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 in the government of PS president François Hollande, is backing Berlin’s bid to build the European Union (EU) as a strategic and military rival of US imperialism. The domestic basis of European imperialism’s ambitions overseas is to be a ruthless war on the working class. Macron’s government, drawn from the PS and the bourgeois right, is planning a series of unilateral decrees that will intensify the PS government’s reactionary labor law reforms and institute a permanent state of emergency.
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’s 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—with 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.
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, Lutte ouvrière (Workers Struggle, LO) and the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) received collectively 3 million votes in an election that led to the elimination of PS…