After delaying for months, President Emmanuel Macron has finally told the French people directly that he is ignoring their votes. In July parliamentary elections, they put the left-wing New Popular Front (NPF) coalition in first place, but on Thursday Macron named right-wing figure Michel Barnier as the country’s next prime minister.
Barnier is affiliated with the fourth-place party, the conservative Les Républicains. He is a career politician, having served in several cabinets since the early 1990s, being minister of the environment, minister for EU affairs, foreign minister, and agriculture minister under various presidents. Most recently, he was the European Union’s Brexit negotiator.
Macron cobbled together enough votes in the National Assembly for Barnier by securing the support of the fascist National Rally party of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella—the very forces he previously pledged to fight.
The president presented his Ensemble/Renaissance party as the anti-fascist option in the elections this summer, but he allied with National Rally in late August as part of a scheme to keep the labor-backed NPF out of power.
Against all political common sense, Macron called the elections after National Rally emerged as the biggest single party in the EU parliamentary vote in June. Formerly known as the National Front, the party was founded in 1972 by anti-Semite and Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen to unite the extreme nationalist right.
Though it has tried to paper over its neo-Nazi roots, the party maintains its strong anti-immigrant positions, and members are frequently outed as racists in the press. Like fascist parties elsewhere in Europe, National Rally has also taken steps to make itself amenable to the neoliberal ideology of the capitalist ruling class. It has ditched its perennial anti-EU stance and accepted the euro currency, for instance.
Relying on its support is not a problem for the centrist Macron, it would seem, so long as the NPF is blocked and big business is kept happy.
NPF is an alliance of four left parties—the French Communist Party (PCF), La France Insoumise (France Unbowed, or LFI, the party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon), the center-left Socialist Party (PS), and Les Écologistes (a green environmentalist party)—that put aside their differences and united to form an anti-fascist front.
It had the backing of organized labor, progressive social movements, women’s groups, and climate justice activists. The 150-point NPF program included major taxes on the country’s biggest fortunes, huge investments in public services and housing, the repeal of Macron’s unpopular “pension reform” that raised the retirement age, price freezes to combat inflation, a rejection of EU austerity rules, an increase in the minimum wage, and much more.
Together, the NPF parties beat the predictions of pundits and knocked the National Rally into third place. Macron’s group, Ensemble/Renaissance, came up the middle and secured second. Coming in first gave the NPF the legal right to nominate a PM and cabinet. Openly defying voters, however, Macron spent weeks peddling one excuse after another to delay appointing Lucie Castets, the NPF’s choice.
Spokespersons for the Elysée Palace, Macron’s official residence, claimed last week that a government formed by the NPF would “immediately have a majority of more than 350 MPs against it, effectively preventing it from acting.”
While trying to paint an image of the NPF lacking popular support, what Macron was really admitting was that he had put his party’s members of parliament into an alliance with the fascists. In the 577-member National Assembly, the only way to get “a majority of 350 MPs against” the NPF is to add Macron’s 159 seats with the fascists’ 142 and Barnier’s Les Républicains’ 61—for a total of 362.
Macron didn’t openly admit at the time that he was working with the right wing, but the math provided by his own office shows he joined forces with Le Pen to install Barnier. The anti-immigrant stance that the new PM took while running for president in 2021, when he said immigration was “out of control,” no doubt helped convince National Rally to support him. Le Pen declared that her party is “waiting to see” what policies Barnier will put forward and what “compromises” he will make with them on the budget.
Predictably, the NPF coalition partners have all strongly rejected Macron’s coup from above.
A Thursday editorial in L’Humanité, newspaper of the French Communist Party (PCF), said Barnier “represents the old world and the continuity of Macronist policy.”
PCF Senator Pierre Ouzoulias called Barnier “the minority candidate of a minority party, appointed by a defeated president, in the service of…anti-social policy.” He said the appointment is a “terrible blow to democracy and the French people.”
The party’s national secretary, Fabien Roussel, said that Barnier is “the antithesis of the message sent in the legislative elections.” For Macron to choose him and pass over the NPF’s nominee is nothing less than “a middle finger to the French people.”
“I am very angry, like millions of French voters who I think feel betrayed,” said Castets. “The president is placing himself in cohabitation with the National Rally,” she said, vowing to table a motion of no confidence against Barnier.
The Socialist Party pointed out that Barnier and his party did not join in the effort to save the Republic from fascism and that Macron’s undemocratic actions signal “a crisis of the regime.”
“Macron was looking for a clone capable of continuing the policy he has been pursuing for seven years,” said Marine Tondelier, leader of the Ecologists party. “He found him in Michel Barnier.”
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, head of La France Insoumise, the largest party in the NPF, said the president has “stolen an election.” He also highlighted Barnier’s past record, which includes voting against the decriminalization of homosexuality and overriding a popular referendum to shove the European Constitution through parliament almost 20 years ago.
The General Confederation of Labor—the CGT, France’s biggest trade union central—laid responsibility for Barnier’s appointment at the feet of the capitalist class. Rallying outside the headquarters of the country’s leading bosses’ organization—the Movement of the Enterprises of France, MEDEF—Friday morning, union members declared France has experienced a “democratic abduction.”
Pasting posters across the façade of MEDEF’s building proclaiming “Increase in salaries,” “Repeal the pension reform,” and other labor slogans, workers fought with staff who came outside to try to stop their protest. The workers prevailed, and the posters went up.
Cédric Caubère, general secretary of the CGT for the Haute-Garonne area, said that Macron “is giving MEDEF a run for its money and is putting the country in the hands of the National Rally.”
The demonstration at MEDEF, Caubère said, is only the beginning, a “symbolic action” of what will come soon. “What is important for workers is not the name of the Prime Minister, but the policies implemented…. We demand the implementation of the program of the New Popular Front.”
All eyes are now on the NPF leaders and the trade unions to see what their next move will be in the battle to save French democracy.
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