The final results of the French elections were an “unexpected blow” to the “far right,” the Washington Post claimed July 7, declaring the result “one of the greatest political upsets in recent French history.”
Like much of the capitalist media, the same outlet had predicted an unprecedented victory for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, which they called the “far right.” Le Pen’s party won the largest share in the first-round vote while a bloc of parties that backed President Emmanuel Macron came in a distant third.
In reality, little occurred that was unexpected. Following Macron’s first- round defeat, parties on the left in the New Popular Front formed an alliance with Macron. Together they withdrew candidates for some 200 seats where they had come in third to create an anti-Le Pen bloc. Days before the vote, Macron’s prime minister, Gabriel Attal, urged people to vote for whoever was most likely to prevent a National Rally majority.
The New Popular Front includes the Socialist, Communist and Green parties, along with Jean-Luc Melenchon’s France Unbowed and smaller far left groups. These forces have little in common, other than a fervent desire to unite against the “far right.” They won the most seats in the second round, 182, but still far short of the 289 needed for a majority. Macron’s Ensemble came in second with 168 seats and National Rally third with 143, up from the 88 it held previously.
The 66% voter turnout was the biggest since 1997. Still, one-third of French voters stayed home.
Viewed through the prism of today’s capitalist politics with its world of parties of the left and right, media coverage of the election largely ignored the deep crisis facing working people in France, the only real way to explain the vote.
Swings away from ruling parties occurred in both France and the U.K., alongside last year’s vote in the Netherlands that ousted 14-year incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte, as well as results that punished those in power in elections for the European Parliament in June. These votes reflect the desire of tens of millions of working people to be rid of parties that have held office for years while workers have faced ruinous price rises, stifling regulations imposed under the rubric of “climate change,” growing uncertainty about the future and increasing threats of new armed conflicts and a third world war.
But the only choices on offer were capitalist parties of different hues. New governments are being formed that guarantee the continued domination of the ruling capitalist families and the bosses’ assaults on workers and farmers.
The crisis workers confront isn’t a product of the clashes between the left and right of capitalist politics. It’s bred by dog-eat-dog capitalist exploitation and wars. The only answer is a working-class road forward — building and strengthening unions, advancing working-class solidarity, and, most importantly, breaking with all the parties of the bosses and building a party of labor. It would organize working people in our tens of millions to fight to defend our class interests and to take political power into our own hands.
Rival capitalist rulers in Europe and worldwide are engaged in sharp struggle with each other for markets and to defend their interests amid mounting instability in the imperialist world. The only road for the rulers to shore up their profits is to deepen efforts to make working people pay, attacks that lead workers to look for a road to resist.
Following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, each of the continent’s rival ruling classes have been driven to transform their dilapidated military forces and to look for new alliances. Despite recent hikes in military spending, the size of the armed forces of Europe’s main imperialist powers — France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. — continues to shrink.
Crisis hits workers in France
Last year the official French inflation rate hit a 40-year high, with real wages dropping 7.6% in 2022. The number of people who rely on food aid is now between 2 million and 4 million. Like elsewhere across the imperialist world, it’s harder for workers to start families. The birth rate in France in 2023 was almost 20% lower than in 2010.
None of this deterred Macron from imposing a raise in the retirement age from 62 to 64 last year. In response, French union federations held one-day work stoppages and demonstrations that were joined by hundreds of thousands.
In these conditions, Le Pen’s National Rally attracted votes across the country, including in rural areas where vital services — schools, train stations and post offices — have closed down and where medical care is getting harder to find.
Beginning in late 2018, tens of thousands of working people in rural areas and cities took to the streets for months, angered by the disdain shown them by Macron’s government and its efforts to protect the position and profits of the country’s capitalist rulers. The yellow vest protesters, as they were known, were responding to his government’s imposition of a new fuel tax and broader assaults on living standards.
Le Pen has transformed National Rally from its origins in France’s ultra-right into a parliamentary party vying for office against its capitalist rivals.
Nothing in the record vote for National Rally signifies a shift to the far right by working people. Claims by liberals and middle-class left groups that National Rally is “fascist” are both false and dangerous. Just as similar claims about former President Donald Trump in the U.S. are.
History shows that fascist outfits can grow significantly when sections of the rulers turn to them when they fear their rule is threatened by rising revolutionary struggle. Fascist thugs are funded and unleashed to target the labor movement and scapegoat Jews, communists and other militants. But this isn’t happening today in any imperialist country.
The terms “fascist” or “far right” are used as epithets for conservative parties by liberals and the left. They urge collaboration with “non-fascist” capitalist parties — like Macron’s — to steer working people away from relying on ourselves, to keep us from organizing independently of the bosses’ parties.
The rule of the capitalist class is the source of the problems workers face. Crucial to uniting workers is combating today’s rise in Jew-hatred, including growing attacks on Jews in France. The main protagonists aren’t fascist gangs, but supporters of Hamas’ bloody Oct. 7 pogrom against Jews in Israel.
This anti-working-class course is exemplified by Melenchon. France Unbowed called Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” caused by Israel’s “policy of occupation of Gaza,” rather than the Jew-hating massacre it was. Melenchon claims Israel’s war to prevent more pogroms is “genocide.”
Workers everywhere know our class faces a crisis today. A road forward requires gaining class-struggle experience, developing working-class consciousness and study of the great revolutions of the 20th century, led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia and Fidel Castro in Cuba.
Whatever government comes out of talks between the New Popular Front and other capitalist forces, at the forefront of the challenges facing workers in France — like workers in the U.S. and elsewhere — is the need to establish a working-class party of their own.