A political earthquake (International Viewpoint 27.4.02)
Francois Duval
The results of the first round of the French presidential election have provoked a real trauma, particularly among popular layers and traditional left supporters. The constitutional rules for this election mean that only the two candidates who top the poll go through to the second round. This means that the final election will be a run off between Jacques Chirac, the outgoing president a particularly corrupt rightwing president and Jean-Marie Le Pen, representative of the racist and fascist far right. Lionel Jospin, the outgoing prime minister and Socialist Party candidate got a few hundred thousand votes less than Le Pen. He is thus eliminated from the second round.
Bankruptcy of the liberal left
This unexpected situation should not hide some other lessons of the 21st April election. First of all, a high rate of abstention (27.85%), the highest since the introduction of the direct elections for the president. Then the collapse of the Communist Party, which has been in the government led by Jospin for the last 5 years: it got just 3.7% of the vote. A historic phenomenon: it was overtaken by two revolutionary far left candidates. Arlette Laguiller for Lutte Ouvrière got 5.72% of the vote and Olivier Besancenot, candidate of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR-French section of the Fourth International) got 4.3%, that is 1.2 million votes.
Popular abstentionism, like the collapse of the parties which had been in government (with the notable exception of the Greens who succeeded in bringing out their differences with social-democracy) bear witness to a widespread phenomenon. There is a clear rejection of the policies of austerity and social injustice that have been implemented over the last few years and the parties that implemented them are discredited. Several opinion polls published during the campaign showed that three quarters of the electorate had difficulty in telling the difference between the political programmes of Chirac and Jospin. The European Summit in Barcelona a few weeks before the election only deepened this inability to tell the difference. There Chirac and Jospin, in duo, accepted the privatisation of the Electricité de France (a state company which still has the monopoly on the supply of electricity), pushing back the retirement age by five years, and a commitment to reduce the public deficit which means budgetary austerity in the years to come.
This confusion, which was already very strong on social and economic questions, worsened with the eruption into the election campaign of the “law and order” or “insecurity” question. Chirac made it his central theme in order to highlight his difference with the right, supposedly more “laxist”, at least so he thought. Because most of the candidates, right and left, rushed onto this slippery slope. Chevènement was not slow to up the stakes, But very rapidly Jospin followed him. In fact during the campaign only Noel Mamère, the Greens’ candidate, and above all Olivier Besancenot, refused to give in to this pressure and to abandon the defence of democratic freedoms or to criminalise young people. What was the result? A huge wave of law and order demagogy under the slogan “zero tolerance”, young people from the underprivileged suburbs and in particular young people of immigrant descent being implicitly or explicitly held responsible. A further outcome was that Le Pen whose linking of law and order to immigration has been his stock in trade for thirty years only had to pick up the winnings.
The elimination of the parliamentary left from the second round of the presidential election, like the strengthening of the racist far right, are obviously a defeat for the French workers’ movement. They will obviously encourage wide-spread soul-searching and a discussion on future perspective for the whole left: the parliamentary left parties, trade unions, associations but also the radical left, How did we get here? How can we prepare the fightback, on a political and social level? How can we regain ground?
The fabulous campaign of Olivier Besancenot
These elections also showed that faced with failure of the free-market left, another left exists, not only in the social movements but also in the electoral arena. Amd that is the starting point for rebuilding. This presidential election also showed that, in terms of political organisations, the radical left, the non-free-market left, the left that defends the interests of workers and different layers of oppressed in society, is mainly two organisations, Lutte Ouvrière and the LCR.
From the beginning the LCR was conscious of this situation and the responsibilities of activists who identify with a revolutionary perspective. This is why the LCR proposed to Lutte Ouvrière a political agreement for joint candidates in the presidential and parliamentary elections, in order to give the strongest possible expression to popular layers breaking with the governmental left. Naturally this not a question of denying the major differences that exist between the LCR and LO but to make it possible for them to be expressed in in a common framework which would not harm the political struggle on some major questions which are common to the revolutionary left organisations and which clearly differentiate them from the free-market left. This had been achieved in the European elections of 1999 where a joint LO-LCR list made possible the election of five revolutionary MEPs.
Conscious of the popularity of Arlette Laguiller, the traditional candidate of Lutte Ouvrière, the LCR proposed that Arlette be the joint candidate. Lutte Ouvrière having refused this proposal and made a sectarian choice without even agreeing to a discussion, a national conference of the LCR, in June 2001, decided to present one of its own leaders, Olivier Besancenot a 27-year old postal worker, and trade-union and global justice activist. The goal was to have a candidate who would put forward an action programme of urgent demands against the bosses’ offensive which is extended by “pluralist left” government and the European Union. But also a candidate who, like the members of the LCR, is a real activist of the mobilisations and demonstrations against capitalist globalisation, unlike Lutte Ouvrière. For this organisation these demonstrations are simply diversion from the “real” anti-capitalist struggle. A candidate who, lastly, would bring to the centre of the political stage the struggle against all forms of exploitation of oppression and of discrimination created and strengthened by capitalism, particularly of young people, women and immigrants. Another goal was to propose the building of a new anti-capitalist party, to bring together not only revolutionaries but all those who reject the barbarity of capitalism, socialist communists or ecologists who no longer who identify with the governmental left and above all the tens of thousands of activists from the trade-unions and associations who today no longer have any party political reference point, after the collapse of the Communist Party and the betrayals of the Socialist Party.
Our goal in choosing Olivier Besancenot was also to bring a new element into political life, by making it possible for millions of people to vote at last for someone who is not a professional politician, but for someone like themselves, a wage worker who has the same pay slip as they do, who, once the elections were over, would find himself like them…at work. It was also a question of speaking to young people, presenting somebody unknown but in step with their struggles, whether the mobilisations against capitalist globalisation or against casualised labour which are growing in France today in big retail firms such as the FNAC book and record shop chain or MacDonald’s. This wager was in large part successful. It was among the youngest electors that Olivier got his best scores (13.9% of 18-24 year olds, and 6.3% of 25-34 year olds according to certain breakdowns).
This campaign, waged under the slogan “Our lives are worth more than their profits” enabled the LCR to speak to a far wider audience than usual. In a few months of campaigning the European members of parliament, Alain Krivine and Roseline Vacchetta, and above all Olivier Besancenot spoke at a hundred public meetings attended by more than 25,000 people, mostly workers and young people. We had not seen this for more than thirty years! In the last three weeks, after the 500 sponsorships were deposited and Olivier was at last invited by the major television channels, this unknown candidate made a breakthrough. The numbers attending meetings reached record levels, hundreds of messages of support and encouragement and asking to join the LCR were received every day. This increased after the results of the first round were announced.
The electoral success has obviously changed the LCR’s relationship with the workers’ movement, the social movements and with the other organisations on the left and far left. First effect: LO has agreed to meet the LCR to discuss the possibility of an electoral agreement for the parliamentary elections in June. It is too early to know if the outconme will be positive. But the mere fact that there will be such a meeting shows that something has changed on the far left.
Building a leftwing of the left
The current situation, shaped by the crisis of the official left, the threat of the far right and the rise of the far left, confers new responsibilities on revolutionaries. First of all we must be the spearhead of the mobilisation against the far right, which has been growing notably among young people since the 21st April. The LCR has been very present in these demonstrations. Then we have to prepare the conditions for a massive response to the offensive which is in preparation, whoever is going to constitute the next parliamentary majority, against social security, public services and democratic rights, particularly for immigrants. Then we must develop a perspective for emerging from this unprecedented crisis, a perspective which gives a new hope to a traumatised workers’ movement.
Moving towards a new party capable of responding, refounding a fighting left, rehabilitating the project of revolutionary transformation of society, will not be easy to do. The result of the far left in general and the LCR’s candidate in particular do not in themselves resolve this problem. But it makes the conditions a lot more favourable than in the past. This is the task the LCR sets itself in the period to come.
