By La Commune
They all want to save the Fifth Republic and muzzle the working class! The political parties and the central trade unions are now uniting to let Macron rule as he pleases and implement his worst reforms, like the retirement reform extending the retirement age to 65… This, in exchange for a few seats in the Assembly[1] and the financing of their parties, for some of them in agony. And the security for the unions of being recognized in their role as negotiators (with the advantages that this implies) by the new Prime Minister, whose firmness they criticize while praising her great capacity for dialogue!
A brief look back at the last few months, which have been particularly eloquent in terms of the recomposition/decomposition of the political life of the parties…
Presidential elecciones: abstention, fuel of the class struggle.
Presidential, no suspense… We wrote it before the results of this election: for us, Macron’s re-election was obvious.
Macron, the badly elected
In fact, differentiating ourselves from the sirens once again raising the specter of Marine Le Pen’s presidential election and fascism at our doorstep, we foresaw Macron’s re-election, given the distressing context of Covid and the war in Ukraine that would inevitably benefit the incumbent president. Thanks to the war in Ukraine and his presidency of the European Union, Macron indeed benefited from the flag effect but also from the national union effect: all parties united behind the army chief. Our prognosis was also that of foreign journalists who, far from the hysteria of television journalists and intellectuals or others, such as the newspaper The Economist, judged Macron’s re-election as certain.
But elected does not mean well elected… Far from it. Macron was elected in the ballotage of the presidential election with only 38.5% of the voters of the electoral roll. He is thus the second worst elected president of the Fifth Republic, only behind Georges Pompidou in June 1969, one year after May 1968, two months after the victory of the No in the referendum and the resignation of De Gaulle, with Duclos of the French Communist Party (PCF) having called for abstention: 37.5%! That says a lot about the current climate!
Apart from De Gaulle, elected by indirect universal suffrage in December 1958 (76.3% of the electors) and Chirac in 2002 in the first duel with the National Front (62% of the voters of the roll), all the others were badly elected and do not exceed 45.3% of the voters of the roll since 1965, which shows the gradual loss of confidence of the candidates for the government of the Fifth Republic, several approaching Macron’s scores in 2022: Chirac in 1995 (against Jospin) 39.4% of the roll, Hollande in 2012 (against Sarkozy) 39.1% of the roll.
In fact, the Macron-La Republique En Marche (LaREM) dynamic has been in free fall since the 2017 elections, be it the 2019 European elections, the 2020 municipal elections (he did not win in any major city) and the 2021 regional elections. If Macron’s party won the votes of the Socialist Party (PS) and The Republicans (LR) in 2017, between the ballotage of that year and that of 2022 it lost almost two million voters, going from 20,700,000 to 18,770,000 even if the electoral roll increased by one million!
RN and Reconquista share LR’s corpse
The results of the first round of the presidential election exceed expectations: Valérie Pécresse drags LR down with 3.4% of the electoral roll.
If LaREM caused the explosion in 2017 by hunting politicians (the best known, Edouard Philippe, Franck Riester, Bruno Le Maire, Gérald Darmanin, Sébastien Lecornu), if it continued the massacre between 2017 and 2022 by gathering several opportunists such as Thierry Solère or Christian Estrosi, with a special harvest in the presidential (Renault Muselier, Eric Woerth and the youngest Damien Abad, accused of rape to whom the Borne government has just offered a ministry), it should be noted that between 2017 and 2022 only a part of LR voters redirected their vote to LaREM. The increase of one million voters for LaREM between the first round of 2017 and that of 2022 (from 8,660,000 to 9,780,000) explains only partly the fall of 5.5 million LR voters in those same instances (from 7,213,000 to 1,679,000).
It seems that it is two other formations that recovered most of the votes lost by LR: Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and Zemmour’s Reconquista. The increase between 2017 and 2022 in the votes of the extreme right comes from a change in the vote of LR voters: if RN adds 10,640,000 votes in the ballotage of 2017 and 13,290,000 votes in that of 2022, it is the right-wingization of LR voters that should be criticized and not the adhesion of the working class to right-wing ideas! Just look at the results of RN in Seine-Saint-Denis, where the poorest population of metropolitan France lives: it is the abstention that is dominant, the RN vote is less important there than in any small town where the notables vote under the influence of anti-worker and anti-immigrant TV propaganda.
LFI, last light of the dead star of the PS
The PS is in agony… Anne Hidalgo collected only a historic score: 1.26% of the electoral roll. In 2017, Macron and his LaREM party plundered and torpedoed the PS, hunting down many opportunists from the Hollande government and the National Assembly: Jean-Yves Le Drian, Hollande’s Minister of Defense; Gérard Collomb, senator and mayor of Lyon; Richard Ferrand, deputy; Bertrand Delanoé, former mayor of Paris… not to mention Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who we will talk about the legislative elections because he never fails to come back…. Recently, before these presidential elections and before the announced disaster of Anne Hidalgo, the former ministers Marisol Touraine and Elisabeth Guigou, and the former spokesman Edouardo Rihan-Cypel (PS) called to vote for Macron.
But in 2022, there as in LR, unlike in 2017, the massacre of the PS finally benefits little to LaREM, which proved to have lost votes between 2017 and 2022. The real winner of the fall of the PS is La France Insoumise (LFI). In the first round of these presidential elections, it took control of some of the 2,290,000 Socialist voters from the first round of the 2017 presidential elections: only 616,000 votes left for the PS now! This does not represent a very significant increase for LFI, which only grows by 1% its percentage of voters of the electoral roll (from 14.8% to 15.8%). Still, it is 1.26% more than the PS!
This is what this eternal politician, former PS bureaucrat who called to vote in 1992 for the Maastricht Treaty, Mitterrandist, Jospin’s Minister of Professional Education (2000-2002), Socialist senator (2004-2010) always wanted: to take revenge on the PS, where he never managed to impose himself. Leader of the small Left Party that he created in February 2009 after leaving the PS, thanks to the rappings operated by the Left Front and the Popular Union (two successive fronts of second-hand electoral regrouping), he became the self-proclaimed leader of the main governmental left party!
Even so, adding up all the forces of the governmental left (LFI, PS, PCF and Greens), we get only 22.1% of the electoral roll, far from the total score of the first round of the 2012 presidential election (33.9%) and barely above that of 2017 (19.6%).
NPA, PCF and POI, soluble in LFI
A look at thirteen years of Mélenchon’s electoral maneuvers. When the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), after the 2007 presidential election in which Besancenot took 1,500. 000 votes, or 3.36% of the electoral roll (to recall, in 2002, the joint score of the LCR and Lucha Obrera -LO- reached 6.9%), decided to create a broad regrouping, the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) and organized itself in congresses and committees in 2008 to found it from February 6 to 9, 2009, Mélenchon, who left the PS in November 2008 and who with the PCF created the Left Front in view of the 2009 European elections, postpones the date of foundation of his Left Party to February 1, 2009 instead of February 9, 2009. He decided to do so in order not to obstruct the NPA, which he hoped to incorporate into his Left Front. Although it did not quite succeed, it gradually absorbed its right-wing currents which joined it one after the other: the Unitary Left (GU) since March 2009, Convergences and Alternative in February 2011 and the Anti-Capitalist Left (GA, unitary current for ecosocialism) in July 2012.
However, the fall of the NPA is due above all to the NPA, to its absence of class struggle and to its unbridled electoralism: declaring in 2009 between 9,000 and 10,000 founding membership cards (or three times the militancy of the LCR), it only declared 1,500 members at its 2018 congress! Sign of an assumed electoral splash: it was in order to present their own candidate for these presidential elections that the members of the Revolutionary Communist Current-Permanent Revolution left the NPA! In electoral terms, the fall since 2007 is also significant: in these presidential elections, the NPA got only 0.55% of the electoral roll (270,000 votes)!
As for the PCF, the right-wing campaign of the pro-police and pro-French identity candidate Roussel was not enough to give life to this moribund party. It barely surpassed Marie-Georges Buffet’s very low score in 2007: thanks to Roussel’s cute French phrases and pro-police bet, it went from 1.59% in 2007 to 1.65% now. Bravo to the artist!
For its part, the national leadership of the Independent Workers’ Party (POI) called since October 23, 2021 to vote for Mélenchon without even naming LFI: “Our position: vote for Mélenchon!” Moreover: “In a context of extraordinary political fragility, of decomposition of the institutions of the Fifth Republic, the candidacy of Mélenchon already embodies the break with the system, with the policies carried out by all the successive governments of the Fifth Republic.” Oh yes, your memory is very short!
LO is missing… What else to say but that his pessimism and his sectarianism do not open any dynamic capable of providing the working class with an independent, mass and class regroupment to put an end to Macron and the Fifth Republic, to finally see the workers’ demands satisfied?
A key actor: abstention
In these conditions, the score of the abstention, plus that of the blank and null votes, is easily explained. These figures cover a very large part of the working class, although the antipathy to the elections also affects the middle and upper classes, but to a much lesser extent. For the most part, the working class abstains. Therefore, abstention, blank and invalid votes are an important actor in this presidential election.
Since 1974 the abstention rate has been steadily increasing, reflecting the lack of confidence in this electoral system, distrust towards the candidates and the parties that run there, in unison with the anger that roars and grows. These are the percentages of abstentions, blank and null votes of the voters registered in the second round of the presidential elections:
| Elections | % abstention |
| 1974 | 13,83 |
| 1981 | 16,61 |
| 1988 | 18,98 |
| 1995 | 25,09 |
| 2002 | 24,59 |
| 2007 | 19,56 |
| 2012 | 24,32 |
| 2017 | 34,02 |
| 2022 | 34,25 |
16,700,000 voters abstained, voted blank or null last April 24! More than a third of the roll, that’s huge and that scares the ruling classes and the capitalists. Because Macron, Le Pen and Mélenchon know it: abstentions are the gasoline of the class struggle!
Macron with his 18,770,000 votes (or 38.5%) and Le Pen with her 13,290. 000 votes (or 27.25%) are not so powerful… and if we put it on a par with the figure of the first round, which better represents the real political aspirations, the abstention is the first party in France with 28% of the electoral roll, above the official right of Macron and his allies (26%), the extreme right and its allies (24%) and the governmental left of Mélenchon and his allies (22%).
To consider: abstention in this ballotage is almost at the level of the second round of the 1969 presidential election (35.6%)! That is why everyone will do everything to extinguish the latent fire and that is why Mélenchon will be Macron’s best ally.
Legislative elections: united front of the apparatuses against the working class
The calendar of the legislative elections, since [Macron’s] five-year term, has been positioned to follow the presidential one and in the same impulse give the majority to the “elected”. It is not certain that the momentum that was absent in the presidential one will be present in the legislative ones. But, on the other hand, it is certain that the two main “opposition” forces will not have a majority in the Assembly either. And yet, the thief Mélenchon, who proclaims himself Prime Minister, would have us believe it. Rejecting the alliance with Reconquista, the RN is working to consolidate its role as the first opposition to Macron.
LaREM and LFI are dead… Long live Juntos and the NUPES!
The recomposition of the right wing of government is endless. On May 5, two new entities were announced: on the one hand, LaREM, which no longer had much momentum, became Renaissance; on the other hand, to win the legislative elections, a confederation is created, composed mainly of LaREM, MoDem, Horizons and Territories of Progress, called Together.
There run the last headless chickens of the PS: the Progressive Federation created last March by François Rebsamen (former Minister of Labor of Hollande) will be part of Together for the legislative elections; Manuel Valls (former Prime Minister of Hollande) rebounded without gains from the defeat of Hamon in the first round of 2017, who went to Barcelona to win the municipality and returned empty-handed, is finally rewarded with a safe seat as deputy of Together for the French abroad….
The politicians who remain in LR are not left out: the government seduces Damien Abad to become Minister of Solidarity, Autonomy and Disability of France. Enough to provoke the probable revenge of his LR friends, who after having protected him from rape charges, probably leaked this information as soon as he was appointed. They don’t care about the rape, but about its use!
But the palm of betrayal is undoubtedly for Mélenchon who dares everything to gain access to power and the consequent money! To gather around him all the headless chickens seeking a seat in the assembly and the moribund parties that do not want to die, on April 15 he sent letters to the PCF, Europe Ecology-Greens (EELV) and the NPA in order to “build a new government majority, that is to say, a political majority in the National Assembly”. In a coup de force towards his future allies, he asks the French people on April 26, two days after the ballotage, to “elect Prime Minister” and on the same day he has posters “Mélenchon, Prime Minister” handed out.
The agreement signed under pressure and in haste between LFI and each of the moribund, EELV (the night of May 1 to 2), the PCF (May 3) and the PS (May 4) distributes the 577 candidacies for deputies as follows: 326 LFI, 100 EELV, 50 PCF and 70 PS (the latter retains a potential number of deputies much higher than its results in the presidential election). The coalition agreement actually brings together a much wider range of organizations than the government parties: it unites the LFI pole and related parties (Left Party, Together! of Clémentine Autain and ex-NPA Myriam Martin, POI, Ecological Revolution for Life of Aymeric Caron), the ecologist pole (The Greens, Generations of ex-PS Benoît Hamon and Aurélie Filipetti, Generation Ecology of ex-PS Delphine Batho, The New Democrats and ex-PS former LaREM), the PS and the PCF.
The POI-D, in a letter to LFI dated April 22, indicates for its part: “The program of LFI is not ours. But the truth is that even a start of implementation of that program would make a difference with respect to what another government would do.” He says he expects a clear answer on Prime Minister Mélenchon’s ability to impose himself on President Macron: “We want to believe that he will clarify his position on this essential question: either to cohabit and in fact submit to the rules of the Fifth Republic that give preeminence of power to a president and the capitalist reaction that brought him to power; or to assume the mandate of the majority, the democratic mandate that [LFI] asks for and not hesitate to implement his own policy to embark on the path of rupture.
“Our approach has no polemical character. If there is any possibility of a beginning of a rupture in the sense of the interests of the workers and the youth, of a first step that questions the continuity of the previous governments, know that the POID will know how to assume its responsibilities.” The fact that the POI-D asks this question is even more disturbing than the open support of the POI!
Thus, on May 18, the NUPES agreement is created, the New Popular Ecological and Social Union, a puppet regrouping of parties which a few months before did not want to do anything together. The last socialist chieftains left the PS raft when the PS-LFI agreement was announced, like Claude Bartolone, former president of the National Assembly from 2012 to 2017; some, like Bernard Cazeneuve, former prime minister of Hollande, denounce the agreement and encourage dissident candidacies. The socialist house goes up in smoke.
And the NUPES, what can we say, if not that it is just an electioneering patchwork like the Plural Left, which wreaked havoc from 1997 to 2002, allowed Jospin to coexist with Chirac and gave Mélenchon a folding ministerial chair?
For those who want to believe in mirages and hope for “a beginning of a rupture” like the POI-D, it is necessary to look at the course that Mélenchon indicated on France Inter on May 8: asked about cohabitation with Macron, “We will get along well because it is in the interest of the country”, placing himself on the course of his social-democratic bosses Mitterrand and Jospin, of whom he says he is proud of what they achieved together!
The money of the parties, the key to the legislative elections
That’s all it takes! The NUPES can neither arithmetically make Mélenchon head of government nor be the vector of a policy of rupture: in any case, let us recall that the LFI deputies voted as one man the Finance reform bill which provides for an emergency plan to save French capitalism (bank guarantee of 300. 300 billion euros from Bpifrance[2]; support plan of 45 billion euros; extension of the social and fiscal burdens of direct taxes on SMEs for 35 billion euros…).
For them, the essential is elsewhere: the legislative elections are not so much about being the voice of those who elected them, but about financing their party. Indeed, the subsidies granted to the parties for the next five years are calculated on the basis of the results of the legislative elections:
First of all, a party can collect subsidies thanks to the number of votes obtained in the first round of these elections, provided that it has drawn 1% of the votes cast in at least 50 constituencies (each vote brings 1.64 euros; for this year alone LaREM received 10.1 million euros; the RN 4.9; LR for not having respected parity only (!) 3.92; LFI 3.7, the PS 2.6…). From 2017 to today, 16 parties, even without elected deputies, were concerned by this first part of public aid.
Secondly, if a party obtains seats, it can take advantage of subsidies allocated according to the number of parliamentarians and paid to its financing association (each deputy receives 37,042 euros, this year alone LaREM received 10.9 million euros; LR 9.1; PS 3.3 like UDI or MoDem; LFI 0.64; RN 0.3…).
Each year, the State reserves 66 million euros for the public financing of the parties. As if to forget the disputes of the presidential elections and to want to make believe in a common program?
Trade union apparatuses, on alert
It would therefore be necessary to appeal to the trade unions to impose the rupture on Macron. With Élisabeth Borne as Prime Minister, the LaREM program should be implemented to the letter and the attacks against the working class already decided and budgeted, in particular the adjustment to Social Security, should not take long… the employers want to recover the indirect wage of the working class and Borne to complete the task begun by the various governments 40 years ago.
But, once again, far from calling for a general strike and a massive response from the workers of this country, “the unions are incapable of agreeing on a common discourse”, reports Le Monde on May 18. The position of the CGT National Confederal Committee in favor of retirement at 60 years of age has offended the CFDT, which is opposed to it. It felt manipulated. As for the working class, it has reason to feel betrayed once again by this call of the CCN of the CGT:
“The organizations of the CCN decided to intensify initiatives in the week of June 6 to 10 by organizing different forms of action: assemblies of affiliates, deployment towards the workers with the material made available, demonstrations, pride marches, questioning of candidates in the legislatures (outside the extreme right), organization of public debates around our demands, etc.
“A bloc of progressive deputies, as big as possible, in the National Assembly must make it possible to translate into law the conquests of the workers.
“With all the strength of our organization and the trade union means, we fight against the extreme right. By nature, this struggle is also inscribed on the political level. To push back the extreme right, one of the priorities is to prevent it from putting deputies in parliament. The CGT calls on workers to mobilize by voting.
“One of the first elements of the balance of power is to strengthen the CGT in professional elections and through unionization.
“The CGT calls on workers to remain alert and mobilized to react to any project of social regression. It decides to analyze with its organizations the situation from the day after the elections.
“As of now, it decides on a national interprofessional day of strike and demonstration in September, wishing it to be unitary.”
Thus, the CGT calls to vote in the legislative elections and to mobilize in the week before the first round. It is counting on those famous progressive deputies to oppose the pension reform bill. It is likely that the CGT will go to the “negotiation” meetings to raise the retirement age in the summer (July-August) and call us in September or October to demonstrate and strike for one day.
Make no mistake: LFI and its allies are the best supporters of Macron and the Fifth Republic, with whom they do not want to break. They do not raise any of the demands of the working class. Pensions, wages, fight against unemployment, whatever we achieve is in the street, by the class struggle, the general strike and the all together, opposing the one of the workers to the front of the apparatuses that want to rule us!
París, May 27, 2022
[1] Lower House of Congress.
[2] Public investment bank.