François Ruffin runs populist campaign in Amiens for France’s legislative election
By
Antoine Lerougetel
17 June 2017
Tomorrow, filmmaker François Ruffin will run in the second round of the French legislative elections against Nicolas Dupont, the candidate of President Emmanuel Macron’s The Republic on the March (LREM) party, in a constituency around Amiens in northern France. Ruffin is running with the endorsement of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the former Socialist Party (PS) minister and leader of the Unsubmissive France (UF) movement, as well as of the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) and the Greens.
The unseriousness of Ruffin’s credentials as an “opposition” figure is underscored by the fact that he has endorsed a Macron vote on television. Though Mélenchon refused to formally endorse either Macron or National Front (FN) candidate Marine Le Pen in the presidential election, while making clear that he in fact supported Macron, Ruffin said: “I would slip an Emmanuel Macron ballot into the ballot box.” However, Ruffin claimed that he would be “a firm opponent of Macron the next morning, because I don’t think he would bring anything positive to the people of my region.”
Ruffin is a successful independent filmmaker whose film Merci Patron (Thanks, boss), about his shaming of businessman Bernard Arnault over the firing of the Klur family after the outsourcing of their jobs, won a César award. Despite the success of his film, Ruffin’s election bid, closely tied to the old PS-linked political establishment, offers nothing new to the workers—even as the PS disintegrates and is absorbed by LREM, which advances an even more right-wing, free-market program.
In fact, it exemplifies the bankruptcy of the various political forces in Amiens that for…