THIS Sunday there will be a “protest” march in Paris organised by Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance Party that is supposedly about contesting anti-semitism in the country.

Would that it were true. 

Instead, the march is a cynical ploy by the politician to drive a wedge between his minority party and its two chief challengers, the left-wing LFI or France Unbowed and the hard-right, fascist and historically anti-semitic National Rally (RN). 

Macron, at the head of this grouping of all the other parties, gets to portray himself and his constantly slipping poll numbers as instead the leader of a united “republic.” All those then who do not join are seen as anti-republican. 

Two problems with this opportunistic formulation. The first and most telling is that the RN, which is constantly attempting to present itself as a mainstream “normal” party to the point where its leader Marine Le Pen now leads Macron in the polls, has just as opportunistically said it would join the march, thus using it to cleanse its past history of Nazi-era collaborationist involvement with the Petain regime that has neither been eradicated nor denied. 

That the RN feels perfectly comfortable marching with “the republicans” is disturbing in another way in that is it indicates the rightward ever-accelerating direction of the supposed centre, which first attempted to stifle all pro-Palestinian dissent and has now organised Sunday’s march as a counter to the outpouring of sentiment last week in favour of a ceasefire and an end to the killing in Gaza.

It is true that there has been anti-semitic vandalism and threats and these have increased since the October 7 Palestinian attack on Israel. 

That attack, though, has been described by some as more prison breakout than terrorist assault. Palestinians going over the walls recalls the last line of the great prison film Brute Force where the doctor looking over the carnage as the prisoners were slaughtered says of all prisoners whether locked behind bars or in the open-air prison of Gaza, “Whoever they are, they’re gonna wanna get out.” 

These assaults in France on synagogues and homes cannot be tolerated and much less so in a society with a history of spoliation of Jewish property and rounding up of Jews and loading them into trains for the concentration camps. But there is also an assault on Muslims in this country with the largest Jewish and the largest Muslim population in Europe. 

Not only does this assault go unremarked but it is being led by the state. 

Macron’s government and his internal security head Gerard Darmanin are using the events of October 7 to push forward a new more restrictive immigration policy, clearly directed at Muslim populations in Francophone Africa and the Middle East. 

Editorial after editorial decries this policy as unnecessary, maintaining that there are already enough restrictions in place and that this is simply a ploy to court right and far-right voters and improve Macron’s and future “centrist” presidential candidate Darmanin’s poll numbers. 

The only party, and indeed only politician, to call out this charade is Jean-Luc Melenchon of LFI who, very reasonably, said he and his party would only officially take part in the march if it also called for a ceasefire in Israel’s slaughtering of Gaza’s civilian population. 

The rightward drift of the left has shown itself in the Socialists’ use of Melenchon’s solidarity with the Palestinians as an excuse to break up the coalition LFI built with the other parties of the left, something the Socialist right has been wanting to do ever since the alliance of what is called NUPES was formed. 

It is useful to remember that Macron was, before coming out of nowhere to win election in 2017 as the candidate of the neoliberal bankers, masquerading as a supposed “Socialist” and that his ever more right-wing “centrist” party is largely made up of deserters from that party. 

It is also emblematic of this acceleration that instead of challenging Le Pen by moving to the left and proposing social legislation that would benefit the majority of France’s beleaguered workers, beset after Covid with food and energy inflation, he and his party choose to move right, not only on the question of immigration, a perennial right-wing obsession, but also now by a Bill Clinton-style remaking of unemployment insurance, called the RSA, where, if the Bill goes through, everyone must now work 60 hours a month to take home the insurance of €550, at a rate of €9 an hour, below the minimum wage. 

This attempt to lower the wage for all workers by flooding the market with those who largely are not even capable of working, the government calls “full employment.” 

The strategy for a next victory is to accelerate this move to the right with cynical ploys largely for show such as Sunday’s march while continuing to neutralise an increasingly toothless and now once more divided left. 

It’s a strategy that as the manipulative strings behind these manoeuvres start to show is instead moving the country further and more quickly to a disastrous outcome.