Unfortunately for Macron, his scheme came to nought. Following local deals ahead of the second round of voting, the left's New Popular Front and Ensemble formed a "Republican Front" alliance by withdrawing candidates in favour of who was best placed to beat the RN. It proved successful. The far right were shocked by their third place finish and 142 seats, vs the centrists' 159 and the left's 180. Though, like Britain, it was the gaming of the electoral system that ensured this outcome: the RN out-polled both in absolute vote terms.
Not getting the result he wanted, Macron has since played a petulant game - severely shaking the legitimacy of French "democracy" and exposing the reality of the state more effectively than any number of public readings of The State and Revolution. The left's policies, which included ending arms sales to Israel and recognising Palestine, price freezes on essentials, the rejection of neoliberal "fiscal rules", and abolition of the Fifth Republic, are not in the interests of the class forces Macron champions. Instead of appointing a new PM from the NPF, he vetoed their participation in any new government.
This is where Barnier comes in. His Republicans continued their historic decline, having had their base previously shredded by Macron and Le Pen, and limped into the Assembly with 39 seats. With this feeble force allied to Ensemble a centre right government under Barnier's leadership can pick up seamlessly where the old one left off. Le Monde reports that Macron has been on the blower to Le Pen for a week trying to come up with a candidate she finds congenial. She acquiesced to Barnier because he's a "negotiator" and might be amenable to RN's influence, seeing as the Barnier/Macron lash up remains a minority government. But it suits Le Pen for a few other reasons. Playing kingmaker consolidates the motherly, elder stateswoman image she has cultivated in recent years. Vibing sensibility might detoxify her just enough to push her (or her successor) over the line at the next presidential election. Similarly, by staying outside of government the RN can present itself as unsullied - which defeats Macron's reason for calling the election in the first place. And lastly, it keeps the left out of office. Their social programme threatens to undercut the bases of far right support. It would be the kiss of death for the RN to hold out against price controls and social housing building programmes, for example.
What's in it for Macron? Because his alliance with Barnier means more authoritarian austerity, he thinks enough of a cordon sanitaire has been maintained for Macron's successor and Ensemble to try and play the Republican Front card again at the presidentials in the hope they will be in the run off against the RN. At the same time, he will be daring them to vote down his minority government's measures because the alternative - the dread left - is too frightful to contemplate. And as a result become tarnished by the dark deeds Barnier can look forward to overseeing in the coming years, as per his original design.
As far as the left is concerned, the discipline the alliance of the Socialist Party, the Greens, the Communist Party, and Jean-Luc Melanchon's La France Insoumise has demonstrated is remarkable. Macron has failed to break the Socialists from their more radical stablemates - a rare instance of the left realising that it needs to hang together, or it would assuredly hang separately. But this moment of danger is also one of historic opportunity. With the centrists, the right, and the far right manoeuvring to keep the NPF out of office they could capitalise on anti-establishment discontent. Big demonstrations against Macron's constitutional outrages are set for this weekend, and more of the same old from Barnier could, as per Macron's hopes, undermine the RN. But it wouldn't necessarily be the centrists who are best placed to benefit. It could be the left.
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6 comments:
The last time the seventy-three year old Barnier submitted to the indignity of election by the people was for he European Parliament in 2009. He hasn't been a délégué in the Assemblée Nationale since 1993. I find it extraordinary that a Prime Minister should be appointed that lacks this essential qualification.
Well, we see here what happens when "centrists" can no longer get elected, don't we?
If they can't keep both the soft left and the far right out, then they try to form alliances of convenience with the far right so that they can rule unelected.
When forced to choose between the far right and any kind of left at all, w.r.t the current Overton Window (i.e. the left edge and "centre" keep moving rightwards), then owners of property rights and their state lackeys tend to pick the former.
When they haven't been suitably scared within living memory, they will do this even when it's obviously suicidal. Collectively, they are not sufficiently intelligent to realise that allowing power to the soft left and some leftward movement of the Overton Window might actually be better for them than allowing the slavering id-monsters of the right (and more rarely, of the extreme left) to take control. The last time that they proved able to make the correct decision in such a pinch was in the mid 20th Century, when they had been suitably terrified by both the October Revolution and the consequences of ascendant fascism in central Europe.
So, how do sell socialism to the petit bourgeoisie?
Marcon will probably use the alliance with Le Pen to get Barnier as PM, as the basis to drive the wedge he wants between the Socialists and the rest of the Left. If that rotten bloc breaks apart it will be no bad thing, in the end, though it would have been better not to form it in the first place, and it would, now, be better for the Left to be the ones dissolving it, not having it foisted on them, much as with the way the Stalinists waited and waited inside the KMT, until such time as Chiang Kai Shek was ready to launch his coup, and slaughter them.
Melonchon is left, now, having helped the Macronists into parliament, having to mobilise demonstrations against them! But, as Sraid Marx, notes, it shows again where the real strength of workers resides. Its not in bourgeois elections, even ones less fraudulent than those just undertaken in France and Britain, but in their economic and social power in the workplaces, and their communities. It was shown in Britain, the other week when workers and their organisations turned out on mass to face down the far right thugs, where the capitalist police had failed to do so.
Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. Fascism is inherent in both of them, and it never arises except by their joint enterprise.
While pre-existing conservative phenomena have been known to ally with Fascism, usually to their own ruin, it is the liberal bourgeoisie that keeps Fascism in reserve for when it might ever face any serious demand to share its economic or social power with anyone who did not have it before the rise of the bourgeois liberal order, or to share its cultural or political power with anyone at all.
And now, Michel Barnier, who is arguably better-known in Britain and certainly in Brussels, has been made Prime Minister of France by Emmanuel Macron because that is who Marine Le Pen wants, or can at least work with, to keep out the New Popular Front that came first at the only relatively recent legislative elections. Barnier himself comes from a kind of Old Centrist legacy party that came fourth.
But a Fascist movement never gets anywhere unless it has been at least cultivated and often directly created by that sort and by Macron's, they will always back it against the Left because that is why they have it, and no Fascist has ever come to power except by some form of that arrangement, nor ever will. It is downright stereotypical for the final stage before official Fascism to be placeholding by one last aged centrist authoritarian from the old elite. Cheered on by Keir Starmer and by his Westminster Village fan club, here we are. Think on.
I thought it was the case though that the RN could veto any policy that they did not like.
i.e. the RN have veto over any potential Barnier stitch-ups.
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