https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/the-french-fight-back-against-corporate
Vive la France!
Jul 08, 2024

So the French equivalent of Jeremy Corbyn has won the French election. Thoughts and prayers to every journalist who was hoping Marine Le Pen would win so they could spend the next five years blaming the left for the rise of the far right and pretending to be mad about it!

I guess it’s similar to how they pretend to hate Farage while platforming him every three seconds to raise his profile. They claim they’re platforming Farage to challenge his ideas, but strangely, they never platform the left to challenge our ideas. They love telling us the far right is on course for unprecedented success and the left is on course for crushing defeat, if they even mention us at all.

NOTE: When I use the terms “left” and “right”, I’m doing so because of their familiarity, but when I say “left”, I primarily mean “anti-establishment” and when I say “right”, I primarily mean “pro-establishment”. Some politicians claim to be anti-establishment or left wing while serving corporate interests and they are not on my side. Ordinary people who call themselves right wing because they believe in free market economics, but reject the establishment and fascism are okay with me.

Just a week ago, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally was supposedly on course to win the French election. Just a week ago, Starmer’s Labour was supposed to take 45% of the vote and Farage’s Reform party was supposed to take 17 seats.

The difference in the UK is Labour stopped campaigning in Reform seats to throw everything at the Greens and the Gaza bloc. It tried to boost the far right and stop the left and it failed badly. In France, Macron’s Ensemble worked strategically with the New Popular Front, withdrawing candidates in key seats to stop the National Rally.

For all the shortcomings of French centrists, they appear to have seen sense at the last moment. However, I’m sceptical they are suddenly adopting progressive values. I suspect they were concerned the National Rally would prove better at punishing refugees and they would lose credibility across the political spectrum. In other words, this was just opportunism.

We’ve all seen how centrists treat the left - just look at how viciously they went after Bernie Sanders for congratulating Corbyn on his victory. Bernie has spent recent years pandering to the establishment after decades as an independent, only to get no thanks. When centrists welcome progressives and socialists, it’s never to work cooperatively with them, it’s always to neuter them. They will just as happily do what Starmer did to Corbyn.

At this point, I’m unsure if pretending to be progressive is in or out of fashion, but either way, don’t fall for the bullshit. All centrists care about is power - the route to power is largely irrelevant. They will say whatever they think key voters want to hear, which is why they are so fond of focus groups. Who cares what the majority want if a few thousand voters in swing constituents want something else?

Marine Le Pen offered to save France by banning the hijab (which is ironic because I thought she wanted to see fewer Muslim faces), but let’s not forget Macron’s mob have been fining women for wearing the keffiyeh. The National Rally is so repugnant that one candidate promised to stop making racist jokes if she was elected in Puy-de-Dôme. But Ensemble is just the respectable face of xenophobia.

Both parties appeal to the lowest common denominator because they are two brands of fascism - one will go all the way, and the other will go no further than it needs to. Such people have nothing to say about the power structures in society and how they’re the cause of deprivation. If we can start a conversation about that, and put an end to the culture war, we might actually improve people’s lives.

The Times recently ran a headline saying: “Don’t replace the culture war with a class war”. If you’re fighting a culture war on either side, you are in the way of class consciousness and doing the establishment’s bidding. Instead of bickering, let’s talk about organising to achieve structural change because that is not going to be easy.

The New Popular Front alliance of parties led by Francois Hollande and Jean-Luc Melenchelon is now the largest group in French politics, but it does not have enough seats to form an absolute majority. This could pose problems, but whatever happens next, the new situation is a major improvement.

French voters have been increasingly turned off by Macron’s leadership and one likely factor was Macron’s sabre-rattling over Russia. People who wave Ukraine flags, but know nothing about Ukraine, might think World War III sounds like our best option, but the majority of the public do not. Macron’s apparent determination to pit two nuclear powers against each other is a massive turn off.

The French left stands with the Ukrainian people to help them achieve peace and I would say the chances of a peace deal have shot up significantly, thanks to this result.

As much as it’s easy to criticise French voters who backed Le Pen, it’s worth remembering, many are just fed up and didn’t see a better option. Le Pen was at least smart enough to see that feeding French boys into the meat grinder was not a vote winner. The centrists offered the worst of all worlds: longer working hours, older retirement age, fewer rights, more war, and violent crackdown on protests. People will inevitably look elsewhere when that is on offer and it’s unfortunate some look in the wrong direction.

If the New Popular Front delivers for the people, many Le Pen supporters will be won over, but success will not come easily because without a majority, there will be compromise with a party two-thirds of France hates. This is not a situation from which you can expect miracles.

The three-way split in France is not dissimilar to the four-way split in the UK, but in our rigged system, one party took almost all of the seats and anti-establishment voices were marginalised. I assume the British journalists who said we should engage with right-wing concerns when Farage had no seats are going to say the same about the left, now we have nine seats, right?

The irony is the media engages with the right when it comes to their scapegoats like foreigners and the unemployed, but never when it comes to meeting the material needs of the working class. On that front, the left offers far better representation than the right ever will, but we can only win them over by delivering structural change and making it work.

The media, of course, are desperate for the new French government to fail. British journalists are talking of the “instability” and “chaos” that will ensue, following Le Pen’s shock loss. Mass protests across France didn’t count as “chaos” and “instability”. A parliament that accurately reflects society is much worse than one where the party with 1/3 of the votes gets 2/3 of the seats. The media aren’t even pretending to care about political representation, are they?

We were told Reform would take far more seats than they actually took and the possibility of the Greens and independents taking seats was hardly mentioned. Journalists love creating self-fulfilling prophecies and it must scare the shit out of them that their power is waning. Thank god for independent media.

I’m now dreaming of an anti-establishment coalition in the UK to bring an end to our rigged system. If you think new parties can’t win, consider the New Popular Front was set up just a month ago. Yes, it’s a coalition of parties, rather than a single entity, but it’s a new brand that was not expected to win.

With the New Popular Front, and the Gaza bloc in the UK, I’m hoping we can change the conversation on Israel’s genocide and nuclear brinksmanship with Russia and China. Hopefully, we can build a consensus to respect international law and honour peace treaties, saving many lives in the process. The media will, of course, do its utmost to prevent this from happening.

Independents like Leanne Mohamed, who came within 500 votes of unseating Wes Streeting, have already been erased from the conversation. Such people must be stopped from gaining traction because the far right and the sensibles who pretend to be progressives prioritise one thing: corporate interests.

People are opening their eyes to this and realising that labels like “left” and “right”, as hard as they are to avoid, are not particularly helpful. The real fight is the 99% versus the 1%.

The coming years are going to be a learning experience for so many who think they’ve won something with Starmer’s victory. The people who’ve spent eight years saying “get the Tories out” (because politics started in 2016 with Brexit) are very confused now that the Tories are out and the Tory policies remain.

For example, Liz Kendall is already telling us how badly she is going to fuck over disabled people. Centrists can’t help revealing their true face, which is why we have Tony Blair warning Starmer to not be seen as “woke” and to introduce ID cards to stop immigrants.

Yay, we got the Tories ou… Oh…

The Gaza bloc offers hope because it’s essentially a party without the party label. It could easily become an actual party though, one with the resources and coordination to make a much bigger impact if Corbyn is involved. If the Greens and the Socialist Campaign Group could be tempted to join forces with the independents and other small parties, we could have about 40 MPs overnight. We could be a political force that prioritises democratisation, peace, and environmentalism. Our electoral system does not work for us because it’s not supposed to, but there is still a chance we can change that. Let’s keep on fighting like the French.