Catherine Curran Vigier looks at Macron’s appointment of Michel Barnier as Prime Minister after Barnier’s party secured just 46 seats, while the Left’s Nouveau Front Populaire won 182. This outrageous appointment is an insult to the electorate which the left must challenge radically and persistently until victory.
Over one hundred and thirty thousand people demonstrated all over France on September 7th to protest President Macron’s nomination of right-wing Eurocrat Michel Barnier as prime Minister.
Macron had called a snap General election in June, hoping to wipe out the left and govern in an alliance with the far right Rassemblement Nationale (RN) if voters rejected his party, Ensemble. But contrary to expectations, the left parties united to form the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) and won the election with a programme of moderate reforms. This included bringing the retirement age back down to 60 after Macron raised it to 64, increasing the minimum wage to 1600 euros per month and recruiting more workers in health and education.
Macron’s party was beaten into second place with 168 seats, and the fascist RN, which was expected to win, came third winning 143 seats. The Conservative Les Républicains (LR) came fourth with 46 seats.
With only 182 seats, the NFP did not have an outright majority. Nevertheless, parliamentary tradition required Macron to nominate a prime minister from the party or coalition with most seats, which was clearly the NFP. Macron refused to do this.
After two months of manoeuvres aimed at splitting the left alliance, he nominated Michel Barnier as Prime Minister. Barnier is a former European Commissioner who is on the extreme right wing of his own party, (LR). He voted against the decriminalization of homosexuality, but also refused to support free abortion, and opposed the PACS which legalised civil partnerships as an alternative to traditional marriage. He wants to make life harder for the unemployed. He is in favour of putting the retirement age up even more, to 65. On immigration, he is all that Marine Le Pen’s RN could hope for.
This weekend, the right wing newspaper, Le Journal de Dimanche, ‘revealed’ that Macron made a personal phone call to fascist Marine Le Pen to get her assurance that the RN would not veto Barnier’s policies if he were PM. She is reported to have demanded a PM respectful of her fascist Rassemblement National. Her niece, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, congratulated Barnier and reminded him of his positions on immigration: ‘zero immigration’, an end to state-funded healthcare for undocumented workers, and a reduction in the number of overseas students, among other proposals.
This alliance of the right and the far right cobbled together by Macron is extremely dangerous for the working class. Barnier will be able to implement a new round of austerity with a budget already planned for him by the outgoing Macronists, some of whom hope to be nominated to the new government. The RN will not veto Barnier’s neoliberal policies if he proves himself to be sufficiently racist, Islamophobic, and anti-immigrant. Already, there is talk of nominating a new ‘Minister of Immigration’. The last time a minister of immigration existed was when Nicolas Sarkozy was trying to win votes by copying the politics of Marine Le Pen. The outcome can only be more racism, more drownings in the channel, and more police killings of young Muslims.
How should the Left respond to Macron’s manipulations?
Jean Luc Melenchon’s party, la France Insoumise, was right to call the demonstration against Macron’s anti democratic coup. But they did not get the full support of the other groups in the NFP. Nor did the unions back the demonstration.
After the big push against Le Pen in July, the unions are in retreat. They have called a strike day for the first of October, but this is too far away to stop Macron’s new government setting up shop. They certainly do not envisage more than this token one-day strike.
But this is not the time for fatalism. In a new study published on September 4th, Vincent Tiberj, a professor of political science, rejects the idea that French society has swung to the right. After analysing on a vast number of opinion polls carried out over several decades, he shows that on a number of key social issues, like acceptance of homosexuality or support for abortion rights, but also openness to immigration, the French are much more tolerant now than they were in the 1980s. The far right has adapted its rhetoric to take greater acceptance of abortion and homosexuality into account. In fact, they have moved away from overtly contesting the rights of homosexuals and are concentrating their fire on Trans people. This does not make the fascists any less dangerous. But the left must stop believing that there is some kind of ‘popular’ basis for extreme right wing politics.
It is not the citizens who have swung to the right, says Tiberj, but the political classes. He argues that the right and the far right have been successful in setting the agenda and imposing the framework through which social issues are interpreted. Where the left contests, it can win the public away from neoliberal and far right ideas. He compares the struggle over retirement age, in which the left fought the government tooth and nail, and consistently had the public behind it, with Macron’s 2023 laws on immigration, which were not contested to the same extent, nor for so long, so that people had little opportunity to debate the issue or think
it through.
On the economic front, Tiberj asserts that there has been no reconversion of the population in favour of neoliberalism. The working classes still support a welfare state and policies that redistribute wealth. This was clearly seen in the support for the NFP’s programme of taxing super profits and investing in the infrastructure of the state. Tiberj concludes that so long as the left allows the right to set the agenda, the left will continue to lose.
This means the left will have to fight a lot harder, and fight differently, if it is to win. LFI’s attempts to have Macron impeached could be a big waste of time unless people are mobilised in the streets and workplaces to make it really happen. The right can be defeated, but LFI needs to be much more aggressive and active about it and stop letting Macron set the agenda.
