BY DICK NICHOLS
France's Lionel Jospin wasn't the worst prime minister as far as capitalist politicians go. His government introduced the 35-hour work week (which produced a clear rise in employment), he resisted the attempts of the European Union to open up the state-owned Electricite de France to privatisation and he negotiated some increased self-rule for Corsica.
Yet in the first round of the 2002 French presidential election, held on April 21, Jospin was beaten into third place by racist demagogue Jean-Marie Le Pen, of the ultra-right National Front (FN). In the May 5 second-round presidential ballot the people of France now face the gruesome choice between incumbent Jacques Chirac ("Superliar" on the local satirical TV program Les Guinols) and ex-paratrooper Le Pen, advocate of a total ban on immigration and still remembered in Algeria for having tortured freedom-fighters during the war of independence.
So, is there a big shift to the right in French politics? Here appearances are deceptive. Le Pen's vote only rose from the 15% he won at the 1995 presidential poll to 16.9%. However, the vote for Jospin (the first-round winner in 1995) collapsed from 23.4% to 16.2%. The presidential vote for Robert Hue of the French Communist Party (PCF), minor partner in Jospin's Socialist Party (SP)-led government, plummeted from 8.7% in 1995 to 3.4%.
Moreover, things weren't much better within the camp of the traditional French right, Gaullist and neo-liberal alike. The total vote for all traditional right candidates fell from 44.3% to 37.9%, with Chirac's own vote falling below 20%.
The big winners were the revolutionary left, whose total vote nearly doubled from 5.3% to 10.4% and the Greens, whose vote rose from 3.3% to 5.3%.
In terms of votes, the reformist left (including the Greens) has lost 1.5 million votes, the revolutionary socialist left has gained 1.36 million, the extreme right has gained 900,000 and the traditional right has lost 3.85 million (most of this loss resulting from the three million voters who abstained from voting).
The combination of the electoral arithmetic and the French election system has therefore produced a paradoxical result — a nation more polarised and if anything more polarised to the left, but a presidential choice between the right and the extreme right. The immediate prospect is a victory for Chirac in the second round, followed by an intense contest for the legislative elections in June.
The National Front
None of this means that the FN is not a serious and increasing threat. In that contest of demagogues which is a French presidential election, Le Pen, the most shameless demagogue of all, won out. The FN continues to win support beyond its core of Algerian war veterans, super-patriots with their cult of Joan of Arc, unemployed white youth and racists of all stripes.
Particularly marked this time was the rise in the FN vote in traditionally left-voting towns long blighted with unemployment, street gang violence, drug-dealing and abuse of the elderly. Even traditional PCF voters, tired of nothing but words from their PCF mayors, have switched to Le Pen for his "get tough on crime" message.
According to one retired school teacher from Nice quoted in a special survey conducted by Le Figaro: "I would never have believed I would have one day come to make this sort of choice. But it's one of despair and I'm not ashamed of it. What else can you do when faced with the inertia of those who've been governing us for 20 years?"
Le Pen's populist rhetoric against globalisation, a political establishment personified by "Chirospin"and "Jospirac" as well as his pledge to take France out of the Maastricht treaty, also did him no harm. The same Le Figaro report quoted an old PCF voter from Calais (where the PCF vote halved): "Left or right I haven't seen change to my situation. If I've chosen Le Pen it's because he's the only one capable of shaking up the sleepyheads.
"A lot of other unemployed people ... voted like me."
Others see in Le Pen the chance for a French equivalent to Silvio Berlusconi's government in Italy, popular among racists for its "zero tolerance" policy towards refugees and "illegal" immigrants. Another seductive message is Le Pen's line that the only thing preventing decent levels of social spending is "Europe" and the euro, supposedly invented, according to FN theory, "at an April 1945 meeting of the Grand Orient Lodge of France".
From these sorts of voter comments it couldn't be clearer that the ongoing rise of Le Pen is due most of all to the neo-liberal policies of the SP-led government.
Revolutionary left
At the other end of the political spectrum, the combined 10% vote for the revolutionary ("Trotskyist") left was marked by the rapid growth in support for the 27-year-old candidate of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), postal worker Olivier Besancenot.
Early in the presidential campaign it had looked like Besancenot would be overshadowed by the best-known voice of the French revolutionary left, Arlette Laguiller of Lutte Ouvriere (LO), who was standing in her fifth election and had registered as high as 10% in early opinion polls. (The LCR had proposed to LO to run a joint campaign with Laguiller as candidate, but LO rejected this proposal.)
However, the spotlight of publicity placed on LO by Laguiller's rating in the polls seems to have been counterproductive — it meant that a lot of potential voters found out that LO is still run as a semi-clandestine organisation with only post office box addresses and that it talks to the outside world via anonymous communiques.
Despite the rise in social and political struggle in France and Laguiller's personal popularity, LO's result did not increase greatly from 1995.
The LCR result reflected the organisation's success in capturing the radical youth vote associated with the movement against neo-liberal globalisation as well as its ongoing presence in the anti-racist and other social movements. It also corresponds to the ongoing rise of the radical union confederation SUD at the expense of the traditional organisations controlled by the SP and PCF.
Chirac manoeuvres
The most immediate effect of the Le Pen win has been to give Chirac greatly increased room to manoeuvre. With Jospin out of the way, Chirac can now devote his attention to the job of reimposing unity on the fractious traditional right-wing parties under the banner of a proposed "Union for a Presidential Majority". This will be the political cover behind which Chirac will move to swipe the most popular planks of Le Pen's social platform in a style made familiar by Australia's John Howard in relation to populist demagogue Pauline Hanson.
Within the shell-shocked SP, now at half the support it received in the early 1980s, the reins have been handed to first secretary Francois Hollande. His future promises to be difficult, with the SP left already criticising Jospin for his campaign (conducted according to the theme "a left but not a socialist program") and the technocratic right, led by former prime minister Laurent Fabius, pressing for the party to campaign as efficient, honest managers of French capitalism as opposed to the corrupt Chirac.
Within the devastated PCF, Robert Hue remains at the helm for now, but MP Patrick Braouezec has launched a scathing attack on the party leadership in Le Monde for failing to relate to the new movements (symbolised by Hue's decision not to go to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil) and for devoting all its energy to changes of facade.
According to Braouezec: "We've forgotten the working class as it exists today even though it doesn't resemble the industrial worker, we have forgotten that there are people in a bad situation. We have abandoned that ground. We have reasoned according to the social concept of the average French citizen."
For its part, the LCR has called for the opposition to Le Pen and Chirac to be built in the streets. On the day that tens of thousands of high school students poured into city centres across the country to denounce the FN (favourite slogan: "Le Pen, you're fucked, the youth are in the streets"), the LCR called for May Day to be turned into a massive statement of rejection of Le Pen.
The LCR has also stated that the "the question of a new anti-capitalist political force, a new party for workers and youth is sharply posed, relying above all on the forces for renewal expressed by the candidacies of Olivier Besancenot and Arlette Laguiller", adding that "Lutte Ouvriere and the LCR have specific responsibilities".
However, the most immediate problem for tens of millions of French people is working out whether they can bring themselves to vote for Chirac on May 5. The SP, PCF and Greens are telling their followers to pinch their noses and just do it. LO and the LCR are refusing to advise their followers to vote for "Superliar". According to LCR leader Alain Krivine: "This is not Germany 1933 and we know that Chirac will win without any problem."
From Green Left Weekly, May 1, 2002.
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