The electoral success of Jean-Marie Le Pen is a by-product of the crisis of the traditional governing parties in France. To many workers, the record of the Socialist Party prime minister and candidate Lionel Jospin marked him as little different from President Jacques Chirac of the right-wing Gaullist party.

The Socialist Party–led government, in "cohabitation" with Chirac, has headed up wide-ranging attacks on working people, frequently sparking strikes and major protests. In foreign policy, too, there has been little to choose between them. Both supported the commitment of French forces to the imperialist war on and occupation of Afghanistan.

This anti–working class record explains the high abstention rate recorded in the elections. It also points to why some workers, especially those in the most crisis-ridden areas, cast their vote for the National Front. Le Pen’s success in winning the votes of some former Communist Party supporters should come as no surprise. The Stalinist misleaders of the working class, like the social democrats and the union officialdom, espouse nationalist policies that grease the skids for such fascist-minded politicians.

Le Pen is one of a number of rightist figures in the imperialist countries who have built a following by scapegoating immigrants for the ills and injustices of capitalism. They take as their starting point the brutal discrimination leveled at migrant workers by the established parties and their cops. Like other incipient fascists, Le Pen has also begun to etch out anti-Semitic rhetoric as part of his anticapitalist, national socialist demagogy.

Increasing levels of immigration and joint actions by workers of all nationalities have made progress in breaking down these divisions, however. The militant response to the election result by young workers and students, many of them the "non-French" so reviled by Le Pen and his ilk, is an encouraging sign of that fact.

Demagogues like Le Pen inevitably arise as the capitalist crisis appears, and become more important as it evolves. Driven by the laws of capitalist development, the imperialist powers push toward deeper assaults on working people, and toward more open conflicts with each other. As their assaults at home and abroad generate deeper and wider resistance, the capitalists will pour increasing resources into fascist organizations and figures as a battering ram for use against the labor movement and all those who pose a threat to their rule.

Workers and exploited farmers in France should not be drawn into the trap of supporting the Gaullist Chirac against Le Pen. Like all forms of electoral lesser-evilism, this is a dead end. Rather, the most conscious workers must lead the way in building a political movement of working people and the oppressed that can take on the capitalist parties on every terrain.

That is the road to gain self-confidence and to build the kind of leadership and organization that will stand us in good stead for the confrontations that are coming, including the ultimate contest with the capitalist class for political power.
 
 
Related article:
Fed up with main parties, many workers stay away in French poll  
 
 
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