they denounce any independent organisation based on Islam (in the same way as the Catholic charity Secours Catholique is faith-based) ... Previously, the authorities spoke of “the enemy within”, now they accuse Muslims of “separatism”, of wanting in the long run to create spaces in the country where the laws do not apply, in which only laws inspired by the Koran will hold sway, replacing those of the republic. This accusation is just an old theme of the far right, dressed up in new rags.”
What has been the effect on teachers?
For many teachers, this feels like the last straw. For years, staff cuts, a pay freeze and constant curriculum changes have made working conditions ever harder. Everyone is shocked and many are frightened by this murder. Teaching unions called a series of successful rallies on Sunday. Most of these were made up of large numbers of people with almost no placards, banners or slogans. It was good to see only a few old people brandishing caricatures by Charlie Hebdo (and even these avoided the most insulting drawings). The declarations of the teaching unions have explicitly warned against the targeting of the Muslim community.
Sad to say, there is plenty of Islamophobia among teachers in France. An insignificant if brave minority opposed banning the hijab in high schools. In teacher activist forums today, many suggest that showing the caricatures of Mohammed should be compulsory in every school. One teacher recounted his amazement when all of his 20-year-old students thought it was better not to insult religion out of respect for believers. Multiple comments from old and bitter secularists ensued. Teacher activists who want to oppose Islamophobia have their work cut out, but some good initiatives and union motions are being prepared
What about the left? It is well known that fighting Islamophobia is not a strong point of the French left.
The most important of the Left reformist groupings is La France Insoumise (“Unbowed France”), which received seven million votes in the last presidentials on a Corbyn-style programme. The movement called last week for “All the people of France to gather around teachers and parents and join the rallies around the country”. It also underlined the fact that “this crime, committed in the name of god, has wounded millions of our fellow citizens who refuse to see their religion linked to such atrocities”.
France Insoumise is a real electoral danger for Macron, and he and the right are seizing this opportunity to smear the movement. In the present frenzied public debate, the reaction of the biggest radical group is important. France Insoumise is a rather heterogeneous movement that aims to win the presidency for a radical left programme. Some hardline secularists were among the original founders, so contradictory pressures are obviously present—the press release also calls for a fight against “obscurantism”. Leading figures, such as France Insoumise member of parliament Danièle Obono, have been in the forefront of the fight against Islamophobia for years, and persistent work by a minority has led to progress in countering Islamophobia in the organisation. Most notably, ex-presidential candidate Jean Luc Mélenchon, against considerable internal opposition, said that France Insoumise should officially support the first ever mass demonstration against Islamophobia in Paris last November. (Far left organisations also supported the demonstration, though only about half their members were convinced that they should.)
In a McCarthyite atmosphere, France Insoumise is now being attacked as “Islamo-leftist” and is accused of encouraging terrorism. Former Socialist Party Prime Minister Manuel Valls accused Mélenchon of being “complicit” in the rise of Islamism. Education Minister Blanquer added his voice to the fight against “Islamo-leftism”, which he claims is causing “enormous damage” in universities and in France Insoumise. It is crucial for left wingers to defend the organisation against these attacks, despite the fact that it, like all parties on the French left, still has a long way to go to become a consistent fighter against Islamophobia, and that its use of “left patriotism” is not something revolutionaries can agree with. 
Although much of the left and the unions have declared that Muslims in general must not be blamed for the murder, they will probably not organise to defend Muslim charities and other groups from being banned: the leaders will tread carefully so as not to provoke sharp reactions among their members.
Marine Le Pen must be delighted. How has she reacted?
Le Pen’s fascists have had a bad couple of years. The Yellow Vest movement, involving poor workers and small businessmen, could have moved towards Le Pen’s ideas, but did not because of the work of left activists. The mass strikes to defend pensions were so popular that Le Pen did not dare openly oppose them. And the health crisis did not leave her any space for a distinctive position. This new political crisis is on her favourite terrain, and she is hoping people will vote for her because she hated Muslims before the others began to do so openly. This week, she has called for “wartime legislation” and demanded a freeze on all immigration and on all processes for immigrants to obtain French citizenship. A number of her fascist co-thinkers are regularly invited on prime-time TV or asked to write columns in establishment newspapers such as Le Figaro, the oldest national daily in the country.
What do you think anti-capitalists should be doing?
It is a bit of a nightmare situation in some ways. I think it was right to go to the big rallies called by the teachers’ unions last week, and I was not convinced by the many revolutionaries who said we should not go because the education minister and other bigwigs would be there.
The situation is in rapid flux and many questions are being thrown up. Some require patient explanation, and some require a sharp polemic. The most important task is to build as broad an alliance as possible to defend Muslims against Islamophobia. There have already been attacks on mosques this week. The oldest mosque in Bordeaux, in the south-west, was vandalised by a far-right gang, and a mosque in Montélimar, in the south-east, was also smashed up. There is a wider section of the French left ready to oppose Islamophobia than has been the case for several decades. If the McCarthyite atmosphere intimidates it into silence, we will have missed an opportunity that we will not see again soon.
We have to keep on with the general explanations about the role of French imperialism, the massive sales of arms to dictatorships that support terrorism, and the meaning of national unity. We need to explain political Islam and contest the idea that political Islam can only lead to terrorism, and so on. But unity against Islamophobia is the immediate task. The banning of the Collective against Islamophobia, of the charity organisation BarakaCity and others will be challenged in the courts (and at the United Nations), as will the closing of the mosque in Pantin. We must mobilise to defend them. This will be the test. It is good to see most trade unions and left groups insisting that Muslims should not be blamed, but will they be willing to defend Muslim organisations and mosques?
This interview first published at <a href="https://www.theleftberlin.com/">The Left Berlin</a>.

Murder, McCarthyism and Islamophobia in France

The second round of the French local elections, at the end of June, was bad news for president Emmanuel Macron, whose candidates did very poorly. In response, Macron switched prime ministers, replacing high-profile operator Edouard Philippe with an unknown right winger, Jean Castex, whose previous experience consisted mostly of being mayor of a town with 6,000 inhabitants. “I’m not looking for the limelight”, confirmed Castex on the day of his appointment. Meanwhile, mobilisations for Black lives and working-class anger at austerity and job losses have marked the month since the raising of the lockdown. What are the prospects for the year to come?
For the last 25 years in France, since the great strikes of 1995, which shut the Paris Métro for a month, there has been regular mass resistance to the rise of neoliberalism and austerity. Sometimes we won and sometimes we lost. Often, the result of a conflict was neither a victory nor a defeat because the government shelved important parts of its plans without announcing, “You have frightened us!”
For example, 1.6 million university students each pay €200 to €300 euros a year in enrolment fees. The think tanks dream of introducing high tuition fees like in England or the USA, but the politicians dare not even suggest it. Another example: pensioner poverty in France is four times lower than in the UK. And, according to a 2019 UK House of Commons briefing paper, French full time employees, on average, work three hours less per week than their UK counterparts. Workers’ struggle has been able to slow down neoliberal barbarism. 
The resistance movements are also a sign of a high level of class consciousness. During the fight back against Socialist Party president François Hollande’s 2016 labour laws, for example, most strikers were not affected as individuals; many of the vicious new rules applied only to future recruitments. Workers who already had a permanent contract or who were a little older could have said to themselves, “Thank God it doesn’t affect me”. Night after night on the television, expert commentators wondered why the strikes went on, when so many strikers were “not personally affected”. TV commentators have a hard time figuring out class consciousness.
This high level of class struggle wrecked the political parties the ruling class relied on for decades. First, president Sarkozy from the right pushed through half the neoliberal attacks he wanted and was then defeated in the 2012 elections by Hollande, who said, “My real opponent is the world of finance”. People hoped Hollande would be different, but he scrapped long-held protections for millions of workers. In the 2017 elections, the Socialist Party was crushed. Hollande did not dare even to stand again; the candidate who did stand, Benoit Hamon, left the party after the election to form a new group. In the first round of the parliamentary elections, the Socialists, who were the outgoing government, got just 7.4 percent of the votes cast – fewer votes than the radical left movement France Insoumise (“Unbowed France”) and the far right National Front. The Socialist Party lost 250 of its 280 MPs.
Macron gathered the disappointed politicians of the right and hopeful careerists from the Socialist Party. His new group, La République en Marche! (“Onward!”), got a clear majority in the parliament. Macron’s plan was full spectrum Thatcherism, but with a smoother discourse. He wanted to weaken trade unions, cut entitlements, take power away from local government and privatise swathes of public services. He was prepared to unleash police violence if that would help.
The resistance was huge. The Yellow Vest movement inspired areas of the country and parts of the population not used to mobilising. Then a new attack on pensions led to seven enormous strike days, and millions on the streets, in the railways, education, manufacturing, hospitals and elsewhere. The strikes were popular – twice as many people supported them as opposed them, and the figures were even better among the working class.
Macron retreated on one important element: instead of the vicious new rules applying to everyone born after 1963, the prime minister announced, they would apply only to people born after 1975. The government hoped this would dampen the movement. It didn’t. The strikes in January 2020 were massive. When the coronavirus crisis arrived, Macron shelved the attack. This must count as a victory for our side. If there had been no resistance, it would have been passed many months earlier.
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The coronavirus has killed more than 30,000 people in France. As the lockdown lifts, Macron says that “we have to be ready to reinvent ourselves” and is promising to change. What we have mostly seen is huge amounts of money to prop up companies, and much less help for workers.
Millions of people have been plunged into poverty because temporary jobs have disappeared. Now, there are likely to be massive redundancies. The big aeronautical company Airbus is threatening 15,000 redundancies, including 5,000 of its 49,000 employees in France. Air France has announced 7,500 job losses (16 percent of its workforce) despite receiving €7 billion in government-backed loans that most commentators think will never be fully repaid. Most companies have not yet announced redundancy plans, but Nokia, Technicolor and the pharmaceutical company Sanofi say they will sack hundreds of workers.
The government has been staving off bankruptcies and limiting extreme poverty by borrowing billions of euros. But in a few years, they will have to be paid back either through more taxes on the rich or more suffering for workers. No prizes for guessing which Macron will choose. He has already said that he is not planning to raise taxes on the rich. His solution, he declared, is that we need “to work more” and “to produce more”.
But he has to be careful. He is unpopular and people are angry. The government just announced €6 billion for low-paid nurses and hospital staff – about €100 a month each. It’s far from enough, and there is no talk of increasing staffing levels in hospitals, but it is a sign that Macron is under pressure.
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In the municipal elections, there were record abstention rates. Fear of the virus was one factor, but mostly these abstentions reflected a disaffection with the main parties. This is why the Greens did so well, aided by the “localist” focus of much of their program, which plays better in municipal elections than in national ones. Several big cities were taken by Greens candidates. After 25 years having a right wing mayor, Marseille was won by an alliance headed by an ecologist. After 73 years of right wing rule, Bordeaux also has an ecologist as mayor.
The far right National Rally (previously the National Front) did not do well. Before these elections, it had 1,468 councillors in 463 towns. It now has 840 councillors in 258 towns. The fascist losses are due to the period of acute class struggle, in which the National Rally cannot afford to take sides. Although it made vague statements sympathetic to the Yellow Vests, it could not denounce police violence because of its huge base among the police. It could neither support nor oppose the pensions movement because the movement was popular but small employers are crucial to National Rally’s support networks.
The group has, however, had a lot of success in persuading people that it is no longer a fascist organisation. Significant sections of the right now view the National Rally as a potential partner. In Perpignan, when it was clear that the fascist candidate was going to win, three members of the local slate of Macron’s party declared support for the National Rally. We will see more alliances between it and the traditional right. Flagship racist policies will be the result.
There was occasional good news for the left. In Bordeaux, a joint list led by car worker Philippe Poutou of the New Anticapitalist Party and Evelyne Cervantes-Descubes, a longstanding trade union activist from France Insoumise, got 11.8 percent in the first round and 9.4 percent in the second round, and now has three city councillors – Poutou, Cervantes-Descubes and a Yellow Vest activist whose hand was blown off by police weaponry last year.
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The local elections were a blow for Macron, and he is also worried about the Black Lives Matter movement. Important demonstrations against police violence, and others demanding papers for undocumented migrants, have hit the front pages this month.
In the last 10-15 years, new anti-racist networks have been set up, mostly led by young Black adults from the working class parts of town. They have led demonstrations of tens of thousands. The Truth and Justice for Adama Committee is one of them, established to demand justice for a Black man murdered by the police. These groups work with the radical left, but mutual mistrust is common. The leaders of the Adama Committee are anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and outward looking in spirit. They organised joint actions last year with the Yellow Vests, signed a joint declaration with the CGT union federation about the legitimacy of revolt in the poor suburbs and organised a long debate this month with France Insoumise MP François Ruffin.
These new anti-racist networks are different to the dusty, extremely moderate, semi-establishment anti-racist organisations of the past, and they are slowly pushing the radical left into improving its anti-racist activity. There is a long way to go in France: Paris is covered with colonial statues, and there have been only small attempts to protest these, and Islamophobia is a traditional blind spot of the French left (despite slow progress in recent years). 
Macron insists that no statues will be taken down, but this is hubris. There have already been changes in the names of schools named after Colbert, author of the notorious Black Code used to regulate slavery in France. The president also squeals about the dangers of communitarianism and Black separatism. Meanwhile, government spokespeople frequently repeat that police racism does not exist.
Between Macron’s worries about the anti-racist revolt and his party’s defeat at the municipal elections, he is looking for something to boost his poll ratings. Last week he was busy switching prime ministers and trumpeting allegedly new proposals on the environment, but a lot of smoke and mirrors is involved. He is proposing a referendum on rewriting the constitution so that environmental concerns are included at the beginning of the clauses about French values.
What about the vicious neoliberal attacks he shelved a couple of months back, including the pension reform and an attack on unemployment entitlements? It is not yet clear if he dares to bring identical proposals back into play immediately, but a neoliberal bill on universities (which would reduce still further the number of permanent contracts and split universities into two categories – well-funded “centres of excellence” and second-rate universities for the less privileged classes) is being pushed into parliament in the autumn. The new PM, Castex, has announced his intention to start negotiations on pension changes, which Macron has said will be “transformed” but “not abandoned”.
Having pushed out his previous, high-profile, prime minister, Macron is indicating that he intends to run the show alone. Pushing on with his Thatcherite combat in the storms of acute economic crisis and mass working class anger is going to be a bumpy ride. Let’s hope we can make him fall off his roller-coaster.
John Mullen is a revolutionary socialist and supporter of the France Insoumise in the Paris region.

France: Macron wounded, but still eyeing austerity

Islamophobia is hitting the headlines again in France, as over 20,000 marched joyfully against it in Paris in November, singing and chanting, backed by major trade unions and radical left parties. Are we finally seeing a real shift in the dreadful politics of the French left on Islamophobia?
A huge row about Islam and racism is on the front pages in France. At the end of October, a former candidate from Marine le Pen’s party (now called National Rally) attacked a mosque in Bayonne in south west France with a revolver and an incendiary bomb, seriously wounding two Muslims. This was the third and gravest racist attack on the mosque over the last five years, and a number of other mosques have suffered arson attacks or racist graffiti.
Two weeks earlier, a fascist representative on a regional council in the centre of France demanded that a Muslim mother wearing a headscarf (who was accompanying a group of schoolchildren coming to see how democracy works) be expelled from the public gallery. Voices were raised in protest but also many in support of the expulsion. The same week, the senate voted up (163 to 114) the first reading of a bill to ban mothers wearing headscarves from accompanying school trips. Although the bill will no doubt fall at a later parliamentary stage, it is a terrible symbol of the hatred faced by Muslims in France. A mainstream right wing senator compared women wearing headscarves to “Halloween witches”; he claimed that the women were not simply living their religion, but were “communitarianists” threatening the spirit of the Republic. A group of intellectuals published an appeal in Le Figaro in favour of banning Muslims wearing headscarves from school trips. The education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, declared that the headscarf should not be banned, but “is not wanted in our society”. In early November, in a nursery school which had organised workshops about “respecting other people” involving the children’s parents, the regional education chief on an official visit refused to enter the premises because there were three Muslim mothers with headscarves. In a recent poll, 42 percent of Muslims said they had faced discrimination on account of their religion. For those with higher education diplomas, the percentage was far higher (as long as – mostly Arab – Muslims stay in their place as cleaners or security guards, they do not get targeted as much).
The shocking blind spot of the French Left
For twenty years, Islamophobia has been used to divide in France, more so than in other countries because the left has been so criminally weak on the issue. A tradition on the left of despising believers, which goes back many decades, merged with lingering neo-colonialist attitudes and the new international Islamophobic priorities since 2001, to give rise to an unconsciously racist consensus which has gangrened the left. It is still not unusual to find activists who have spent decades fighting for refugee rights or combatting other forms of racism who have horribly backward ideas about Muslims, and in particular refuse to really imagine that one might be French and Muslim (so any discussion of Islam turns within seconds to comments about Saudi Arabia). Older readers can compare the situation to the way genuinely left people could be horribly homophobic fifty years ago.
In 2004, the law which banned headscarves among high-school students encountered no serious opposition from the radical left: demonstrations attracted a few dozen people only. Even the mainstream of the revolutionary left (at the time the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire), which had had better positions 10 years earlier, ran a front page “Neither this law nor the veil!”, abandoning its duty to defend oppressed groups. Most of the left supported the ban, and some far left activists ran campaigns locally to extend the ban to parts of universities, while their organisations, deeply divided, did not stop them. The 2010 follow-up law, which forbade the wearing of a niqab in any public space, saw even less opposition. This law was historic in that it was the first time a law had been passed to ban a practice followed by a tiny minority: its real motivation was to please racist voters by underlining “the problem” caused by Muslims.
In 2010, when a local group of the New Anticapitalist Party chose, as a candidate for municipal elections, a young Muslim woman who wore a headscarf, the highly emotional national conference was divided almost exactly fifty-fifty on the issue, and the young woman soon left the party. In 2016, when some right wing mayors banned full-body swimsuits on beaches, there were some press releases from the radical left in protest, and one small demonstration on a beach. But year after year, there have been no public meetings, no campaigns, pamphlets, books or demonstrations set up by left parties against Islamophobia, even though this form of racism is the one which is most helping to build the fascist National Rally in the country (its polls are presently around 23 percent of voting intention).
The result of this weakness was a heaven sent gift to Macron and to the right in general. Since attacking Muslims would not give rise to any concerted opposition from the left, it was the ideal tactic for any government pushing through austerity packages that wanted to put up a smoke screen. Macron’s modernist branch of the right has not traditionally been the one the most involved with pointing the finger at Muslims, but as his position becomes more and more precarious, what with the continuing Yellow Vest movement, electoral pressure from the far right, and upcoming mass strikes to defend pensions, Islamophobia is an irresistible tactic for him too.
Fighting Islamophobia at last
The attitude of left organisations is slowly and painfully beginning to change. On Sunday 10 November, over 20,000 marched in Paris, backed by the biggest national union confederation, the CGT, as well as the smaller, more radical confederation SUD, by the France Insoumise (biggest of the left reformist movements, a sort of French Corbynism), and by the Communist Party. The call was launched by Madjid Messaoudene, a left city councillor in Saint Denis and taken up by Muslim organisations, student unions and the New Anticapitalist Party before gaining wider support. Yellow Vest leaders and human rights organisations also marched. To my surprise, my local baker in the Paris suburbs had a pile of leaflets on his counter about the demonstration (whereas local Muslims have been more used to keeping their heads down than fighting back).
The march drew many thousands of Muslim women in headscarves, their faces showing joy and disbelief as crowds chanted “If you like being with Muslims, clap your hands!” and “Solidarity with veiled women!” The Yellow Vest signature song was adapted and sung en masse: “Here we are, here we are, even if Blanquer doesn’t want it, here we are! For the honour of the Muslims, for respect for our mothers, even if Blanquer doesn’t want it, here we are!” French tricolour flags were waved and many home-made placards announced, “We are proud of being French AND Muslim!” Other slogans included “We’re in danger, we’re not dangerous!”, “Criticising religion: yes! Hating believers: No!” and “Muslims aren’t the problem: Islamophobes are full of hate!”
Older activists against Islamophobia like myself were deeply moved: we have been waiting for this for 25 years. This change on the left is due to a number of factors in addition to the escalation of attacks on Muslims, the violence of which has been shocking. Firstly, non-white organisations, including many Muslim women, organising against police racism in particular, but also against Islamophobia, have built over recent years, small but dynamic independent campaigning networks, which are able to get a few thousand out demonstrating. As was the case in the past with gays and with women, the oppressed mobilising independently of the left are teaching left activists to improve their politics.
Secondly, inside each radical or revolutionary left organisation, the small minority that understands the importance of actively fighting Islamophobia has been plugging away for twenty years and is now considerably larger (though still a minority in every organisation).
Thirdly, there is a generational change. The older anti-religious campaigners, whether in feminist circles, in teaching trade unions or in radical or revolutionary left parties are happily not managing to convince younger generations of activists who have been immersed in multicultural communities since school days and do not see why their Muslim contemporaries should not be treated like everyone else, rather than ostracised.
Sunday’s demonstration has brought the row into the mass media. Blanquer, Macron’s education minister, spoke of “a deplorable initiative” opposed to the principles of a secular state. The (ever more Blairite) Socialist Party refused to join the march. Some of them have called for an alternative rally “for secularism and against racism”. Left wing politicians (including a couple of those who signed the call to demonstrate) have been searching through the list of 400 initial signatories to find someone who is sufficiently reactionary about some question or other, so as to have an excuse to distance themselves from the march. One humorous cartoon doing the rounds showed a left wing activist being asked “Are you going to the march against Islamophobia?” He looks unsure and asks in a worried tone “I don’t know – there won’t be Muslims there, will there?”
There will be a fierce backlash by the Islamophobic sections of the left and the right, which are both fairly well organised. There is even a popular weekly magazine, Marianne, for secularist Islamophobes who think they are on the left. In every left organization or trade union which supported the demonstration, there are large numbers who boycotted it. Very few trade unions brought their banners on the march. These people need to be persuaded. Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen is hoping to polarise around the march, claiming that everyone supporting it is playing into the hands of Islamic fundamentalism and accusing France Insoumise of being in reality “la France Islamiste”. Macron’s ministers are doing the rounds of television studios explaining how “foolish and naïve” the left is being.
But at least the fight is on. The march is an enormous step forward. The front page of the Paris local newspaper last week read “Muslims faced with racism”, whereas even vicious attacks in the past had only given rise to local demonstrations of a couple of hundred Muslims and always the same twenty or so of us activists from various left organizations.
Some Muslim activists are understandably sceptical, claiming that the upcoming municipal elections are the reason for the mobilisation of politicians looking for votes. This is unlikely – the terrible truth on the left in France is that an organisation is more likely to lose votes by supporting Muslims than gain them. A poll published last week showed that two thirds of French citizens think that mothers wearing headscarves should be banned from accompanying school trips! There is an urgent need for a broad campaign against Islamophobia.
Jean- Luc Mélenchon, leader of the parliamentary group of France Insoumise MPs, a group of 17 parliamentarians a few of whom are clearly unhappy about this march, has nailed his colours to the mast (previously his verbal opposition to Islamophobia was frequently ambiguous). There will certainly be resignations from the France Insoumise because of this demonstration (the grouping integrated left currents characterised by hard line secularism), so it was very heartening to see Mélenchon standing firm. “When our Muslim fellow countrymen, representing the second largest religion in France, are stigmatised, insulted and physically threatened, it is our duty to come to their aid” he said. In addition, the front page of the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party called for people to join the demonstration. Even the Trotskyist organization Lutte Ouvrière (which has in the past enthusiastically supported laws against Muslim headwear) attended.
If this fightback can be sustained, it could remove from Macron’s hands a powerful divisive weapon. As unions in transport, education and health gear up for massive strikes from 5 December on, unity against racism and Islamophobia can be a big boost for our class. The class anger, amid rising poverty (9.3 million below the poverty line), must take centre stage, not racist division disguised as the defence of secular civilisation.
 
John Mullen is a revolutionary socialist and supporter of the France Insoumise in the Paris region.

At last: a fightback against Islamophobia in France?

As the Yellow Vest movement in France continues its novel and inspiring revolt, president Emmanuel Macron could not help expressing his class disdain for ordinary people: at a gala speech on 11 January, he declared: “Too many French people don’t know the meaning of the word ‘effort’. That’s part of the explanation for the present troubles”. This article takes a look at the general significance of Macron and the movement within France.
Certainly, on our side, effort has not been lacking! It is unheard of to hold demonstrations in dozens of towns across the country on the weekend between Christmas and the New Year. But the Yellow Vest movement managed on 12 January to hold one of the biggest waves of protests yet. Imaginative and symbolic direct action has inspired all those who want smug-faced Macron thrown out of his palace. 
Motorways and ferry ports – and a horse racecourse – have been blockaded again, as well as some regional police headquarters and town halls. And one of Macron’s MPs woke up one morning to find their house entrance bricked up. In early January, another minister was made to scurry out the back door of his office, as demonstrators smashed in his front door with a handy forklift. He later squealed something about “extreme violence threatening the Republic”.
Meanwhile, the 24-hour lies and distortions of much of the media have been challenged by demonstrations in front of TV headquarters, and blockades stopped delivery of at least three regional newspapers this week, including Ouest France. A right wing news channel, BFM, refused to cover some demonstrations due to barracking by unhappy Yellow Vests. At the same time, Google and Amazon have been targeted by “Pay your taxes!” pickets.
Last week and this, women’s Yellow Vest marches were held around France, while a new Yellow Vest version of a famous World War Two resistance song is doing the rounds of social media. Many towns have seen nothing like this since 1968, and it all shows a rapid politicisation of the people involved, in particular on the subject of the police and the media. Many involved had been “apolitical” before!
In a number of cities, regular meetings now allow debate on demands and actions. The protests are now more frequently declared in advance, allowing people who might be concerned about going to a non-authorised rally to join in. The numbers involved are not those which the mass union mobilisations of 18 months back could bring out, but the creatively insurrectional atmosphere and the fact that the actions have continued for more than two months make the situation unique. Even the Times in London is editorialising about Macron’s “desperation”.
Polls show that, although sympathy for the Yellow Vests among better-off sections of the population has fallen somewhat, across society a majority of people support the revolt. Among blue collar workers and low-grade office workers it remains extremely popular.
Challenges
The successes of the movement (in addition to the concessions) are that poverty among workers and pensioners is now at the centre of public debate, and Macron has been humiliated in the eyes of the entire world. At a moment when we have just learned that shareholders in France received 57 billion euros in dividends last year, the disgusting injustice of the system is very much in focus.
The rhythm is quite different from that of a social explosion like May 1968, when a general strike followed only days after the political crisis appeared. The defeats of enormous strikes in 2018 and 2017 against neoliberal attacks have led to a certain demoralisation, which makes the move from mass revolt to mass strike action more difficult, and means many workers are tempted by an attitude of passive support for the Yellow Vests, hoping that the movement will win for everyone.
The revolt is facing other challenges, too. The active core, present daily at roundabouts and toll booths, is an alliance of different fractions of dominated classes. The biggest groups are manual workers and low-grade white collar workers, but there are large numbers of retired people, self-employed and small business owners. This mix will tend to encourage a view of the government and the multinationals as the sole enemies rather than the capitalist class as a whole. This is no doubt why the demand for a big rise in the minimum wage (not easily supported by small business owners, and a matter of indifference for many self-employed) has not become the central focus. Instead, demands that the government listen, that ministers be paid less and, in particular, that citizen-called referendums be made possible by a change in the constitution, are being raised. The restoration of the wealth tax Macron recently abolished is also among the most often heard of the demands.
To bring Macron down, widespread strike action will be necessary. Alliances between the Yellow Vests and left trade unions exist in several towns, but the class mix makes this harder. And the high school student strikes which blockaded dozens of schools at the end of December do not seem to have started up again in January.
There are signs that this could change. A Yellow Vest meeting in Toulouse called for a general strike last week, and organised a public meeting with trade unionists. Yellow Vests in Montpellier, Toulouse, Lille and Narbonne are following the same strategy, and there is talk of a national meeting of delegates from Yellow Vest groups. Joint leaflets have been produced with left unions in some towns, and teachers’ unions are calling for their members to join the Yellow Vest actions.
Macron’s strategy
Macron’s response to humiliation, after his minor but real concessions in December, has been to hold firm and hope the movement dies off. Meanwhile, he is ensuring that police violence is at its highest point for decades. A spokesperson for one of the police trade unions confirmed that government orders were the reason that rubber bullets were being aimed at the heads of demonstrators (even though this is, in principle, illegal). 
Medics and journalists have been targeted by police thugs, and one 83-year-old vicar lost two teeth to a police baton. At least 82 people have been seriously injured. Twelve demonstrators have lost eyes, four have lost hands and an elderly Muslim woman died after police fired a tear gas canister at her while she was at her window in her flat (they aimed deliberately according to the victim).
More than 4,500 people have been arrested and kept in police cells since the beginning of the movement, and 216 are in prison. Harsh custodial sentences have been handed out to demonstrators fighting back against police (two years’ jail for allegedly throwing stones and a four-month suspended sentence for shouting “we need a guillotine” at a minister are two examples), whereas police filmed attacking demonstrators or bystanders without provocation have been backed by their superiors. “Nothing will happen to me, I’m a commander”, one violent policeman was filmed saying.
Prime minister Edouard Philippe has announced new laws to deal with “violence at demonstrations”, with more rights for police to keep files on people and ban them from demonstrating. Meanwhile, in a sign of panic among the elite, a former Conservative minister of education, Luc Ferry, called on the police to shoot demonstrators who fight back. “They should use their guns once and for all … we have the fourth largest army in the world and we can’t stop these bastards?”, he squealed.
Otherwise, Macron is hoping that the three-month “Great National Debate” he has announced will help calm the revolt. Polls show 41 percent of the population intend to take part (and since Macron is personally thought to be doing a good job by only 20 percent of the population, one can understand the reasons for his debate). It is a risky tactic. Left wing MPs from the left wing party France Insoumise are mocking the initiative in the media, and the grand debate got off to a limping start, as the person appointed to organise it resigned a few days after her appointment, once she saw that public opinion was shocked at her salary – 15,000 euros a month.
The debate idea is to send ministers out to a series of public forums around the country, and ask town mayors to collect written opinions. But as one minister commented: “Do we really want to go out to community halls and get tarred and feathered? It’s a risk”. Ministerial teams are making lists of “safe towns” to go to. There may not be many – Macron himself can hardly go anywhere without a protest demonstration these days. In addition, a number of local mayors have said they don’t want to be involved in organising the debate: “We don’t want to be associated with failed policies”, they explained.
In any case, the president has announced that the debate will not deal with the major reforms (read attacks) he is planning. Most of his own ministers think the “reforms” should be delayed, but he is not listening. Already from 1 January, a new policy forcing unemployed people to take practically any job available is being implemented, and the big project of the year is to reorganise retirement pensions so that public sector workers in particular receive far less at the end of their working lives. Not far behind are attacks on students: it has already been announced that students from abroad will pay 10 times higher enrolment fees next year, and Macron hopes to extend this attack to all students later (at present enrolment fees are around 300 euros a year).
Fascists
The danger of the far right is ever present. Two months ago, a number of left commentators mistakenly denounced the Yellow Vest movement as being close to the National Front. This is not the case, and attempts by fascist activists to push immigration to the front of the debates have failed miserably. Recent mass meetings in Lyon and Toulouse voted for very left wing demands: a free health service, nationalisation of the motorways and reduced taxes for retired people. Fascists have been physically chased off several demonstrations. Nevertheless, the far right and particularly far right leader Marine Le Pen are hoping to profit from the crisis.
This is not straight forward for them: the fascists will not support a rise in the minimum wage and cannot wholeheartedly condemn police violence, since their support among police officers and small business owners is high. But Marine Le Pen, concentrating on the anti-politician atmosphere in the movement, has called for a reduction in the number of MPs in parliament and is supporting the demand for citizens’ referendums. Polls show that voting intentions for Le Pen for the upcoming European elections are rising, no doubt largely from “law and order” types.
Unions
The fragility of the government means that this is an excellent moment to launch a strike movement against neoliberal attacks. The national union leaderships are determined that this should not happen. The joint statement of all the larger confederations in December refused to express support for the Yellow Vests, or to condemn police violence, and concentrated on telling the government that they were ready to negotiate. Laurent Berger, general secretary of one major union federation, the Democratic Confederation of Labour, went much further last week, declaring that the Yellow Vests were threatening to bring totalitarianism to the country!
Even the leadership of the General Confederation of Labour, the most radical of the large confederations, is refusing to come out decisively in support of the Yellow Vest movement, although they have also decided to have nothing to do with the “Great National Debate”.
Regional and local unions often support the movement actively and are more and more calling on people to join the uprising. But there is, sadly, no widely recognised alternative leadership to the official one. In several sectors the situation is worsened by a tradition of more radical workers forming separate, very left wing unions, often cut off from wider influence because of this.
The radical left
Left organisations have been working on how to intervene in this novel kind of movement. There are practically no open interventions on the demonstrations – no leafleting or bookstalls, no placards or banners from parties or campaigning organisations. At times, this has been because some demonstrations resembled riots, but even now that the demonstrations are often calmer, this has not changed. In the meetings held in many towns, left political activists are very much involved, but mostly the political intervention is separated out – the declarations appear on TV, on websites, in leaflets separate from the moments of Yellow Vest agitation etc. This is because the left organisations respect the “non-partisan” atmosphere of the movement, which issues partly from its class nature mentioned above.
On 12 January, “Act Nine” was far bigger than “Act Eight” a week earlier. A dozen metro stations were closed in Paris and dynamic demonstrations were held in Lille, Marseille Toulouse, Saint Brieux, Rouen and elsewhere. Macron has many a headache coming. The further the movement can pressure him, the better it will be for all workers, and throwing Macron out is possible. The “Great National Debate” will be launched by a “letter to the French people”, which Macron’s stooges are composing as I write. Meanwhile, Macron supporters are organising an anti-Yellow Vest demonstration on 27 January.

Macron, Yellow Vests and the class struggle in France

Act Five for the popular Yellow Vest revolt against poverty in France came on 15 December – but it was not the finale. The movement remains vibrant and determined, especially in big southern towns such as Toulouse and Bordeaux. 
Its effects are considerable, with pre-Christmas commerce heavily hit, privatised motorway companies losing tens of millions of euros, and images of burning cars and smashed bank windows on the Champs Elysees tarnishing president Emmanuel Macron’s image as 21st century European capitalism’s blue-eyed boy.
Christmas trees have been put up on several Yellow Vest-held roundabouts and motorway toll booths, symbolising that protesters are not giving up. At some roadblocks, the movement collects for food banks; at others they set up mock guillotines. One of Macron’s MPs turned up for work the other day to find her offices had been repainted bright yellow.
New initiatives are to be noted every day. A picket of Monsanto offices, another at the home of the chair of the main bosses’ organisation, the the Movement of the Enterprises of France, and a blockade of a wholesale food market at Rungis, outside Paris, are just three examples. When Yellow Vests blockaded the tax office at Figeac, some workers came out on strike to support them.
In several places (such as Toulouse or Clermont-Ferrand), large general meetings are for the first time being set up to debate demands. People speaking on behalf of parties or unions are often not welcome, but commentators who had believed exaggerations about the influence of the far right were surprised to see, in Toulouse, there were no racist demands being debated. In Clermont, the one anti-migrant demand was shouted down. Of the 30 or so different slogans I saw on vests and placards in Paris on 15 December, none mentioned immigration. 
Police interventions against roadblocks are rising to dozens every day, but the Yellow Vests cleared out sometimes come back the following day, some town mayors support them and anger remains high (several motorway toll booths have been burned down this week). There are still a couple of hundred roadblocks active.
Macron’s concessions
After Act Four and the high school students’ mobilisation, Macron went on national television on 10 December. He pretended to apologise for his attitude and made further concessions (after having cancelled fuel tax rises the previous week). The concessions are small but tremendously important, having broken his image as the Thatcherite Iron Kid. He is desperately hoping that these minor retreats, and the Christmas break, will be enough to halt the movement.
The first concession was more money for workers on the minimum wage. Obviously, this money is useful, but the mechanics of the proposal are rotten through and through. Instead of raising the minimum wage, which acts as a benchmark for many other wages, Macron announced an increase in a government top-up paid to low income workers. This means it costs nothing to the employers (and the suggestion was that public service cuts would pay for it). 
The increase, around 100 euros, was understood to include already-planned increases. However, the following day (when it had become clear that the Yellow Vests were unimpressed) a new statement said that it would be on top of what was already planned, a small gain of about 20 euros. The government also scrambled to make sure the increase would apply in just a few weeks’ time, after leaked information suggested it would take six months.
The second concession was the cancellation of a new tax on pensioners whose household income is under 2,000 euros.
Third was the reintroduction of a scheme that originated under conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy: overtime hours will no longer be subject to income tax. This would put money in the pockets of up to a third of French workers, but most people do not get overtime and the high unemployment rate means that there is less, not more, overtime being worked.
Fourth, Macron announced that the government would encourage employers “able to” to pay an end of year bonus to employees. This bonus will be tax free if it is under 1,000 euros. Invited to cocktails at the Elysee Palace, several large employers including Total, Orange and Publicis said they would pay such a bonus. According to a left news magazine, their mission was “saving private Macron”.
In Macron’s televised speech, there was ominous dog whistling. He urged a “national debate” on issues including “the deep identity” of the French, immigration and threats to secularism. Macron has been known to use considerably less Islamophobia and racism than other right wing leaders. He had said last July, for example: “The Republic has no reason to have any difficulties with Islam” and he criticised militant secularism. But it seems the possibility of diverting attention to scapegoats was too tempting this time. The “national debate”, announced a few days later, omitted the question of immigration, but these mentions may be dark signs for the future.
Macron is scared – there is no doubt about it. He and his friends are frantically leafing through copies of Neoliberal Government for Dummies, looking for ideas. Suddenly, the railway and Paris Metro nationalised companies and the Post office declared a Christmas bonus of a couple of hundred euros to all of their 300,000 employees. One of Macron’s ministers announced that the government will levy a new tax on the internet giants – Google, Facebook Amazon etc. – that have been denounced by Yellow Vests for avoiding tax. And 400 million euros for hospitals, which had been bureaucratically blocked for five years, suddenly became available.
Propaganda
When, on 11 December, there was a tragic shooting incident in Strasbourg, the right jumped on the opportunity to close down the movement. News channels and “concerned” ministers insisted that “reasonable yellow vests” were calling to stop the demonstrations; that the heroic police were exhausted and needed to concentrate on terrorism. There was also a continuing attempt to discredit the radical left by bundling them in with the fascists. 
“Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left wing La France Insoumise (FI – Unbowed France), and far right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen are calling for more violent demonstrations” was last week’s theme song. Current affairs shows on all channels invited the best dressed and wittiest Nazis in the country to speak about the movement. Viewers are supposed to conclude that Macron is the only alternative to fascism.
Meanwhile, police violence increased. Several protesters have lost an eye from rubber bullets. Amnesty International has denounced police violence as excessive, counting more than 1,500 injured, 47 gravely so.
The union leaders
One advantage of a movement without a recognised leadership is that it cannot be closed down from above in return for minor but complicated concessions. The role of the union heads in recent weeks has generally been dreadful, whereas overwhelming public support for the movement had made a call for a general strike plausible. 
First, on 6 December, a joint declaration by all the union confederations except one declared they wanted to negotiate with the government. The statement did not even denounce police violence, much less call for building the Yellow Vest movement. Then, under pressure from below, the biggest left federation, the General Confederation of Labour, called for strike action on 14 December. But the call was half-hearted and routine, and hardly mentioned the Yellow Vest movement. This helped to ensure that the strikes were relatively weak. 
In addition, many workers, demoralised after massive strikes last Spring failed in their objectives, are hoping that the Yellow Vests will sort out the problem without mass strikes being necessary, and so are only showing passive support. But strikes have been sparked off this week, (in commerce, for example), some demanding a Christmas bonus like the one agreed by the big companies.
The student mobilisations were strong but have not yet managed to grow and affect a majority of institutions. After the holidays we will see how much energy is available in this movement. Meanwhile, an additional cause of destabilisation for the government is an incipient movement in the police force demanding more resources and the settling of unpaid overtime. On 19 December, police on passport control held a go-slow and some police stations closed. This led to a wage rise of 150 euros for the police within 12 hours!
The left
In parliament, Mélenchon demanded a minute of silence for those Yellow Vests who have died (the latest was run down by a lorry forcing a road block). The government refused to participate in this mark of respect. The France Insoumise MPs have been very impressive, defending the movement on TV and on the ground. But the reformist FI conception of the division of labour between trade unions and political parties means that Mélenchon will not call for a general strike. The far less influential New Anticapitalist Party calls for one but remains marginal – though its activists work along FI activists in many Yellow Vest groups.
Changing demands 
This week, one particular demand of the Yellow Vests hit the headlines. This is for a constitutional change allowing referendums to be called by a sufficient number of citizens petitioning for one. Such referendums might abrogate a law or sack a member of parliament, for example. 
Constitutional reform has often been important to the French left and this proposal already figured in the program of the FI in last year’s elections. It is an extremely popular demand that reflects distrust in present democratic structures, but it is one question among several others. A big rise in the minimum wage, the reestablishment of the recently abolished wealth tax or Macron’s resignation are all at least as popular. 
There appears to be an attempt in the mainstream media to put the referendum proposal at the centre of the debate. This is not good for the left because it is the kind of question which can be buried in a promise to set up a commission to investigate the many referendums that might improve democracy. “Bring the wealth tax back now” and “More money on wages and pensions” are better demands to prioritise, since they are harder to wriggle out of.
One reason the referendum demand is popular among Yellow Vests is because it appears to be “neither left wing nor right wing” and so can allow people to avoid the more difficult political questions. It is far from clear that this demand will remain central, though Macron’s ministers are making noises that they would be open to discussion about it. Other proposals abound. Some have suggested setting up a Yellow Vest slate to stand in the European elections next May. 
The future for Macron
News magazines are headlining: “Is Macron finished”? His popularity ratings are around 23 percent, down from 50 percent at the beginning of the year despite his comfortable majority in parliament. Worried right wing commentators are saying that his position is so weak that he may not be able to push through the vicious attack on retirement pensions he was planning. Meanwhile, his jerry-built party is multiplying blunders. Its leader explained this week that the problem was that the party had been too subtle and too intelligent!
The ruling class has been making extreme efforts to support Macron because previous neoliberals Sarkozy (from the right) and Hollande (from the left) didn’t weaken workers’ positions half as much as the capitalists wanted, and Macron, they often felt, was their last card. But, though several huge gifts for the rich are going through parliament Macron’s popularity has fallen below 30 percent even among business owners.
No one can say how far the Yellow Vest movement will go in the coming weeks, but we could be in for many more surprises. Poverty among workers is now at the centre of public debate. And tens of thousands of previously unmobilised working class people have discovered radical collective action; this is a step forward.
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John Mullen is a member of the anti-capitalist network Ensemble, in the Paris area, and a supporter of the France Insoumise.

Ghosts of Christmas present: Macron’s ongoing Yellow Vest nightmare

It is hard to count demonstrators spread out across thousands of mobilisations, but it seems that over half a million people were involved in “Act Four” of the Yellow Vest mobilisation in France on Saturday 8 December. In Bordeaux, a huge joint demonstration between university students and Yellow Vests chanted: “Students and Yellow Vests, same Macron, same struggle!” In Toulouse, Lyon, Saint Etienne, Marseilles, Dieppe and dozens of other towns many thousands marched. Even in smaller places like Albi or Auch there was a fine Yellow Vests demonstration.
A lively picket was organised in front of the factory in Sarthe which makes tear gas grenades. At Saint-Avold in the East of France a replica of a guillotine was placed at a major roundabout. A few days earlier in the port of Saint Nazaire in Brittany, demonstrators repainted the banks of the town in bright yellow, while a cake shop owner in the South started selling special lemon eclairs in the form of a Yellow Vest protester! 
A people’s movement like this can never stand still: it has to keep rising or it will quickly decline. People make sacrifices to go out and occupy the roundabouts and motorway toll booths, they find the time and money to go to Paris or to the regional capital for the Saturday demonstration, and they live the stressful life of activism. But they want results. Although the togetherness and the dignity of resistance are important to people, unless some progress is seen each week, the temptation to go home, watch TV and repaint your bathroom instead will tend to win out.
A rising movement
This last week, there was none of that – there has been tremendous progress. First, hundreds of high schools have been blockaded by the students, and demonstrations organised in Paris, Lille, Marseilles and elsewhere. This new mobilisation is inspired by the Yellow Vests, but based on specific demands of the young people – against recent reforms making it harder to get into university, and against the government decision to make foreign students pay around 3,000 euros a year tuition fees (as against around 300 at the moment).
In several universities – Rennes Toulouse and Paris Nanterre among others – mass meetings of thousands have voted to blockade their universities and join the Yellow Vest movement. Dozens of motorway toll booths are still occupied by Yellow Vests letting cars through free, and road blocks are functioning at hypermarkets and roundabouts: serious effects on weekend commerce are visible. At least one hypermarket has closed due to lack of supplies.
Now, energy strikes have been announced for this week, some teaching unions are calling for strikes, and an influential small farmers movement has called on people to join the revolt. On 8 December, climate marches in many cities (Paris, Amiens, Nantes) were joined by Yellow Vest people, helping to put to rest the lie that Macron’s fuel taxes were somehow green, when in fact he is closing down thousands of kilometres of railway and refuses to make the big oil companies pay their taxes.
In Paris, hospital workers fighting for jobs also joined the Yellow Vests, while ongoing strikes in steel and in oil depots add to the atmosphere of generalised revolt. There are many other developments, but suffice it to say this is still a rising movement.
Macron and his government have responded in three ways: repression, propaganda and concessions. None have been successful: the movement is still on the up and public opinion remains solidly with the Yellow Vests. On 5 December, polls gave 66 percent “support or sympathise” with the movement, against 24 percent “opposed or hostile”. 
A month ago, these figures were 71 percent and 11 percent respectively. In smaller towns, support is stronger; age makes little difference to levels of support, and among manual workers rates of approval are extremely high (78 percent support or sympathise). And this was one of the polls least favourable to our side. Other polls show that 50 percent of the population want Macron to resign. You can feel something in the air. The lady who cleans the stairwell in our block of flats proudly displayed yellow vests on the two seat backs of her car.
Repression, propaganda and minor concessions
After a couple of dozen bank branches and a few shops were smashed up in Paris on 1 December, the government decided to put into action a Project Fear at a level not seen in France these last 35 years. The presidential spokesperson claimed (without any evidence) that a “hard core of several thousand people” were heading for Paris at the weekend “to smash and to kill”. The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, all the high schools in Paris and a number of other institutions were closed for the day. 
The huge department stores stopped work too, costing them tens of millions of euros in pre-Christmas sales. Twelve shiny armoured vehicles were trundled out along with fanfares and serious-faced TV commentators reflected all day long on “how the worst can be avoided” (although sending in the army was ruled out at the last moment).
The reason for Project Fear was partly so that the more vicious of the police chiefs and police sections understood that, whatever happened, they would be covered by the state power. 
This has had its effect already. Countless videos of teenage demonstrators being thumped, kicked and beaten with batons are circulating on social media. Several high school students have been seriously injured, some permanently disfigured by flashballs or teargas canisters. Young people were kept in the cells for 36 hours because they had scrawled graffiti on walls. 
One anonymous riot policeman told a journalist that for the first time in his career he had received the (illegal) order to aim tear gas grenades directly at demonstrators rather than above their heads. An 80-year-old Arab lady in Marseilles died on the operating table after she was hit by a tear gas grenade while closing her shutters: it seems the police had aimed at the woman deliberately. Two clearly identified photographers from the Le Parisien newspaper were hit with flashballs, and in several big towns, demonstrators were seriously injured. 1,700 people were arrested across France on 8 December.
And then there was that video, which has gone viral, of the dozens of schoolchildren in Mantes-la-Jolie forced to kneel with their hands on their heads, like in a police state. The general reaction among the population was deep shock. Colleagues who never talk politics brought up the subject spontaneously at work. Parents’ organisations are making official complaints and Communist regional councillors and trade unions offered to organise protection for high school student demonstrations. 
Over the last 30 years, police violence against demonstrators in France has been getting worse (as previous generations of high school activists can witness). The present clear intensification is meant to warn us that the state power is ready to go much further in future as its desperate fight to prop up the dictatorship of profit goes on.
Along with Project Fear, the state’s public relations experts, who have been working overtime, have come up with some other wizard wheezes. A small right wing breakaway from the Yellow Vests, which has practically no influence (called the “free Yellow Vests”) is interviewed day and night on the TV news bulletins. Riot police are interviewed anonymously, speaking of how they are terrified to go to the demonstrations and fear for their lives. And some of the media continue to claim that the movement is in the hands of the far right and Macron is the only defence against fascism. 
In fact, as Yellow Vests joined the climate marches on 8 December (notably in Toulouse and Paris) and the demand for a rise in the minimum wage became more prominent, Marine Le Pen’s influence is slowly waning, since she is radically opposed to progressive action on either of these issues. In the Paris area, calls by Black activist organisations to join the Yellow Vest demos (with their own slogans against racist police violence) have also helped clarify the fundamental political nature of the movement.
Macron trying not to back down
Macron really did not want to cancel the fuel tax rise planned for January, because his reputation of never backing down is at the centre of his strategy. Nevertheless, his prime minister, Edouard Philippe announced on 4 December that the rise had been suspended. The decision was universally condemned as far too little far too late, and the very next day, Macron himself decided to announce the rise was scrapped not suspended. The episode was seen as a sign of tension between Macron and Edouard Philippe, and rumours that Macron will fire his prime minister are being heard. The episode of the wealth tax similarly showed confusion. One of Macron’s ministers suggested on Wednesday that a recently abolished wealth tax might be brought back in. Macron corrected her publicly within hours.
Macron is fishing around for other concessions which they can make which will divide the movement without costing too much. A suggestion that employers in the private sector will be encouraged by tax breaks to give a cash bonus of up to 1,000 euros to their workers this year is one idea we are hearing. In officially unrelated areas, concessions are occasionally being found to head off the spread of the movement. Four hundred million euros for hospitals which could not be found for many months was suddenly discovered by Agnès Buzyn, the minister of health.
Union leaders
Though local and regional trade union organisations often support the Yellow Vest movement, national leaderships are worse than contradictory. I am no fan of excessive rhetoric, but it is hard to avoid the word “treacherous” when you speak of last Thursday’s press release, co-signed by all the national trade union confederations except one.
It denounced the violence of demonstrators, but did not mention police violence. It declared that the unions were keen to negotiate at any time with the government, and it neither called on people to join the Yellow Vest protests nor expressed wishes for their success. Since this movement does not have an established leadership, it is hard for professional negotiators to try to close the movement down with complex but minor concessions (as often happens with strike waves), but the trade union bureaucracy seems desperate for a chance to do so.
In Thursday’s statement, the dreadful role of the trade union bureaucracy is laid out in all its horror. National trade union leaders in France earn only a fraction of the bloated salaries of British trade union leaders, but their position as professional negotiators still leads them to aim at calming any revolt. The seriousness of the crisis and the mass support for the movement would have justified a call for a one-day general strike – there would have been nothing utopian about such a call – and the union leaders’ action shows the dire need for alternative leadership within the working class.
Left trade union confederations like the powerful CGT, however, have contradictory positions. As well as signing the joint statement, the national CGT leadership brought out another press release two hours later denouncing police violence and calling for a large rise in the minimum wage, and their leader Philippe Martinez recently declared that the CGT’s job was to get everyone out on strike. Locally, trade unions have offered to organise protection for yellow vest demos against the police, and regional federations of the CGT have often taken a very radical line. The CGT has called for strike action nationally for Friday 14 December.
The radical left
Radical and anti-capitalist left organisations have become more fully involved this week. In parliament, Mélenchon, president of the France Insoumise group of MPs, made an impressive speech praising the Yellow Vest movement and predicting that the present government is on its way out. He is worth quoting:
“These are happy days we are living through, because at last France is in general rebellion against an unjust order which has survived for far too long. We have millions of people whom life had made invisible, in metropolitan France and in the overseas territories, and now these millions, the people, are moving onto the stage of the History of France. As an irony of history, this yellow vest has become in a way the new Phrygian bonnet of the French, who are abandoning resignation and isolation, who are abandoning the idea of continuing with harsh suffering in dignified silence.”
Act five
It is already a fine victory for our side that a mass of previously unpoliticised people have moved into action, and that a new generation of high school students have become involved in a struggle to change their lives. These are experiences which will help form the political and psychological forces which will be needed in future battles.
Understandably, some commentators have got a little carried away. France is not on the edge of a revolutionary situation or of a civil war. But the movement is on the rise, and very determined. One Parisian riot policeman who was interviewed complained “people used to be afraid of us, but they aren’t any more. They’re aiming at us, because we’re symbols of the state”. 
It is crucial that we make the state’s leaders regret what was done to the schoolkids at Mantes-la-Jolie, and if we do, there is plenty of hope for radical social change.

The Yellow Vest movement strengthens in France

The 7 May second round of the French presidential elections is between Emmanuel Macron, a neoliberal who has already declared his intentions to continue tearing up labour protection laws, and Marine Le Pen, leader of the fascist National Front (FN).
It is hardly an envious situation for anti-capitalists, even if the historic 23 April first round vote (19.6 percent) for the radical left program of Jean-Luc Mélenchon brightened the picture somewhat.
A fierce public image battle has been raging between the two candidates. Macron, who has never been active against fascism, has been visiting holocaust memorial sites. Le Pen, whose voting record in the European parliament shows how little she cares about workers, is spending her time at factory gates. She has also feigned interest in the environment and in women’s rights.
Le Pen pulled off a major tactical victory a few days ago by forming an alliance with a small right wing party, Debout la France (Stand up, France!). This group was founded in 2008, has 15,000 members and works under the slogan “Against the system and against extremism”. Its leader, Nicolas Dupont Aignan, received 4.7 percent of the vote on 23 April. Le Pen has announced that he will become prime minister if she wins the presidency. She hopes to win over support from the mainstream right.
The response of the left
Macron has been a key architect of austerity and attacks on the working classes, and he is promising much more of the same (proposing, for example, that unemployed people not be entitled to entitlements if they have refused two job offers).
The Socialist Party, the Greens and the Communist Party have all called for a vote for him, as have several feminist and anti-racist bodies. The Communist Party says that, should Macron win, it will nevertheless fight his policies every step of the way. My own organisation, Ensemble, has also called for a Macron vote (I do not agree with it on this). The far left New Anticapitalist Party, which polled 1.1 percent in the presidential election, released a statement saying it “understood” those who would vote Macron, but were not calling for people to do so.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose “Insubordinate France” election campaign was tremendously successful and led the biggest and most enthusiastic rallies on the left for years, says that no one should vote for Le Pen, but has declined to say whether people should vote Macron or abstain. A call to vote Macron would be unacceptable to a large part of his electoral base; a call for an abstention would be unacceptable to another part.
Mélenchon’s position has been met with an avalanche of slander in the media (backed by some left activists) claiming that he is an ally of the fascists. The French elite is far more afraid of Mélenchon’s 19 percent of the vote than they are of Marine Le Pen’s 21 percent. Even Macron seems to spend as much time attacking Mélenchon as he does attacking Le Pen, and he doesn’t use the word “fascist” to characterise his FN opponent.
In reality, Mélenchon’s supporters are among the most effective anti-fascists. His radical left campaign drew voters away from the FN in a way that the “austerity as usual” candidates could not. Le Pen was at 27 percent in the polls in February and finished at 21 percent. This was largely due to the dynamic of Mélenchon’s campaign. He won more young people and more unemployed voters than the fascists. Mélenchon is the only political leader who had the courage to challenge Le Pen in her own constituency a few years back. And he won a court case when she sued him for calling her a fascist.
Nevertheless, during a recent appearance on prime time television, Mélenchon put all the emphasis on legislative elections in June and did not make a priority of building anti-fascist demonstrations in the lead-up to this weekend’s vote. His electoralist orientation was clear.
Mass action against Le Pen
On 1 May, more than 200,000 people took to the streets to defend working class interests against fascism and neoliberalism. The mobilisations took place in hundreds of towns across the country. Many people who rarely demonstrate joined in to show their hatred of Le Pen. The mobilisation, however, was much smaller than the last time the fascists made the second round. In 2002, when Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie faced Jacques Chirac, the route of the Paris march was so packed that the demonstration could not move from its starting point for six hours.
Other anti-fascist initiatives have occurred this week. In one town, the FN representative was chased from a holocaust memorial ceremony. Anti-fascist lawyers and anti-fascist workers have led protests and launched petitions, as have Catholic workers’ groups and others. Over recent weeks, counter-demonstrations to FN meetings have been held in a number of towns. A series of high school students’ demonstrations were held during the last week under the slogan, “Neither Macron nor Le Pen”. This was not the best of slogans – it can be read as attacking those who will reluctantly vote Macron. “No votes for the fascists !” would have been better. But the most important thing is that the young people mobilised.
Various trade unions, nationally or regionally, published leaflets and press releases to build the May Day demonstration. Some of the union declarations call for a vote for Macron while insisting that he will remain an enemy. “No votes for Le Pen, no honeymoon for Macron” is the headline of one of them. Others, such as the national confederation of Education Unions, have a compromise slogan, which I think is best: “No votes for Le Pen”. The General Confederation of Labour declared, “Not a single vote should go to the far right candidate” without calling to vote Macron.
The reasons for the limited mobilisation this week compared with 2002 are several. First, Marine Le Pen’s campaign to “detoxify” the FN and persuade the world that it is not a fascist force has had considerable success. Even among people who are opposed to her ideas, many do not consider her a fascist. And of the 11 candidates in the first round of the presidentials, hardly anyone called her a fascist. Second, the FN is now treated in the media as a friendly, mainstream party.
Their spokespeople are asked to comment on everyday events, and are invited on chat shows; the party’s anti-Semitism and racism are rarely challenged on screen. Third, the favourite themes of the FN – reasons to hate Muslims and immigrants, and the need for law and order and states of emergency – have become so common in mainstream parties and on television that the FN automatically seems less extreme. Last year, for example, mainstream right wing mayors passed bylaws banning Muslim women from wearing full body swimsuits on the beaches, and the Socialist Party prime minister applauded the bans.
Time to organise
Le Pen will likely lose the runoff election. However, she will get her largest ever vote, and her organisation will be emboldened and ever more of a grave danger for working people. The French working class is paying the price today for two major weaknesses of the French left.
The first is the lack of significant active opposition to Islamophobia from the left or the far left, which has allowed it to become a key manner of attracting people to voting for the FN. The second is the lack of broad-based, permanent, national campaigning organisations to fight fascism. We need week-in, week-out anti-fascist education all year round, not two weeks of mass anti-fascism every 15 years.
The reason for their absence is confusion about fascism. It is widely-held on the French left that building an alternative to austerity and poverty is the “only real” solution to the problem of workers voting for fascism. This contains a grain of truth, but it misses the crucial necessity of preventing the fascists from holding meetings, demonstrations and other activities that build their ranks. The result is that more than 50,000 marched in Paris while Le Pen held a mass meeting of 5,000 at practically the same time 15 miles away without even a counter-demonstration in front of the venue!
The current political earthquake will continue through the June legislative elections. Further sections of the mainstream right will ally with the fascists (something they have avoided doing for 20 years). Socialist Party MPs will scramble to form new alliances and organisations, and the radical left will work to build on its excellent result last week to create a powerful anti-austerity left force. Hopefully, such a force will learn to be active outside parliament as well as inside.

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