French Elections: Heads Bosses Win, Tails Workers Lose

PARIS, June 18 — Whatever the outcome of the June 17 second round of legislative elections, the workers will be the losers based on French bosses’ plans A and B.

Plan A is a socialist government intended to disarm workers as the bosses continue to attack using austerity plans to please the finance capitalists who own France’s sovereign debt. 

The first round of legislative elections on June 10 showed that Socialist Party president François Hollande succeeded in mobilizing working-class voters with a few crumbs. By decree, he “generously” restored retirement at 60 for workers who began working before age 18 and who have worked continuously for 41 years. The head of France’s largest union, the General Confederation of Labour, hailed this mini-measure as an historic “European event.”

Other mini-measures are a 25 percent hike in back-to-school aid for low-income families’ school supplies; a promised 1 percent increase in the minimum wage in July; and wage and benefit limits for public-sector company bosses.

Only 56 percent of the voters went to the polls, a record low. However, enough working-class voters did cast ballots to put the Socialists in the leading position for the elections’ second round in which Hollande won a majority in the National Assembly. This would allow the Socialists to rule without their junior partners in the Green and Left Front parties.

However, Hollande is dispelling any illusions about his future policies. He warned the Greeks — prior to their June 17 balloting — that “if the impression is given that the Greeks want to distance themselves from the [austerity] commitments they have made and to abandon all perspective of economic recovery, then there will be countries that will prefer to end Greek presence in the euro zone” — and then had the gall to pretend he wasn’t threatening Greek workers!

Hollande will not hesitate to impose similar austerity measures on workers. A post-election 50-billion-euro [US $60 billion] cut in workers’ social benefits over the next five years is in his presidential campaign platform.

Hollande is expected to cut spending on labor, ecology, aid to cities, social housing, health care and retirement pensions, and push through another increase in the retirement age, despite the partial return to retirement at 60 for 100,000 workers (of the 600,000 workers retiring at 62 each year).

The Socialist Party program also provides for using half the money saved through government budget cuts to pay off the finance capitalist who won France’s soverign debt, whichs stands at $2.4 trillion. To do this, the Socialists will have to cut $20 billion from governemnt services (with $10 billon going to reduce the budget deficit, and $10 billon going to reduce the soverign debt). If workers rebel against these austerity measures, then it’s:

Plan B 

The Front National finished third in the April 22 presidential elections with 6.4 million votes. Sarkozy’s UMP (Union for a Popular Movement)party has already formed an unofficial alliance with the Front National against the Socialist Party. UMP officials have praised its values and even support Marine Le Pen’s election to the National Assembly. UMP leader Jean-François Copé has called for updating UMP’s program to move it closer to the fascists. 

The fascist Front National has undergone a facelift since Marine Le Pen succeeded her father as party president in 2011. Although she’s smoother than her father, the party program remains fascist. Notably:

   • Militarist — proposing creation of a 50,000-soldier National Guard, presumably to repress worker rebellions, and a naval construction program to fight “Asian navies”;

   • Nationalist — proposing a program to indoctrinate government workers in “the meaning of the state and patriotism”;

   • Racist — proposing “a thorough-going reform of the law on French nationality,” prohibiting public health care for, and demonstrations by and for, undocumented immigrants, and making “anti-French racism” a crime;

   • Repressive — proposing 40,000 new prison cells and reintroducing the death penalty, as well as increasing the punishment for “verbal violence” against cops, doubling the number of anti-crime brigade cops, and filling the streets with plainclothes cops.

Despite this, the Front National has supposedly become respectable. Throughout his five-year term, right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy adopted the positions of the Front National, trying to counter his unpopularity, and thereby popularized its fascist ideas.

The Front National has built a base in the working class. According to an April 2012 opinion poll, in the presidential elections Marine Le Pen won 29 percent of the blue-collar worker vote compared to 27 percent for Socialist Hollande, 19 percent for Sarkozy, and 11 percent for the Left Front.

Historically, this is the weakness of the French left. There’s been no tradition of disruption of fascist marches, rallies and meetings, while for decades the Front National has been able to hold profascist “Joan of Arc rallies” on May Day in Paris.

Right now the bosses are relying on Plan A — a Socialist government to impose austerity measures on the working class. If working-class rebellion threatens that agenda, Plan B can move to outright fascism, possibly through a joint UMP-Front National government.

The future holds very bitter struggles for the working class. The only way to ensure victory is to build a revolutionary communist party to destroy capitalism and the fascism that capitalism breeds.