Seven weeks ago, President Emmanuel Macron’s party was defeated at the parliamentary elections in France, losing more than 90 seats. (It was a minority government before the poll.)
The left alliance, Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front, NFP) is now the largest group of MPs in the National Assembly, with more than 185 seats to Macron’s 160. However, Macron has so far refused to nominate a left Prime Minister.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a leader of the France Insoumise (France in Revolt, FI), which is part of the NFP, has accused the president of being “an autocrat” who is “causing chaos”.
Macron declares war on the France Insoumise
Meanwhile, Macron has been trying to squeeze every last bit of political capital out of the success of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, subjecting athletes to embarassingly long hugs, while his cronies try to cobble together some kind of left-right coalition.
The priority, say the anti-democratic Macronists, is to exclude “extremists of the left and of the right” — in other words, the FI, the most radical of the four parties in the NFP, and the fascist Rassemblement National (National Rally, RN).
They are searching for a PM, preferably from some left party, who rejects the NPF’s radical program and hates the FI.
The traditional right Republican Party is backing Macron up, by saying it will immediately propose a vote of no confidence if the new government includes ministers from the FI, but not if there is a soft left alliance with Macron.
Macron has, in effect, declared war on the FI.
When FI’s European MP Rima Hassan published a pro-Palestinian tweet pointing out that even the United Nations did not treat the events of October 7 as a terrorist attack, and that outside of the Western powers, few dismiss Hamas as a terrorist organisation, Macron organised 51 of his MPs to demand that Hassan’s parliamentary immunity should be lifted and that she should be tried for supporting terrorism.
Macron is hoping that such a fabricated “scandal” will split and weaken the NFP. The right-wing media will be trying, disgustingly, to claim there is a link between principled opposition to genocide in Gaza, and the horrific antisemitic attack on a synagogue in La Grande Motte in the country’s south, on August 24.
In his speech at the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the Allied landing in the South of France, Macron hit peak hypocrisy, declaring “We must not give into division”. This is the president who made everyone work two years longer and slashed unemployment benefits, while abolishing the wealth tax, viciously repressing the yellow vests and demonising Muslims.
Can Macron split the left alliance?
Macron’s zombie government, which has officially resigned, is continuing to work against us.
Interior minister Gérald Darmanin is rabidly stoking Islamophobia, because he knows the left fightback on this issue will be muted.
A Muslim preacher from Pessac in the country’s south west is threatened with deportation because he defends Palestine and because he has declared that France “is an Islamophobic country”. A major mosque in Marseille is being threatened with closure by the police on trumped up charges.
Austerity continues, too. Former PM Gabriel Attal has sent letters to the ministers of health, education and other departments, telling them they should cut hundreds of millions of Euros, in real terms, from their budgets over the next year.
Even centre-right MPs like Charles de Courson are protesting that “it is not good for democracy” for a government which has, in theory, resigned after its election defeat, to do this.
Macron met with the heads of all political parties on August 23, promising to choose a PM shortly afterwards. He is hoping to avoid following democratic procedure and naming Lucie Castets, a candidate who is loyal to the radical NPF manifesto, and who the four left parties have agreed upon.
In this slowly developing but deep crisis, the four parties of the left alliance — the FI, Socialist Party (PS), Communist Party (PCF) and Greens — are revealing their political differences, although none have yet broken ranks to form an alliance with Macron’s people.
Faced with Macron’s refusal to appoint Castets, the FI threatened to launch an impeachment procedure against him. This initiative was denounced by the PCF leadership, and PS and Greens leaders distanced themselves from such a “disruptive” suggestion.
The mass media are running a frenzied campaign to present Macron’s choices as sensible and good for the country, although left leaders are regularly interviewed at length (if aggressively) on TV. Alternative media are playing an important role, especially for left activists and sympathisers: a 90-minute analysis of the present political situation by Mélénchon got 400,000 views on YouTube, as did a recent television interview with Greens leader Marine Tondelier.
Preparing the fightback
The end of August is the traditional time for political summer schools in France.
More than 5000 people are attending the four-day FI summer school in Valence, where 116 meetings will be held. Major speakers include Castets, Olivier Besancenot of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) and Assa Traore, who has been an inspiring campaigner against police violence and racism since her brother’s murder by police in 2016.
The PCF is holding its summer school over three days, with 66 meetings. Two thousand, five hundred activists listened enthusiastically to Castets at the Greens’ summer school on August 22 and several hundred people are gathering for four days on the south coast at the NPA’s summer school.
Everywhere, activists are debating about the best strategy in a completely new institutional crisis, and an ever more polarised situation.
Macron’s attempt to split the left and persuade the centre left to ditch all radical policies has not yet worked. He may be obliged to allow the formation of a minority government by the NFP. Such a government might have difficulty passing legislation, although there may be majority support in the Assembly for measures such as reversing last year’s rise in the standard retirement age and establishing minimum agricultural prices to protect small farmers.
But passing new laws is not the only thing governments do. A number of important clauses in the NFP’s program could be carried out by a left government without a vote in parliament: dissolving the most racist police units, raising the minimum wage and minimum pension, raising public sector wages, freezing the prices of basic foodstuffs, and recognising the state of Palestine, for example.
What happens in parliament in the next few months is important. Whatever government is formed will be a minority government and further elections cannot be held until June 2025. But mass mobilisation will be key.
We may need mass action to force Macron to name an NFP PM. We will certainly need mass action to support the enacting of the reforms in the program when resistance from the rich and powerful turns out to be even more vicious than the radical left leadership thinks it will be.
And if Macron takes his contempt for democracy further and hand picks his left-right alliance government, mass strikes and demonstrations will be needed to throw them out. And if no minority government can survive, we must demand that Macron resigns and that a new president is elected.
[John Mullen is active with the France Insoumise in the Paris region. His website is randombolshevik.org.]