https://anotherangryvoice.substack.com/p/starmer-heed-warning-france-macron

Keir Starmer's rise is remarkably similar to Emmanuel Macron's in France, and if he's continues with his project of making Tory austerity permanent he's going to be heading for a similar downfall.
Another Angry Voice
Jul 06, 2024

Keir Starmer’s ascension into the top job with an unprecedented majority is remarkably similar to Emmanuel Macron’s triumph in 2017.

They both sabotaged the left-wing party from within.

Starmer destroyed Labour’s 2019 election chances by labelling them "the party of remain" and lumbering them with the unsellable policy of relitigating Brexit with a "sore loser" referendum, gifting scores of Labour’s vital "Red Wall" constituencies to Boris Johnson’s Tories.

Macron helped make François Hollande’s socialist government deeply unpopular with their own supporter base by steering them towards the economic hard-right, before quitting as a minister, and from the party, to run his own rival election campaign in 2017.

They both benefited dramatically from unprecedented collapses in the vote share of major parties.

Macron stormed into power with an unprecedented mega-majority for his new En Marche party as both the French socialists and the French conservatives recorded all-time record lows in 2017.

Keir Starmer won a similarly massive majority despite losing 600,000 Labour votes from the last election, because the Tories lost over half of the 14 million votes they got in 2019, recording the worst election performance in their entire history.

They both had a remarkably easy ride from capitalist media

The worst the French right-wing media could come up with was ridiculing Macron over the fact his wife was far older than him, and Starmer was allowed to play politics on easy mode for four years in opposition, with virtually no scrutiny of his dishonesty or his dictatorial tendencies.

For example Starmer was endlessly allowed to claim he’d "fixed the Labour antisemitism issue" with zero pushback from capitalist media hacks, while simultaneously abusing and expelling more Jews from the Labour Party than any of his predecessors!

Given the tsunamis of capitalist media hate and smears towards their predecessors like Hollande and Corbyn, it was astonishing to see Macron and Starmer face little more than inconsequential personal vitriol like "his wife is really old" and "he bought his parents a donkey field".

They both pretended to occupy"centrist" political territory to hide their hard-right economic agendas.

Macron endlessly portrayed himself as a "centrist" but behind the scenes he was fixated with with bringing in wildly unpopular labour reforms to make life much worse for French workers, and profits much higher for French capitalists (remember the yellow vests protests and the brutal police repression they faced?).

Despite all the Starmer adoration from the "centrist" commentariat, the central pillars of Starmer’s project are the unmistakably right-wing objectives of making Tory austerity cuts permanent, and protecting the interests of the privatisation profiteers who are bleeding British families, and the British economy dry with their insatiable greed.

The big difference of course is that Starmer is at the beginning of his stint in power, while Macron has already lost his parliamentary majority (thanks to his own ridiculous temper tantrum) and now faces a final few years as an isolated and deeply unpopular President, while the resurgent unified French left and the depraved extreme-right Le Pen family cabal battle it out for France’s future.

Two of the big reasons Macron has wound up in this mess is his insistence on pushing wildly unpopular right-wing economic reforms, and his decision to imitate and legitimise the hateful xenophobic rhetoric of his extreme-right rivals, rather than tackling it head on.

Starmer is just as committed to unpopular right-wing economics like making austerity permanent and further privatising the NHS, and his inexplicable rabble-rousing against Bangladeshis during the election campaign illustrated his preference for imitating and legitimising extreme-right xenophobia, rather than countering it.

Both of these men rose to power as a result of the breakdown of traditional voter loyalties, and Macron has now found out the hard way that he’s subject to the exact same forces that brought him to power in the first place, after voters have abandoned his project in their millions.

He didn’t deliver for the people who actually elected him, so now his party is crawling home in a distant third place.

The warning signs are obvious for Labour.

They’ve already lost 3.2 million voters since the high point of 12.9 million in 2017, and losing anything close to that number again would leave Starmer’s project in the same desperate position that Rishi Sunak’s Tories are in now (especially if Farage’s mob and whatever’s left of the Tories form an electoral alliance at the next election).

Traditional voter loyalties are a thing of the past, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned in 2024, it’s that it’s no longer inconceivable that a political party can go from winning a massive majority to collapsing to a thumping defeat at the very next election.

Labour must deliver for the people who elected them in a way that makes material improvements to their lives: Reversing austerity cuts, improving public services, capping obscene rents and rip-off utility bills, building affordable social housing, ending wage repression policies, undoing Tory vandalism of the health and welfare systems …

However Starmer has laid out his intentions to follow the opposite course of serving the interests of capitalists, slumlords, and the mega-rich, while hammering everyone else with permanent austerity and capitalist privatisation profiteering, in the vain hope that doing exactly what the Tories did for 14 years will magically bring economic boom times rather than further stagnation and despair.

And if Starmer sticks with the course he’s laid out, he’s in for the kind of rude awakening that Macron is suffering right now in France.