Macron’s neoliberalism moved country toward fascist abyss, leading to left’s surge in support

Sophie Binet, general secretary of France's largest labor federation, the CGT. In an interview Thursday, July 11, 2024, with France Inter broadcaster, Binet called for massive protests against what she says is President Emmanuel Macron’s denial of legislative election results that entitle the labor-backed New Popular Front coalition the right to form a government. | Thibault Camu / AP

PARIS—“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” wrote Yeats in “The Second Coming,” but he might as well have been covering the just completed French elections.

The mainstream media are describing the mixed results of the National Assembly, the principal French lawmaking body, as “hung” or even validating President Emmanuel Macron’s judgment to call a snap election after the defeat of his party in the European Parliament vote.

However, the fact of the matter is that the left – in the form of the New Popular Front coalition – now controls the most seats in the Assembly, standing approximately 100 seats away from having one of its leaders appointed Prime Minister. A remarkable turnaround from just a week before, when it looked as if the far-right candidate Jordan Bardella was on the threshold of heading the government on behalf of the Le Pen party, the National Rally (NR), in “cohabitation” with Macron.

A clear trend in the election is that the French are fed up with Macron’s neoliberal “reforms,” a program that under the guise of securing foreign investment and creating jobs amounted to a vicious and continuous attack on working people, those on the edge of the cities, and small businesses.

Macron’s major “reform” in his first term was rewriting the labor laws promoting precarity over work security by making it much easier to hire and fire. His major reform in his second term was extending the age of retirement from 62 to 64. In a society where, because of the earlier reform, workers are being laid off at an earlier age, many around 55, with a decreasing possibility of being rehired, they now have to scrape together a livelihood for two additional years, a drain on themselves and their families.

Macron also canceled the wealth tax, imposed a tax on gasoline that prompted the Gilets jaunes (yellow vests) rebellion, and continually used provision 49.3 to pass laws unilaterally, many of them budgetary, in the Assembly. The use of this provision upset all the other parties and was an abrogation of the main power of any legislative body dating back in European legal history to the Magna Carta, the power of the purse, that is to control the budget.

See our earlier report: Macron on the throne: French president takes neoliberal path

The far right has taken advantage of this neoliberal attack on so much of society in the name of increasing the wealth of the rich and the most powerful corporations, and now controls much of the countryside. The electoral map after both rounds of the current election outside the major cities is all brown, the NR color.

Much like far-right parties throughout the West, the NR has succeeded with an anti-immigrant platform that stirs hatred and animosity and promises little else, despite the fact that it is immigrants who constitute the workforce most likely to pay into the French welfare system. The party’s economic platform, such as it is, skews remarkably close to Macron’s and is, if anything, even more business friendly.

The NR gives the appearance of being concerned with ameliorating the worst effects of a still biting inflation, but it promises to raise the money for this protection by cutting France’s contribution to the European Union, whose subsidies benefit one of the NR’s core constituencies, farmers.

The party also, despite its policy of normalization, called “dédiabolisation,” still has at its core a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBTQ faction. During the campaign, violence was unleashed against these elements, violence that, had the NR dominated the legislature, would most likely have increased, along with a strengthening of police violence against these populations.

The program of the New Popular Front, on the other hand, rolls back many of Macron’s reforms, including resetting the pension age to 60 and abolishing his automated system for allocating spaces in Frances élite universities, accused of simply fostering inequality in education.

The left alliance consists also of the Communist, Socialist, and Green parties, along with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (La France Insoumise, LFI). Its three-phase program of technologizing the economy will raise the minimum wage and has already halted Macron’s attack on unemployment insurance and his Bill Clinton-style cutting of the welfare ranks.

The left will pay for these programs by increasing taxes on the wealthiest individuals and corporations, a program which the business press has termed “reckless” and “alarming.” The program also calls for a new constitution and more specifically annulling the extremely undemocratic 49.3.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Macron and the center’s—in reality center-right’s—main enemy is not the far right but the actual reforms of the left. Macron, after swearing this would never happen, even worked with the NR to pass his restrictive immigration “reform” and claimed that should the New Popular Front come to power its platform to correct his heightening of inequality in the country would lead to “civil war.”

While members of the three center parties helped form the dam or “barrage” to defeat the NR, both Macron and another centrist party leader Édouard Phillippe, the mayor of Le Havre, urged voters not to vote for the New Popular Front even in districts where the party opposed the NR.

A key accusation leveled against the LFI component of the alliance and its leader Mélenchon is that because of his criticism of the Zionist genocidal attack on Gaza he is anti-Semitic. Both centrist leaders, though, often ignored the open anti-Semitism of the NR, whose roots, despite the dédiabolisation, trace back to Pétain’s France which collaborated with the Fascist Germans in Jewish extermination during World War II.

Although the mainstream press is already quaking at the prospect of a France led by the New Popular Front, the numbers indicate that there is a chance, if the left coalition holds, for members of Macron’s Ensemble Party, some of whom are ex-Socialists, to join the coalition, which would then have the 289 members required to necessitate the appointment of its candidate as the Prime Minister, the figure who would direct the legislature and promote the left agenda. During the campaign, one Ensemble candidate claimed he still had a lot in common with the left, including favoring taxing the rich.

The left would not only then have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat but also halted the center-right trend that instead of aiding the country pushes it ever closer to the fascist abyss.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Dennis Broe

Dennis Broe, a film, television and art critic, is also the author of the Harry Palmer LA Mysteries. His latest novel, The Dark Ages, focuses on McCarthyite repression in Los Angeles in the 1950s.