the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jun 17, 2024
This article is translated from the June 12 issue, #2915 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
To get out of a political crisis further deepened by his poor vote total in the European Union elections, President Macron has therefore chosen to dissolve the Assembly and provoke new elections for deputies.
In 2017, this president was plucked out of the hat of big business, supported by most of the media, to replace the teams of right and left, Sarkozy and then Hollande, worn out by their time in power. Ultimately, he owed his election, and then his re-election in 2022, to the fact that he was pitted against right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round, a candidate whom the upper middle classes still distrusted and whom a large part of the population rightly rejected.
Like all his predecessors, Macron has followed exactly the instructions of the owning class: tighten the screws on the world of work, so as to free up the funds needed to maintain the profits of big business and its shareholders. He has sought to conceal his attacks on workers, pensioners and the unemployed, his cuts in social budgets, and the disintegration of hospitals and schools, with the help of demagogic rhetoric copying that of the far right. His pretentiousness and contempt for ordinary people, as well as his policies, logically aroused widespread hatred in working-class circles and a powerful electoral rejection. He had promised to eliminate any reason to vote for the National Rally, the far-right party, but in fact provoked the opposite, an unprecedented rise in the far right. On June 9, their vote among the working classes was largely an anti-Macron vote.
By provoking new elections, Macron is attempting to replay what happened in 2017 and 2022, that of the barrier against Le Pen. He’s betting on the discrediting of the left on the one hand, and on repelling the National Rally on the other, to rally the center around him. But for the moment, there are few candidates willing to board his Titanic. The left was quick to make a deal in an attempt to save its seats. Part of the right, in the person of Ciotti, president of the Republican conservative party, has accepted an alliance with the National Rally, having admittedly long since taken up its program. As for the Macron MPs themselves, they are trying to save their seats by distancing themselves from the President.
Macron, the Mozart of finance, the youngest President since Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the incarnation of Jupiter, has thus worn himself out in seven years, without glory, virtually giving way to the extreme right he claimed to protect the country from. To date, the stock market, that is, the bourgeoisie, has not been much moved by his political antics. It knows that it has at least two recourses left: the extreme right-wing alliance on the one hand, and the new version of the union of the left on the other. The only thing that could worry the rich and powerful would be a profound movement from the working class to impose its demands.