“THINGS fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” wrote Yeats in The Second Coming but he might as well have been covering the just completed French elections.
 
The mainstream media is describing the mixed results of the National Assembly, the principal French lawmaking body, as “hung” or even validating President Emmanuel Macron’s judgement to call a snap election after the defeat of his party in the European Parliament vote.
 
However, the fact of the matter is that the left, and particularly the more openly left, in the French press called “far left,” France Unbowed (LFI) led and sometimes dragged a coalition that now controls the most seats in the Assembly, and that stands approximately 100 seats away from having one of its leaders appointed Prime Minister.
 
This is a remarkable turnaround from just a week before when it looked as if the far-right candidate Jordan Bardella was on the threshold of taking Marine Le Pen’s party the National Rally (RN) to power in a “cohabitation” with Macron.
 
A clear trend in the election is that the French are fed up with Macron’s neoliberal “reforms,” a programme that under the guise of securing foreign investment and creating jobs amounted to a vicious and continuous attack on working people, those on the edge of the cities, and small businesses.
 
Macron’s major “reform” in his first term was rewriting the labour laws promoting precarity over work security by making it much easier to hire and fire. His major reform in his second term was raising the retirement age from 62 to 64.
 
In a society where, because of the earlier reform, workers are being laid off at an earlier age, many around 55, with a decreasing possibility of being rehired, they now have to scrape together a livelihood for two additional years, a drain on themselves and their families.
 
Macron also cancelled the wealth tax, imposed a tax on petrol that prompted the Gilets Jaunes rebellion, and continually used the constitutional provision 49.3 to pass laws unilaterally, many of them budgetary, in the assembly. The use of this provision upset all the other parties and was an abrogation of the main power of any legislative body dating back to the Magna Carta, the power of the purse, that is to control the Budget.
 
The far right has taken advantage of this neoliberal attack on so much of society in the name of increasing the wealth of the rich and the most powerful corporations, and now controls much of the countryside. The electoral map after both rounds of the current election outside the major cities is all brown, the RN colour.
 
Much like far-right parties throughout the West, the RN has succeeded with an anti-immigrant platform that stirs hatred and animosity and promises little else, despite the fact that it is immigrants who constitute the workforce most likely to pay into the French welfare system.
 
The party’s economic platform, such as it is, skews remarkably close to Macron’s and is if anything even more business-friendly. The RN seems to be concerned with ameliorating the worst effects of a still biting inflation but promises to raise the money for this protection by cutting France’s contribution to the European Union whose subsidies benefit one of the RN’s core constituencies, farmers.
 
The party also, despite its policy of normalisation, called “dediabolisation,” still has at its core a racist, anti-semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT faction. During the campaign, violence was unleashed against these elements, violence that, had the RN dominated the legislature, would most likely have increased, along with a strengthening of police violence against these populations.
 
The left programme on the other hand, led by LFI, rolls back many of Macron’s reforms, including resetting the pension age to 60 and abolishing his automated system for allocating spaces in France’s elite universities, accused of simply fostering inequality in education.
 
The left alliance consists also of the Communist, Green and Socialist Parties. Its three-phase programme of technologising the economy will raise the minimum wage and has already halted Macron’s attack on unemployment insurance and his Bill-Clinton-era cutting of the welfare ranks.
 
The left will pay for these programmes by increasing taxes on the wealthiest individuals and corporations, a programme which the business press has termed “reckless” and “alarming.” The programme also calls for a new constitution and more specifically an annulling of the extremely undemocratic 49.3.
 
It is becoming increasingly clear that Macron and the centre’s (in reality centre right’s) main enemy is not the far right but the actual reforms of the left. Macron, after swearing this would never happen, even worked with the RN to pass his restrictive immigration “reform” and claimed that should the LFI-led left come to power its platform to correct his heightening of inequality in the country would lead to “civil war.”
 
While members of the three centre parties helped form the dam or “barrage” to defeat the RN, both Macron and another centrist party leader Edouard Phillippe, the mayor of Le Havre, urged voters not to vote for the LFI even in districts where the party opposed the RN.
 
A key accusation levelled against the LFI and its leader Jean-Luc Melenchon is that because of his criticism of the zionist genocidal attack on Gaza, he is anti-semitic. Both centrist leaders though often ignored the open anti-semitism of the RN, whose roots, despite the dediabolisation, trace back to Petain’s France which collaborated with the fascist Germans in Jewish extermination during World War II.
 
Although the mainstream press is already quaking at the prospect of a France led by Melenchon and the LFI, the numbers indicate that there is a chance, if the left coalition holds, for members of Macron’s Ensemble Party, some of who are ex-Socialists, to join the coalition which would then have the 289 members required to necessitate the appointment of its candidate as the prime minister, the figure who would direct the legislature and promote the left agenda. During the campaign one Ensemble candidate claimed he still had a lot in common with the left including favouring taxing the rich.
 
The left would not only then have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat but also halted the centre-right trend that instead of aiding the country pushes it ever closer to the fascist abyss.