France

By Joan Trevor The French regional elections delivered a big snub to right-wing UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) prime minster Jean-Pierre Raffarin. His coalition now control only two - Alsace and Corsica - of the 22 metropolitan regions. The victors in the second round of voting on 28 March were coalitions led by the Socialist Party and including variously the Greens, the Communist Party and other smaller parties of this "plural left". They went from controlling eight regions previously to controlling 20. The share of the vote was roughly 50% to the plural left, 38% to the government...

According to a Louis Harris poll published by the paper Liberation , the joint lists of the Trotskyist organisations Lutte Ouvriere and Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire in France's regional elections on 21 March got 13% of the vote in the 25-34 age group. Overall, the LO-LCR lists got a bit less than 5% - more than the LO-LCR total in the last regional elections, of 1998, and much more than in the legislative assembly elections of 2002, but less than their 10% in the presidential election of 2002. Oddly, the Harris poll shows LO and LCR got only 3% among 18-24 year olds, an age group among...

The joint lists of the French Trotskyist organisations Lutte Ouvriere and LCR won 4.58% of the first-round vote in France's regional elections on 21 March. This was a lower score than they hoped, but still sizeable. A joint statement by LO and LCR declared: The Raffarin government and the brutal anti-social offensive of the last two years have been condemned. The growth of unemployment, privatisations, the suppression of unemployment benefits, the demolition of the pensions system, and the attacks against the state education system, have been massively rejected. Whether this means that...

I was going to entitle this article "The French Galloway", but French comrades tell me that would be grossly unjust to Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the subject of the article. Chevènement was a member of the Socialist Party and president of the Franco-Iraqi Friendship Society from 1985. In 1991 he resigned his post as Defence Minister - he would surely have been sacked otherwise - because he opposed the US war against Iraq in that year, which the French government supported. In 1993 he split from the Socialist Party and launched a new party, the MDC. The point of the story is that no-one on the...

The month the National Committee of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty voted to reaffirm our opposition to the hijab (Islamic veil or headscarf) as a mechanism of women's oppression, but also to oppose the new law in France outlawing the hijab in schools. Mark Sandell outlines a minority view and Martin Thomas argues for opposing the law. Don't go soft on religion By Mark Sandell The debate about the hijab in schools has confused many socialists. Some see the hijab as an anti-imperialist revolt that should be supported; others oppose the hijab as a symbol of oppression but see the right for...

By Joan Trevor Elections matter. Since they romped home in the parliamentary elections in 2002 on the coat-tails of Jacques Chirac's freak presidential win, France's UMP government with their massive majority have been punching holes in the French welfare state. They have made massive cuts in pension and unemployment entitlement. They are looking at ways to cut healthcare. They have embarked on a programme of "decentralisation" in education as a way to soften it up for more local pay bargaining, and cuts in the standard of provision. They are creating new job schemes, especially for young...

In recent issues, Solidarity has printed translations and articles from revolutionaries in France responding to the current ferment around the French government's plans for a law banning the Islamic headscarf from state schools in France by arguing "no to the veil, no to the law". Here we print a translation of the views of Lutte Ouvrière, who place much more emphasis on opposition to the veil. "Neither father nor brother nor husband, it's we who have chosen the veil"; "Veiled or unveiled, the freedom to choose". Such were among the most common slogans on Saturday 17 January at the Paris...

Le numéro 6-7 de la revue Ni patrie ni frontières vient de paraitre. On y trouve notamment des traductions en francais de l'article de Faryal Velmi (de l'AWL) sur le Parti de Travail de Pakistan et de l'article de Rumy Hasan sur l'Islamophobie . Tous disponsibles à mondialisme.org/nipatrienifrontieres . Au sommaire: LES SYNDICATS CONTRE LES LUTTES ? Retour sur le mouvement (Collectif La Sociale de Montpellier) Sur les retraites et les grèves de mai-juin (Mouvement communiste) Comment lutter (CNT-AIT) Les élections professionnelles contre le syndicalisme ( CNT-AIT) Les prud'hommes ne défendent...

The congress of the French Marxist organisation Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire on 30 October to 2 November 2003 adopted new statutes for the organisation which dropped mention of "the dictatorship of the proletariat". This move made little stir in the congress, where no-one much thought that a debate on new statutes, designed to be accessible and workable for the LCR's many new recruits, was the best place to argue out the substance of the matter. It has caused some stir in the media, though, if only because of echoes from the time, in 1976, when the French Communist Party dropped the phrase...

Opinion polls in France have shown strong support for the revolutionary left lists for the June 2004 Euro-elections there, organised by Lutte Ouvriere and the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire. Nine per cent of voters say they are "certain" to vote for the revolutionary left, and another 22% say they might consider it. LO's magazine Lutte de Classe of December 2003/ January 2004, however, predicts a much lower score. LO reckons that their result "could even be of the order of 3% for our common lists (the same as our total score in the legislative elections of 2002)". They expect the following...