THE new French government exists by courtesy of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, and will dance to its tune.
President Emmanuel Macron’s determination to overrule July’s parliamentary election results brings Europe closer to catastrophe.
His refusal to appoint Lucie Castets, candidate of the first-placed New Popular Front, prime minister is a political choice. His claim that it would immediately fall because it lacks a majority applies even more so to all the other, smaller electoral blocs, and Michel Barnier’s Republicans — who came fourth — are no exception.
Had the NPF formed a government, it would not have been able to enact its whole programme: but, as NPF MP Sylvie Ferrer explains in tomorrow’s interview with the Morning Star, it could have built support for parts of it, including reversing Macron’s hated raise to the retirement age. It is not because the NPF would fail to legislate that the president has denied its election win: it is because he fears it would succeed.
So instead he has opted for the far right.
Not Barnier, though the politician best known to Britain as the EU’s Brexit negotiator is himself a hard-line rightwinger, a man who voted against the decriminalisation of homosexuality and ran for president on a platform of banning all immigration from outside Europe for five years.
But Barnier by grace of Le Pen. Two other candidates approached first were rejected: Bernard Cazeneuve for suggesting adopting some of the left’s policies, and Xavier Bertrand — because Le Pen vetoed him.
The president has been phoning the fascist leader to seek her support. Barnier’s ministry rests on it, and Le Pen can topple it whenever she wants. The French far right has been given control of when and why the government falls, a huge risk.
The alternative is for the left to force the government out instead. The NPF has, so far, resisted Establishment pressure to divide it, partly because of mass mobilisation from below. Wavering deputies on its right wing are aware the grassroots and the unions are watching.
It has called protests this weekend, and is pushing for Macron’s impeachment. Le Pen’s “kingmaker” status becomes a weakness: the supposedly anti-Establishment National Rally are exposed propping up a despised president.
There are lessons here for the left everywhere.
The liberal centre is no bulwark against the far right. Macron, with his authoritarianism and Islamophobia, has prepared the ground for a Le Pen government for years; now he brings one closer in order to salvage neoliberal attacks on the welfare state.
The far right’s anti-Establishment rhetoric is for show. It is acting to support the French ruling class’s war on working-class living standards, and the left now has an opportunity to highlight that. This will be crucial in Britain too, where smashing Reform UK’s appeal in deprived areas means exposing its commitment to the exact Thatcherite policies that have impoverished them: Jean-Luc Melenchon’s quip that the National Rally in power would be “Macron, but worse” transfers neatly over here to Nigel Farage.
And the left’s strength derives from mass mobilisation and a refusal to submit to neoliberal economics preached by politicians in power on both sides of the Channel.
Had Macron’s initial gambit worked, and the left been reduced to propping up a government of cuts for fear of the fascists, Le Pen could pose as the champion of ordinary people against the elite: that will be much harder now.
In Britain, a Chancellor whose fiscal rules dictate spending cuts risks continuing the ruinous economic course of the Tories; and a labour movement that acquiesces in that risks allowing the fascist thugs who rioted across Britain in August to keep preying on communities’ despair.
This places obligations on our movement as it meets for the Trades Union Congress to warn Labour that its economic policy needs to change — or it will face political and industrial resistance.
