{"id":314212,"date":"2017-06-23T22:02:45","date_gmt":"2017-06-23T21:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/political-lessons-of-the-french-elections\/"},"modified":"2017-06-23T22:02:45","modified_gmt":"2017-06-23T21:02:45","slug":"political-lessons-of-the-french-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/political-lessons-of-the-french-elections\/","title":{"rendered":"Political lessons of the French elections"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"content\">\n<h3 class=\"nomargin\">\u00a0<\/h3>\n<h2>Political lessons of the French elections<\/h2>\n<h5>\n<p>    23 June 2017<\/p>\n<\/h5>\n<p>The cycle of presidential and legislative elections this Spring in France has culminated in the disintegration of the Socialist Party (PS) and the election of Emmanuel Macron and an absolute majority in the National Assembly favorable to his government.<\/p>\n<p>Macron, who served as economy minister in the government of PS president Fran\u00e7ois Hollande, is backing Berlin\u2019s bid to build the European Union (EU) as a strategic and military rival of US imperialism. The domestic basis of European imperialism\u2019s ambitions overseas is to be a ruthless war on the working class. Macron\u2019s government, drawn from the PS and the bourgeois right, is planning a series of unilateral decrees that will intensify the PS government\u2019s reactionary labor law reforms and institute a permanent state of emergency.<\/p>\n<p>This outcome is a devastating exposure of the bankruptcy of all the organizations in the so-called French left that broke from Trotskyism, who bear principal responsibility for Macron\u2019s ability to profit from the discrediting of the austerity and war policies of Hollande and the PS. Time and time again during the last quarter-century, workers in France reacted sharply against these attacks\u2014with mass strikes in 1995, 2003, 2010, and 2016. The working class gave these organizations millions of votes in 2002 and this year, but still they proved incapable of advancing any alternative.<\/p>\n<p>They did not orient to building a revolutionary party in the working class as an alternative to the Socialist Party, but worked time and again to turn workers back behind it. In 2002, <em>Lutte ouvri\u00e8re<\/em> (Workers Struggle, LO) and the <em>Ligue communiste r\u00e9volutionnaire<\/em> (LCR) received collectively 3 million votes in an election that led to the elimination of PS&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2017\/06\/23\/pers-j23.html\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 Political lessons of the French elections 23 June 2017 The cycle of presidential and legislative elections this Spring in France has culminated in the disintegration of the Socialist Party (PS) and the election of Emmanuel Macron and an absolute majority in the National Assembly favorable to his government. Macron, who served as economy minister [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2526,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-314212","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2526"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}