François Hollande — the Socialist Party [PS]’s candidate for French president — has made policy commitments with implications for the future of economic policy throughout the Eurozone and Europe more widely.
They have helped him to do better than the PS candidates in 2002 and 2007 and to beat the incumbent, President Sarkozy, into second place in the first round of the 2012 election.
Hollande wants to renegotiate the Fiscal Treaty decided by the EU in December and signed by all the EU states except the UK and the Czech Republic.
The Treaty — which still requires ratification by 12 stattes to come into force, and faces a referendum in Ireland — requires states to limit their “structural” budget deficits to 0.5% of GDP. For 2010 the average deficit of the EU 27 was 4.7%. How much of that is “structural” is guesswork. Only Estonia and Sweden were below 0.5%.
Hollande’s policy commitment of taxing incomes over one million euros at 75% is popular with voters, as is his promise to create more jobs in education, and spend more on housing.
Hollande says austerity is threatening economic growth and prosperity rather than nurturing it, in France and throughout Europe. Many people, even in the ruling classes, know that, and so a Hollande victory could shift the economic approach of Europe and particularly of the Eurozone as a whole away from right-wing fiscal austerity.
The collapse on 23 April of the strongly pro-cuts Dutch government, unable even to meet a target of cutting its budget deficit to 3%, strengthens that possibility.
But his approach is not intended to challenge the rule of capital, not even slightly! It offers a more social-democratic management of capitalism and maybe some Keynesian attempts to limit the slump.
The response of socialists in France, the UK, Spain, Italy and everywhere in Europe should be to work for unity of the labour movement across Europe. Unity around a common programme, not of tinkering with the institutions of European austerity but of making the bankers and bosses pay for their crisis.
A programme that gives a clear answer to the far-right nationalist demagogues feeding on the crisis, like Le Pen in France and Xrisi Aygi in Greece, and Wilders in the Netherlands. A programme that aims instead to reshape a united and more democratic Europe.
The French left and the election
François Hollande scored 28.6% in the first round of the French Presidential election. The second round, on 6 May, will be a run-off between Hollande and the right-wing outgoing president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Marine Le Pen, of the neo-fascist, anti-immigrant National Front, scored an alarming 18%.
On the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon got 11.1% on the first round — less than the 17% he got on some opinion polls, but way ahead of the 5% which polls gave him at the start of the campaign.
Philippe Poutou of the NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party) got 1.2%, and Nathalie Arthaud of Lutte Ouvrière (LO), 0.6%. These are poor results compared to the scores of the revolutionary left in 2002 and 2007.
Almost all of Mélenchon’s voters will go for Hollande in the second round. According to polls, most of Le Pen’s voters will back Sarkozy in the second round, but many will abstain; the 9% who voted for the centre-right candidate François Bayrou will divide fairly evenly. These transfers look like giving Hollande victory on 6 May.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a former Socialist Party left-winger, a minister in the last SP-led government, who split away from the SP in 2009 to form his own splinter group, the Parti de Gauche (PdG, Left Party).
The PdG is small, but Mélenchon was the candidate not just of the PdG but of the Front de Gauche, or Left Front, an alliance of the PdG and smaller groups with the reduced but still large French Communist Party.
In the last presidential election, the CP got a dismal vote (1.9%) for the perfunctory candidature of a CP apparatchik, Marie-George Buffet. This time not only CP members but the still-large periphery of people influenced by or sympathetic to the CP were mobilised for Mélenchon.
Mélenchon’s 11.1% seems to have included many young voters. It signifies that a large chunk of the electorate voted for full reimbursement (rather than partial, under France’s “social insurance” system) of health charges, renationalisation of public services, a return to full pension rights at age 60, an increase in the minimum wage, etc., all summed up under the slogans of “a citizens’ revolution” and “a Sixth Republic”. This represents a constituency of great importance for the left
There is a downside, however. The total vote to the left of the Socialist Party seems to be up a bit compared to 2007 (total 9%), but down on 2002 (13.9%) and 1995 (14%).
It’s difficult to be precise on this, for example because it’s difficult to tell whether we should count Green votes (low in 2012 and 2007, but 5.3% in 2002) as to the left of the SP. But the gist is that the increased vote for Mélenchon, compared to recent CP candidates, had as flipside a decreased vote for clearly revolutionary socialist candidates.
This probably doesn’t mean that the same people who voted LO or NPA in 2007 and 2002 voted Mélenchon this time. Research has shown that a lot of the “far left” vote in France is fairly unstable — many people vote “far left” as a one-off protest — and many Mélenchon voters were young. However, the “far left” dropped back and Mélenchon/CP advanced.
The drop in LO and LCR/NPA votes cannot plausibly be attributed to them running new people this time in place of their candidates in 2002 and 2007, Arlette Laguiller from LO and Olivier Besancenot from LCR. Besancenot at the start of his 2002 campaign, when he did a bit better than in 2007, was as unknown as Poutou this time. LO has worked hard since 2007 to establish Natalie Arthaud as the successor to Laguiller, and on the face of it Arthaud should be better able to gather votes than the 72-year-old Laguiller.
There is a big risk of a very destructive split in the NPA, successor to the LCR (Revolutionary Communist League), with a big minority splitting off into the Mélenchon camp, maybe joining the PdG.
LO is better geared to resist adversity. It has been telling its members at least since the 2007 election that they should face up to the fact that France is going through a period of working-class depression and they must buckle down and defend unpopular principles through times of adversity. Arthaud based her campaign not on current political agitation but on being “the only communist candidate”, a pitch which LO will have known to be unlikely to draw support except from a declining constituency of diehard CP sympathisers. Still, the 0.6% score certainly won’t help LO grow.
In ongoing political activity, the main product of Mélenchon’s score looks like being a small revival of the Communist Party and a boost for the PdG. The CP is still a shadow of what it was at the end of the 1970s (600,000 members), but it has stabilised at around 130,000 since the referendum in 2005 on the draft EU constitution, when the CP was able to play a big part in the “no” campaign.
The CP has grown, though not spectacularly, from the Mélenchon campaign, signing up 2,500 new members since 1 January as against 1,200 in the same period last year.
Mélenchon’s PdG, whose members had a high profile in his campaign while the CP prudently remained relatively back-stage, has grown from 6,500 members in autumn 2011 to 10,000 today. Although it is a left social-democratic party (and, of course, an electoral party, rather than an activist one like NPA or LO), a number of revolutionary Marxist groupings operate (and are allowed to operate) within it.
It may have been inevitable that, in conditions generally still marked by working-class defeats, the revolutionary socialist left could not solidify more than a fraction of the large protest vote it got in 1995, 2002, and 2007. It may have been inevitable that as soon as a plausible candidate from the CP-ish spectrum emerged, they would take most of the protest vote.
In any case the blame for the disarray of the revolutionary socialist left cannot reasonably be put on Mélenchon. That LO has responded to the difficulties by sullen retrenchment, and the NPA by flaking apart, is down to them.
The future depends on how the revolutionary socialist left manages to deal with its current setbacks, regroup, and win over sizeable numbers of those who voted for Mélenchon.
The danger from the far-right
The National Front/FN vote, though not as high as some opinion polls suggested, was high: 6.4 million people, 17.9% of the vote — the fascist party’s highest score in a presidential election. They seem to have done well among working-class and among young voters.
In 2002 the former leader Jean-Marie Le Pen caused shock waves when he won through to the second round with 16.9% of the vote. 2002 saw a relatively low turnout for the first round of 79.1%: 4.8 million people voted for him in the first round, 5.5 million in the second round where he was trounced by Jacques Chirac winning the votes of almost everyone else on the political spectrum.
The FN was knocked back after that, although in the 2007 election they still managed to win 3.8 million votes (10.4%).
One thing that has changed since then is the character of the main right-wing party, the UMP (the party is itself a merger of predecessor parties). Chirac, particularly in the second round in 2002, standing as Rassemblement pour la République/Rally for the Republic, presented himself as a president for all French people. Sarkozy is a far more abrasive politician, showily patriotic, anti-immigration and anti-immigrant, hostile to “les banlieues” (poorer suburbs), and rude about the people who live there.
Against this general hardening of the stance of the right in France, the 2012 vote represents an advance for the FN. During the election campaign they posed as the true choice of right-wing voters.
Their election promises and themes included:
* Leaving the euro
* Scrapping the Common Agricultural Policy
* Leaving the Schengen zone and reducing legal immigration to just 10,000 people a year
* Protecting and re-building industry and privileging “native-born” [white French] people for new jobs created
A poll suggests that Le Pen’s voters will split in the second round roughly half to Sarkozy and 25% to Hollande.
Going into the second round, Sarkozy will have to win a large proportion of those who voted for the National Front/FN. He set out his stall the day after the first round, declaring on Monday 23 April that he would organise a festival for “real work” in central Paris on 1 May, to rival the traditional trade union celebrations of workers’ day. This throwing down the gauntlet to the workers’ movement should be countered vigorously.
Some of the FN’s increased vote may be attributed to a more presentable candidate. Marine Le Pen, replacing her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, gave her campaign a smoother, less visibly fascistic, tone.
As with the rise of the far-right Xrisi Aygi (Golden Dawn) in Greece, the FN score shows that popular anger against the crisis can be channelled in far-right and nationalist as well as left-wing and internationalist directions.
The far-right can be undercut and defeated only by an effective left.
