French media, political parties hush up PS government’s coup plan
By
Alex Lantier
20 May 2017
Major French media and political parties continued their silence Friday on the extraordinary report in Thursday’s edition of L’Obs magazine, which revealed that the outgoing Socialist Party (PS) government planned a coup d’état if National Front (FN) candidate Marine Le Pen, rather than PS-backed candidate Emmanuel Macron, had won the May 7 presidential elections.
Plans were made for a major police mobilization to crush anti-fascist protests, and to break the usual electoral protocol and force Le Pen to accept a PS prime minister. As a top state official told L ’ Obs, “The country would have been totally shut down. The government would have had only one priority: ensuring the security of the state.” That is, while the PS would have effectively suspended the usual parliamentary forms of rule in France, the goal was to keep Le Pen in power and crush opposition from the left.
The deafening silence on the story, coupled with the absence of official denials of its contents is the clearest indication that L’Obs report, based on information from multiple anonymous, high-level sources in the PS, is essentially correct.
The material in the story indicates that PS officials are willing to suspend parliamentary procedures and install a dictatorship via a coup by intelligence and police officials to crush mass protests. This is not just a hypothetical about what would have happened had Le Pen won on May 7: demonstrations are expected to erupt against Macron’s plans to unilaterally slash wages and contracts using the PS labour law, and to restore the draft. The question that is posed is whether the new Macron administration is preparing to use such methods against the…