The French lockdown has only been going on half a day and it already feels like a month, an exceptionally stressful month. Meanwhile, we’re all reading online and the French media are carrying Q+As about confinement. Some of the Qs are slightly surprising.
People seem very concerned about walking their dogs. It’s permitted as long as the walk is short and you are alone (apart from the dog, of course). Apparently, in Italy some people have borrowed their neighbours’ dogs to provide a pretext for going out. Not a good idea.
Someone asked Le Monde if they could have a party in their home. Not only is this stupid idea quite correctly forbidden, if you were planning to get married in the next fortnight, you have to postpone.
We all want to know how long this well go on. The present decree runs for a fortnight but can be renewed. It takes a fortnight to be sure that you’re clear of the symptoms apparently. It is quite likely to be prolonged for a further fortnight and there’s even talk of 45 days (Eek!).
Workers who cannot go to work are to be paid 80% pay. There’s a relief package for companies.
Further questions have occurred to me:
There are reports of Cuba having a treatment that has worked against Coronavirus in China. How seriously are governments around the world taking this and how much can be produced?
There are reports that an anti-malarial drug appears to have some effect in France, although there can be side-effects which can be serious for older people. Pharma giant Sanofi says it’s going to hand some over to the French authorities. Is the news and the formula being shared with other countries?
Is the disruption to the economy going to throw globalization into reverse?
Will xenophobia be reinforced among some people and, if so, how many in what age groups, classes and other categories?
The climate crisis has already discredited capitalism in the eyes of many people, especially the young. Will this further discredit it, or will criticism just be confined to austerity and its disastrous effects on health services and other vital services whose value is being proved at the moment?
After two days’ phoney war, the president has opened serious hostilities against the Coronavirus. From midday we are confined to our homes, at pain of a 135-euro fine for unjustified sorties.
Not much social-distancing – pre-lockdown queueing in a Champigny-sur-Marne supermarket on Monday
“We are at war,” Emmanuel Macron told the nation yesterday evening, in a sharp turnaround from the complacency that allowed voting in local council elections to go ahead on Sunday. There was, of course, a record low turnout and the second round has been postponed sine die.
I imagine
there are millions of Coronavirus diaries, in a great many languages, since the
epidemic has put most of the world in the same awful situation, even if
governments’ reactions have varied (I’m looking at you, Boris Johnson!).
Here’s my
two-euros worth, anyway.
I’m
66-years-old and my mother, who lives with me, is 95.
So we’re
both high-risk, her more than me, I suppose.
That makes
our relationship even more interdependent than it already was. If I catch the
virus, which is more likely since she rarely goes out, I will probably pass it
on to her. Should she catch it, she’s pretty much certain to pass it on to me,
since she forgets the recommended precautions and doesn’t really understand what’s
going on.
So we can kill each other if we’re not careful and, frankly, that’s very frightening.
I suppose
that’s true of everybody at the moment, although the young are at less risk,
and it should be a lesson in our responsibilities to each other. The whole crisis
is an incitement both to solidarity – we must behave responsibly so as not to
endanger each other – and selfishness – if someone catches it, how much should
we put ourselves at risk to help them? – and I suspect we all react to it in both
ways at different times.
How seriously
are people taking it all in France?
Anticipating
the lockdown, I went to the shops yesterday. I wasn’t the only panic-buyer. There
were queues in both the chemists and the supermarket – not much social distancing
but quite a few face masks and scarves over the mouth and nose.
Of course
the chemists had no more gloves or masks and at first I was told there was no
hand sanitiser. But then they said that, if I went home and got a bottle, I
could have some. Which I duly did, to be informed that it was strictly rationed
and be charged 3.80 euros for a very modest amount.
Like the
pharmacists, the supermarket till-operators have face masks and plastic gloves.
The queues were long, so we stood there and judged each others’ purchases as we
waited – I did, anyway.
People are clearly
anxious about being confined to their homes – even though they will be allowed out
if they have the necessary paperwork to buy food, walk the dog and even do some
exercise, which strikes me as a major loophole.
I think many
people are taking the virus more seriously now, too.
Our neighbour,
who last week was asking whether the authorities weren’t taking it all a bit too
seriously, is now shut up in her house with two weeks’ supplies.
The election
turnout may have been low last Sunday but, my brother tells me, people in Paris
went out to enjoy the spring weather, many of them failing to keep at
regulation distances from each other. There haven’t been many people in the
streets of the town where I live these last two days, although it’s difficult
to judge if there’s been a big change since Monday is always a quiet day.
As for me,
last week I drove my mother down to the Jura to visit houses with a view to
buying, staying in a hotel, eating in restaurants and, worst of all, shaking
estate agents’ hands.
Now we’re
locked in the house as if the zombie apocalypse were going on outside, although
I will probably exercise my right to go out to buy bread at some point.
Meanwhile,
workers in jobs judged indispensable and impossible to do from home are
exposing themselves to risk for the common good – and to keep earning a living.
Turns out that most of them are low-paid and that many of them are part of that
“privileged” caste whose pension rights will be reduced by the reform that sparked
a big strike movement last year.
And
finally, the health service. It’s in crisis. The government cut 900 million euros
from its budget in 2018.
France’s minister for machismo, Christophe Castaner, has covered himself in ridicule by falsely claiming that a group of demonstrators attacked a hospital during this week’s May Day demonstration in Paris.
Police stop demonstrators by the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital
Castaner, a former Socialist who lobbied hard to become interior minister in the Macron government after another Socialist defector, Gérard Collomb, ducked out, has seized on any pretext to try to discredit protests against the government, whether they be the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), the trade unions or the left.
On May Day they all marched together and Castaner’s twitter finger was clearly itching. Before the day was out he had announced that a group of demonstrators had “attacked” the famous Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, assaulted a member of the hospital staff and forced entry into the resuscitation unit.
Unfortunately for Monsieur le Ministre, hospital staff denied his version of events and video shot at the scene showed demonstrators fleeing teargas and stun grenades fired by the police. They had blocked a section of the demonstration from advancing towards the Place d’Italie, as their colleagues came to grips with demonstrators further up the road (see my account of those events here).
Thirty-four demonstrators were arrested and detained for nearly 30 hours
but then released without charge.
On Sunday they presented a joint statement to the media, complaining of Castaner’s attempts to exploit their case for political purposes and thanking the hospital staff who came forward to give an accurate account of what had gone on.
Castaner is one of a long line of Socialist defectors who seem to believe
they must prove some sort of political manhood by declaring their undying love
for the police and all their works.
The now utterly unloved Manuel Valls, who was interior minister before becoming prime minister and is currently a soon-to-be unsuccessful mayoral candidate in Barcelona, suffered from the same syndrome.
By coincidence, today I read an account of German Social Democrat Gustav
Noske’s suppression of the 1919 “Spartakist uprising” in Berlin.
“Someone must play the bloodhound I will not shirk my duty,” he declared
as he led the Freikorps into the city to massacre over 1,000 rebels and
assassinate Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.
Formally dissolved in 1921, the Freikorps were the soil from which the
Nazi militias and the Waffen-SS grew.
The Nazis later booted Noske out of his minister’s position and he retired from politics after Hitler became German chancellor. He was arrested by the Nazis in 1937 but released after a few months, only to be detained again in 1944 after the attempt on Hitler’s life.
He was interned in Fürstenberg/Havel concentration camp, then in
Ravensbrück, before being transferred to Berlin’s Lehrter Strasse priso, from
which he was liberated by Soviet troops in May 1945.
Anarchists and some Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) protesters promised to clash with police on the 2019 May Day demonstrations. And they did. The unions accused police of attacking some of their members, even though they were clearly identified.
Police fire teargas as the march draws to a close. Photo: Tony Cross
As usual, France’s trade unions failed to march together on May Day, the self-styled “reformist” unions marching in the morning, the more militant CGT, FO and other smaller organisations in the afternoon.
Neither the unions nor the Gilets Jaunes are satisfied with President Emmanuel Macron’s response to the social unrest in the country. He organised a national debate to try to head it off and, like so many people these days, heard what he wanted to hear. Along with several other far from revolutionary measures, he has promised tax cuts, ignoring calls to restore a wealth tax that he axed early in his term of office.
The big political question of the day was whether the CGT, which belatedly declared its support for the Gilets Jaunes, in their anti-inequality guise at least, would manage to seal a solidarity pact with the diverse and poorly defined movement.
There were plenty of high-vis jackets on the Paris demo, although the turnout was not as high as the early Yellow Vest protests in Paris.
Perhaps influenced by the fact that the government only paid serious attention to their protests after shop windows were shattered on the Champs Elyées, some Gilets Jaunes joined anarchist groups in threatening to turn Paris into the riot capital of the world, a declaration that was seized on with relish by France’s macho interior minister, Christophe Castaner.
Some 7,4000 cops were put on the city’s streets, armed with water cannon, teargas and the controversial flashballs. Metro stations along the route of the demonstration and at other potential hot spots were closed.
Riot police with water cannon block a side street. Photo: Tony Cross
Police weaponry has deprived 22 people of an eye on Gilets Jaunes demonstrations. Ten people died on their demos last year, some as a result of road accidents at roadblocks.
There has also been violence on both sides on trade union demonstrations, such as the protests against the last government’s changes to labour law.
The government has angrily dismissed charges by a UN committee that excessive force has been used against demonstrations. Patriotic media pundits were indignant that their country was treated as if it was Venezuela or Iran or somewhere.
The government has introduced a law extending the authorities’ powers to police demonstrations, although its key proposal – giving wider powers to ban individuals deemed a danger to public order from attending – was struck down by the Constitutional Council.
The French police reportedly don’t bother to go to European Union meetings on developing crowd control methods.
Even if organisers call for calm, the battle lines are drawn, so far as many demonstrators are concerned. “Everybody hates the police!” is a popular chant in some sections of the May Day demo.
Demonstrators are blocked by police. Photo: Tony Cross
Not many people were shouting “Commit suicide!” this time, though. A 49-year-old unemployed cook was recently given an eight-month suspended prison sentence, ordered to do 180 hours community service and to pay 500 euros to two cops who had filed a case against him for shouting that on a Gilets Jaunes demo last month.
With Gilets Jaunes protests every weekend, frequent union demos, and social unrest in deprived areas, the police are overstretched. There have been 28 suicides in their ranks this year, the continuation of an upward trend.
Some protesters come well-prepared. This man appears to be a street medic. Photo: Tony Cross
Independent journalist Gaspard Glanz, who specialises in covering police violence, also appeared in court recently for giving the finger to a police officer. It is an alleged breach of France’s a law against “outrage“, broadly translatable as insulting behaviour, against a police officer.
At first Glanz was banned from attending demonstrations until his trial several months away. After an outcry, another court overturned the ban but the case against him is still pending.
Many reporters now go to demos in body armour, helmets and gas masks. Journalists’ organisations have complained that both police and protesters abuse them and prevent them doing their jobs, the cops sometimes confiscating equipment.
A young protester lights a flare as the march approaches its end. Photo: Tony Cross
According to reports, there were clashes at the start of the CGT May Day march.
As it approaches its destination, Place d’Italie, groups of youths become agitated, some throwing objects at the police line.
That’s when it kicks off. Police respond with teargas. Groups of black-clad youths – real or aspiring members of the infamous Black Bloc – run towards the trouble.
Teargas fills the air near Place d’Italie. Photo: Tony Cross
A group of men set about a rubbish bin, tearing it off the ground, presumably with the intention of hurling at the police lines.
As the teargas thickens, coughing and spluttering protesters rush away from the scene. Self-appointed “street medics” spray water in our faces and help a person who has crouched on the ground.
Police stop the march. Photo: Tony Cross
Further down the boulevard, riot police stop another part of the demonstration from advancing towards the trouble. Young protesters ask, “Shall we force our way through?”
At the end of the day the government says 38 people have been injured, 14 of them police officers, 33 of them in Paris.
The government says 151,000 people demonstrated across France, the CGT says 310,000. There were 16,000 on the Paris demonstration, according to the government; 80,000, according to the CGT; 40,000, according to a study commissioned by several news media outlests. At the time of writing, there have been 380 arrests, 330 in Paris.
To read a short history of May Day, written a while ago, click here
The French authorities are not exactly slow to spot a terror attack but they have said there is no evidence that the Notre Dame fire was caused by one. That hasn’t stopped the far right from hatching conspiracy theories. They just can’t help themselves.
Notre Dame viewed from the south, 16 April 2019. Photo: Tony Cross
“More and
more people agree with me,” claimed the ageing gent on the banks of the Seine
on Tuesday afternoon. He was part of the crowd looking at the damage done to
Notre Dame Cathedral in the previous night’s fire.
Having
blamed immigrants for the lack of affordable housing, he went on to express
scepticism about the “theory” that the fire had started by accident.
Indeed, he
is not alone.
Officials
and experts say there is no evidence of arson or a terror attack. The conflagration
is most likely to have been set off by an accident, possibly connected to
restoration work being carried out in the cathedral, they say. But that hasn’t
stopped the conspiracy theorists soaping the ropes for a prospective pogrom.
With
sickening predictability, far-right websites, known as the “fachosphere” in
France, launched a desperate search for evidence that the disaster was the
result of an Islamist terror attack.
Here are
some of their claims:
The two fires theory: A tweet by Pierre Sautarel of fachosphere favourite Fdesouche.com claimed there were two fires and therefore that they must have been started deliberately. As evidence, it cited well-known newsreader David Pujadas, who in a live broadcast did point out that there were two lots of flames, but without implying they had been started separately. That did not prevent other far-right fantasists, in France and abroad, from spreading the rumour.
The mysterious imam/Yellow Vest: A Spanish tweet claimed that a figure filmed walking along the side of the cathedral was there when the building was supposed to have been empty and must have been an imam or, failing that, a Gilet Jaune. As Libérationnewspaper established, the report was broadcast live on Spanish TV after emergency services had arrived and the figure was wearing a high-visibility jacket and safety helmet because, well, you would in those circumstances, wouldn’t you?
Well, look, it just must have been terrorists: All France’s main parties, even the party previously known as the Front National (FN), have abstained from claiming the disaster was a terror attack. Not the Islamophobes posing as secularism-defenders at Ripostelaïque, however. They declared that “inevitably, we’re all thinking it might be an attack on France and all that she stands for … And if it’s an attack it can only be a Muslim attack.” Philippe Karsenty, a right-wing councillor from the posh Paris suburb of Neuilly, won the distinction of being fact-checked by Fox News when he told an interviewer that the “politically correct will tell you it was an accident”. Perennial presidential candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignon, an anti-tax obsessive who backed the FN’s Marine Le Pen in the 2016 second round, demanded an official inquiry “to know if it was a terror attack or not”. And vehemently pro-Israel MP Meyer Habib managed to combine both the above items of fake news in one tweet that asked “Accident or criminal attack?”, following it with another that indignantly denounced government ministers who have condemned conspiracy theories.
In today’s digital world fake news spreads before the truth has the time to put its boots on, so inevitably these and other unfounded rumours found their way to dodgy sites from Australia to America. In the US Alex Jones’s Infowarsgave a headline to a tweet that was soon deleted by its author, who told BuzzFeed News “I never should have tweeted it.”
The hate-mongers have had a little help, however. Two members of the national committee of the left-wing students’ union Unef gave them just what they wanted when they sneered at “some cathedral woodwork burning”, people “crying over some bits of wood”, one declaring that she “couldn’t care less about the history of France” and that the outpouring of emotion was white people’s ravings.
Police cordon off Notre Dame on Tuesday afternoon. Photo: Tony Cros
Conspiracy
theories also put in a brief appearance on the Gilet Jaunes’ social networks. Some
contributors judged it suspicious that the fire led to the cancellation of the
president’s address to the nation on prime-time TV. Macron was due to outline
his response to the national debate he organised in the wake of the high-vis
protests.
It’s
difficult to imagine the president declaring “Shit! I haven’t finished my
speech. Somebody set fire to Notre Dame!” and, knowing what we do about the
man, we can be fairly sure he was convinced of the brilliance of his proposals.
Gilet Jaune moderators seem to have shut down
those debates, in any case. And Macron’s main proposals have been leaked.
Surprise, surprise, he leads with tax cuts, which the prime minister has
already explained will mean more cuts in services. Not really worth setting a
national monument on fire for.
To listen to me talking to KPFA radio’s Kris Welch about the Notre Dame fire (including the strange story of the kings’ entrails), click here
The Democratic Socialist Congresswoman’s answer to well-heeled Republicans who claim that environmental concerns are “elitist” was inspiring. But …
Dear
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes,
You
probably won’t read this, which is fair enough, given that I’m an OWM living in
France who has never set foot in the US.
What’s
more, not only do I have zero influence on American politics, my influence over
the politics of the country where I was born (the UK) and the one where I now
live is pretty much zero, too. But then I have that in common with most
citizens of those countries.
Nevertheless, as a lifelong left-winger, I would like to say how encouraging it is to see a professed socialist elected to the US Congress and how impressed I was by your takedown of Republican sneers that concern over climate change is “elitist”.
But – you
knew there was going to be a “but”, didn’t you? – I must take issue with your
statement that climate change “should not be a partisan issue”.
Of course
many US politicians, and practitioners of other equally respectable professions,
are “more concerned about helping oil companies than helping their own
families”. Not only are they corrupted by lobbies, as you showed so effectively
in another gone-viral speech, but defending the rich and powerful is actually what
their politics is about.
True, in the long term climate change will threaten all human civilisation but capitalism is all about the short-term. Increasingly so, as Thomas Piketty has shown, with companies frittering away their own future by paying out bigger and bigger dividends to shareholders.
Furthermore,
interests that will in the long-run endanger the whole kit and caboodle of
humanity have become so entrenched they can dictate current policy.
And, let’s
be honest, politics, like human consciousness, is formed by the past, which is
a handicap when it comes to planning for the future.
I was
tempted to describe Sean Duffy’s remarks as “stupid crap” but it’s not, it’s
cunning and disingenuous crap designed to convince middle-class and
working-class people that their interests converge with those of big business
and its political, legal and media courtesans.
That’s what
their politics is about.
So climate
change, like everything else of any importance, is a partisan issue, although
the partisan divide may also appear within the Democratic Party.
This may
seem like nitpicking but in France we have an illustration of why it is
important to be clear about what are left-wing values and what are right-wing
ones.
Yellow Vests campaign on a market near Paris. Photo: Tony Cross
Starting as a reaction to a decree from on high that adversely affects the vulnerable, the kind of action your Green New Deal warns against, it has become a mass protest that is diffuse and difficult to define but essentially against inequality.
That’s a left-wing concern, right? Fighting inequality and eventually establishing a classless society is what socialism is all about, isn’t it?
Unfortunately,
not for many Gilets Jaunes. As one young activist told me the other day, the
experience of France’s Socialist Party in government, carrying out a pro-business
programme that has increased inequality and left many feeling ignored or
despised, has emptied the idea of socialism of its meaning for a large number
of the people it is supposed to be fighting for.
So, at the
same time as that young man outlined what seems to me a very clear-sighted
analysis, an older woman was declaring that the fight against inequality is
“above politics”.
In France
today the chattering classes have a tendency to throw around the terms left and
right without any reference to actual policies, as if they were tribal
loyalties. The disillusionment with that sort of politics is such that both
candidates in the final round of the last presidential election – one a
far-right hate-monger, the other a social liberal with a right-wing economic
programme – declared themselves to be neither on the left or right. (They are
also both millionaires, by the way.)
We on the
radical left used to think that after attempts to reform capitalism had failed
the masses would turn to us. It’s proved a little more complicated than that. Various
experiences of “socialists” and “communists” in office, as well as the arrogance
and callous indifference of EU bureaucrats and traditional politicians, have
led to a kind of anti-political demagogy that exploits disillusion and has
allowed xenophobic, far-right movements to grow in several European countries.
So I don’t
think we should make any concessions to the idea that because something’s
important it is non-partisan or not political.
Socialist
politics are about serving the interests of the majority and protecting the
future of all humanity.
I imagine
that’s why you took up the political cudgels.
We owe it
to our adversaries to refrain from distorting what they stand for. But we owe
it to humanity not to give them credit where credit is not due.
The French Gilets Jaunes revolt is something of a magic mirror. Anyone looking at it sees whatever they want to see.
On the first Paris demonstration. Photo: Tony Cross
The left,
in France and abroad, has seen a popular uprising against President Emmanuel
Macron’s neoliberal economic policies; the right an explosion of discontent by
overburdened taxpayers; Macron’s ministers portray it as a lumpenproletarian
riot, inspired by conspiracy theories, manipulated by the far right and the far
left and, latterly, infected with anti-Semitism; and many journalists,
committed to their own versions of conspiracy theories, have searched
desperately for leaders, plotters and hidden agendas.
But how do
you find a coherent definition of a movement that anyone can join simply by
donning a high-visibility jacket and going on a protest or, for that matter,
taking to the battlefield on their keyboard?
You can’t. That seems pretty obvious but it hasn’t stopped the pundits, politicians and armchair activists from crowbarring the phenomenon into their own preconceived scenarios.
The lack of structure, a result of the movement’s online origins, means that anyone could be a Gilet Jaune – the casseur who smashes a shopfront on the Champs Elysées as much as the young mother camped out on a roundabout in the provinces – and anyone can declare themselves a spokesperson, as I found when trying to track down a Toulouse area representative for RFI.
At the
start, all we could be sure the protesters had in common was opposition to the
government’s green tax on fuel, although it soon became clear that they all
hated Macron.
As the
movement appears to be drawing to a close, the call for referendums on sufficiently
large demand has come to the fore.
So what
does characterise this movement, apart from those basic demands?
Here are a
few of my observations/hypotheses:
Solidarity and the internal combustion engine: As anyone who has ever sat behind a steering wheel has to admit, the automobile is an individualist, not to say egoist, form of transport – a strange basis on which to build solidarity. In its 100-odd years of existence, the internal combustion engine has radically restructured our lives and our attitudes. No more need to live within walking distance of your workplace, shops or other basic facilities. That has made many people regard a car as an essential part of their lives, if not a basic human right. Frankly, that can bring the worst out in people – just try living in a place with limited parking facilities, as I do. But the government’s decision to tax a form of transport people have come to rely on, while letting off big polluters like airlines and ships (taxing them would mean job losses, one minister, predictable, argued), drew attention to Macronism’s class bias. ” People see it as a class war, because it is,” as Naomi Klein pointed out in a tweet. As is now well-known, the Gilets Jaunes shock troops come from rural areas, small towns or the outskirts of larger ones, where public transport and other facilities are poor to non-existent. (That is likely to become worse, by the way, when the government has opened up the rail network to competition, in enthusiastic compliance with an EU directive, and neglected branch lines are found to be unprofitable). So the response has been collective and demands for better public transport and facilities have surfaced.
Taxes: Nobody actually likes paying taxes and, given the percentage of would-be fiscal freeloaders in the population, there are almost certainly a number in the ranks of the Gilets Jaunes. The right-wing Republicans tried to interpret the protests as a taxpayers’ revolt, something they, their voters and their friends in big business can identify with. That was the government’s spin, too, once TV footage of Paris in flames had convinced it that concessions had to be made. Ministers promised more tax cuts, a now time-honoured way to tie the less well-off to the agenda of the wealthy, accompanied by an it’s-all-your-fault rider that this would mean cuts in services. But all the Gilets Jaunes I asked insisted they were ready to pay what they regarded as fair taxation and a key demand has been for the reversal of Macron’s cut in the wealth tax. To nobody’s astonishment, the government has absolutely ruled out any such move.
Macron and elitism: With his declaration that you only have to cross the road to find a job, his lectures to a teenager on the appropriate way to address his august person, his apparent belief that those who have not “succeeded” are “nothing”, Macron, elected on a promise to break the French political mould, has personified the arrogance of the French elite once in power. “It’s the contempt he has for people,” Jean-Pierre, a middle-aged former Macron voter told me as teargas wafted around us on the first national demonstration in Paris in November. To sociologist Laurent Mucchielli, Macron is “a typical representative of that technocracy … someone who has never held elected office, has never had the experience of running a local council … not used to being in contact with either the voters or trade unionists or local councillors, all he’s used to is ministries, technocrats, top civil servants, MPs and journalists.” But it’s not just about style. Macron’s policies have been a continuation of previous governments’ applications of trickle-down theory, regardless of their failure to deliver on promises of a better life for all. To the government, and many media commentators, resentment of technocratic arrogance is populism, raising the spectre of “the white working class” and, with it, bigotry, xenophobia and anti-Semitism (although, confusingly, that seems to be coming from Salafists). There have been instances of these but such excesses seem to be an integral part of today’s world of online invective, rather than a specific property of the Gilets Jaunes. When Macron’s supporters, adopting the elegant soubriquet “the Red Scarves”, took to the streets and the keyboards, class hatred seemed to be pretty much the order of the day.
Left, right or apolitical? Impossible as it is to establish who can really speak for the Gilets Jaunes – some who’ve tried have received death threats for their pains – a list of 42 demands published after online consultation seems to be generally accepted as representative. The highest number, 22, featured in the programme of left-wing presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, while 21 featured in that of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. Justification for the old platitude about the extremes meeting? Not really, if you factor in the relative importance given to the questions in these politicians’ rhetoric. Le Pen’s hobbyhorse of Islam is not raised and immigration hardly gets a mention in the list of demands, although there have been flurries of fake news and on the question and some sings of racism on Gilet Jaune social media networks. The key concern is inequality, with calls for progressive taxation, a rise in the minimum wage and pensions, a maximum wage and a reversal of tax handouts to the rich. A left-wing programme, one might say. But in January a group of researchers found that 60 percent of Gilets Jaunes declared themselves to be neither left-wing nor right-wing (as did both candidates in the final round of the 2017 presidential election – Emmanuel Macron and … Marine Le Pen). This should seriously worry the left. How is it that so many people no longer identify the core concern of socialism – the eradication of inequality – as a left-wing value, or even a political question?
Media: Many Gilets Jaunes might be surprised to know that their belief that the numbers on their demonstrations have been underreported and their activity misrepresented is common to practically all activists. Nobody is ever happy with how their cause is reported, leading the committed nowadays to seek consolation in the social media echo chamber, where there is distortion on demand. That said, the sensationalist reflex that leads to non-stop images of isolated cases of violence is automatic in certain media, and could be seen during the demonstrations against Macron’s labour law reform, for example. If you compare the official figures, or the organisers’ claims, those protests at their height mobilised higher numbers than the Gilets Jaunes but you wouldn’t guess it from the coverage, so maybe some of the sensationalism worked in the latter’s favour. Both movements were also on the receiving end of the attentions of law and order, which proved a great shock to many Gilets Jaunes. In both cases, establishment politicians’ cries of indignation about police injuries has obscured the fact that a greater number of demonstrators were injured.
Democracy, representation: “Be careful what you wish for,” is my own response to the call for referendums on demand. Whether you are in favour of Brexit or not, nobody in their right mind can claim that the debate preceding the UK referendum was balanced and well-informed. Social media have added to the capacity for disinformation that was already amply exploited by certain media moghuls and their outlets. It is not a coincidence that referendums are popular with dictators, who can manipulate the debate and engineer the required result. But the demand does highlight the fact that parliamentary democracy as it is currently practiced is not serving the interests of the majority. Paying MPs the average wage, one of the 42 demands as well as a lonsgstanding hard-left proposal, would surely inspire them with more empathy with their constituents. An interesting proposal for preparing legislation is the establishment of commissions of citizens, a kind of political jury service, that would draw up proposals after interviewing experts and interested parties, thus drawing informed conclusions.
Teargas on Paris streets on the first national demonstration. Photo: Tony Crosss
Recep Tayyip Erdogan was sworn in as Turkey’s president on Monday, assuming new powers that consolidate his power, already strengthened by post-coup purges and a long-running media clampdown. I covered June’s presidential and parliamentary election for RFI. Here’s what I found on my latest visit to Erdogan’s Turkey.
AKP voters welcome Erdogan to the rally in Eyüp Photo: Tony Cross
”So, are you going to say bad things about our president?” the young man asked, smirking.
He was part of a crowd gathered in the Istanbul district of Eyüp to see Erdogan on his eve-of-poll tour of the city.
The fact of being both a journalist and a foreigner is a guarantee of suspicion in a crowd of the president’s supporters – an indication of the mindset of many of the 26,324,482 who voted for him the following day, 24 June 2018.
In Eyüp the Muslim traditionalism can be seen in the women’s headscarves and long coats, the defensive nationalism makes itself heard in the mistrust of foreign media and the credulous acceptance of conspiracy theories, and the devotion to the leader in the rapturous cheers when he appears.
Waiting for Erdogan in Eyüp Photo: Tony Cross
A call to prayer echoing over the rally failed to put an end to proceedings, although Erdogan himself was careful to leave a decent interval before his appearance on stage.
But there is no denying his supporters’ attachment to their Islamic identity, in defiance of the cosmopolitan middle class that make up the bulk of supporters of Erdogan’s principal opponent, Muharram Ince, who turned out in vast numbers in Istanbul Ankara and Izmir.
Erdogan voters’ nationalism is less easily detected by the naked eye. But it, and an acute case of strong-leader syndrome, are key elements in his appeal.
Economic woes and conspiracy theories
Feeling the pinch – shoppers in Eminömü Photo: Tony Cross
The election result surprised me. Opinion polls had indicated shrinking support for Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). That confirmed what I’d observed last year, when I covered the constitutional referendum: signs of discontent among taxi drivers and small businessmen – surely classic Erdogan supporters – over a worsening economic situation.
Despite growth of 7.5%, a full-blown crisis has developed, with 12% inflation, the lira tanking on the money markets and the current account deficit ballooning.
I should have made more attention to the interviews I did with shopkeepers in Istanbul’s Eminönü district a week before the election. They were feeling the pinch, especially if they sold imported goods, but most were still keeping the faith.
Sales are always down during Ramadan, which had just ended, some assured me, adding that once the uncertainty of the election had lifted business would look up.
And then there were the conspiracy theories.
“The reason is foreign powers,” audio equipment shop owner Muhammed Akcotoya insisted, echoing Erdogan’s own explanation. “They’re trying to harm Turkey. That’s why they’re making the dollar and the euro higher.”
We’re in the Middle East, whether the Ince crowd like it or not, so conspiracy theories abound on all sides. They did so long before algorithms put us all on a dripfeed of the fake news most suited to our susceptibilities and they show no sign of abating now.
Although the lira perked up after the election, the economic problems are unlikely to go away. So how long will AKP voters carry on making excuses for the leader?
Indefinitely in some cases, one supposes, but the wallet is a sensitive organ. An important part of the AKP’s social base is an Anatolian bourgeoisie that has done will during its years in power and may not look kindly on its living standards being squeezed.
The AKP has also won support for providing social benefits for the poor, whom the secular parties, including the “social democratic” CHP, neglected and often treated with contempt.
The underpriveleged, too, cannot all be expected to remain faithful if inflation continues to eat away at their living standards.
Describing the growth rate as artificially induced “hormonal growth”, economist Mustafa Sönmez told me he expected a slowdown in the second half of the year and predicted big trouble because of the current account deficit.
Fear of such problems was the reason Erdogan brought the election forward by more than a year, according to Sönmez and most other commentators, but the political manoeuvre may not spare him social unrest.
The uses of nationalism
Young men at the pro-Erdogan rally in Istanbul Photo; Tony Cross
The AKP’s religious inspiration is well-documented but its nationalist discourse receives less attention.
Anti-imperialist rhetoric is employed to deflect criticism, economic problems and embarrassing revelations are attributed to foreign plots, and nostalgia for the Ottoman era is invoked to inspire a dream of revived national glory.
Of course, this sort of demagogy is not unique to Turkey. It is increasingly employed by fundamentalist and majoritarian movements in India, Russia, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland … one branch of it is known as “what-aboutery” in Pakistan. The Turkish version means that the excesses of the state of emergency can be dismissed with the observation that France took a similar measure after the Paris attacks.
A foreign journalist gets fallout from this – in a far gentler form than our colleagues who have been arrested in successive purges of the media – not only in suspicion from the crowd at Erdogan rallies, but also in AKP MPs’ assurances that we wouldn’t be asking certain questions if we understood Turkey properly, or in police and other officials’ obstruction when we try to interview voters on polling day.
Is its virulence in Turkey, which doesn’t just concern AKP supporters, affected by the origins of the modern Turkish state – the expulsion of the Greeks – admittedly an echo of the Greeks’ expulsion of Muslims when they won independence from the Ottomans – the Armenian genocide, the persecution of the Alevis, and the denial of Kurdish identity and rights?
All-embracing Ince
The crowd hears Muharram Ince in Izmir Photo: Tony Cross
What about the opposition? Is Ince all he’s cracked up to be?
And, being the son of a farmer who became a physics teacher, he has a welcome common touch in a party seen as the mouthpiece of the cosmopolitan elite.
But what was he actually promising?
An end to the state of emergency, the arrests of thousands, the sackings of thousands more, a free media, to be sure. But what would he do for the ordinary Turks who support the AKP because it has given them access to health care, brought electricity and roads to their rural homes, or helped them set up small businesses?
Difficult to say, in particular because, in an effort to differentiate himself from Erdogan’s cronyism and represent “all Turks”, he proposed to form a government of all parties, including the AKP.
Perhaps he hoped such a proposal would further deepen divisions in the party but what policies could such a heterogeneous cabinet – which would also presumably include the hard-right Iyi Party of Meral Aksener, the MHP, which she split from, and the Islamists of Saadat – carry out?
“An excellent question,” according to former diplomat and CHP MP Osman Faruk Logoglu, who talked to me the day after the election. Triangulation can work for the right, he argues, but no necessarily for the social-democratic left, where he situates his party.
In fact, Ince’s support was also heterogeneous, attracting former MHP voters, attracted by his secular stance and seeing him as a viable alternative to Erdogan.
The secular parties are also pretty nationalist, the MHP and Iyi particularly, but the CHP as well.
Izmir may see itself as a progressive stronghold but it is also the port from which the Greeks were expelled after the war of independence.
The town is built around a bay, which is plied by ferries. Football fans taunt their rivals with threats to throw them into the sea “like Atatürk did to the Greeks”, I was told while I was there.
And several Izmiris expressed hostility to Syrian refugees, a hot-button issue that has aroused resentment and rumours similar to those now widespread in Europe. Like Aksener, Ince promised to send them home, insisting that reestablishing relations with President Bashar al-Assad would make this possible.
The HDP offices in Istanbul Photo: Tony Cross
Ince also attracted support from left-wingers, who voted for him as the candidate with most hope of beating Erdogan but for the left-wing pro-Kurdish rights HDP in the parliamentary elections.
That the HDP – whose leader Selahattin Demirtas contested the presidential election from jail much to Erdogan’s disgust at the election board’s “emotional” decision – managed to break the 10% barrier to holding seats in parliament is in part evidence of a radical left among young Turkish voters.
Several non-Kurdish young people told me they were backing Ince for the presidency and the HDP for parliament, in part because they believed the Kurds should have a voice in the country’s politics and in part because they support its progressive stance, which includes endorsement of LGBT rights and male-female parity in all posts, despite the social conservatism of some of the Kurdish electorate.
Turkey’s economic turbulence may mean political turbulence, regardless of Erdogan’s electoral victory.
The massive drilling machine, in place and ready to dig Line 15 of the Greater Paris metro Photo: Tony Cross
Saturday, 3 February 2018
On a drizzly Saturday evening in February I joined a queue of hundreds to trudge through the mud of a building site. Not just any building site. The Grand Paris Express, which will bring the metro to millions of residents in the French capital’s famous banlieue, is apparently Europe’s biggest construction project. It will transform towns like mine, perhaps in unforeseen ways. And it will provide a boost to the French economy that will have more tangible effects than the supply-side dogma of this and previous governments.
The view from the queue Photo: Tony Cross
At 7.00pm, under arc lights and with a commentary broadcast across the site, a gigantic boring machine was lowered into place in a deep Piranesian pit that will be the starting point for drilling line 15 of the Paris metro, which – starting in our town, Champigny-sur-Marne – will eventually encircle the whole of Paris.
Still waiting … but there’s some pretty impressive kit Photo: Tony Cross
At least, I think that’s what happened. I was stuck outside with a couple of hundred other would-be spectators because too many damn other people had already gone in.
But we did hear the applause and were allowed in afterwards to see the beast in its lair, try the limited-production local wine – a pinot noir and not bad at all at 7.30pm on a chilly night – and eat gigot de bitume (more of that later).
Immigration and the banlieue
The crowd, in free fluorescent jackets created for the occasion, takes a look at Steffie-Orbival Photo: Tony Cross
It was all rather moving – parents showing their children a moment in history, civilians marvelling at a triumph of engineering that is dedicated to the common good, and a feeling of being part of a community that binds people of various origins together.
Although I would say there was perhaps less variety than at the regular festivals our Communist-led local council puts on during the course of the year. Fewer Turks, Maghrebins and Sub-Saharan Africans, I would say, but plenty of Portuguese.
The Portuguese presence is appropriate, poignant even, since the park out of which the pit has been gouged was the site of France’s second-biggest shanty town in the 1960s and it was populated by Portuguese immigrants – some refugees from the Salazar dictatorship, many more economic migrants, a category that had not then acquired the stigma President Emmanuel Macron is working so hard to give it these days.
Site workers with Steffie Photo: Tony Cross
Up the hill from where we were milling stands a recently constructed, and extremely kitsch, monument to Louis Talamoni, the Communist senator and mayor of Champigny who fought for the immigrants to be decently housed.
Down the hill is the industrial estate where two cops were beaten and one of them kicked outside an unauthorised New Year’s Eve party in a warehouse, leading some right-wing smart-arses to compare the good Portuguese immigrants of yore to the bad banlieusards of today, blacks and north Africans, according to the caricature, although one doubts if they had carried out a demographic survey of the assailants.
Happily, that prompted a group of people of Portuguese origin to publish an open letter in Le Monde newspaper, objecting to being exploited for racist ends and pointing out that their community had not actually been a docile bunch of grateful paupers.
Lamb baked in tar – great French tradition
The gigot comes out of the bitume Photo: Tony Cross
Anyway, back to Saturday’s soirée because I bet you’re all dying to know about the gigot de bitume.
… And handed to an assistant … Photo; Tony Cross
This is one of those only-in-France things. It’s known as the menu de Sainte Barbe in honour of Saint Barbara, who, even though she may well not have existed, is the patron saint of miners and other people who work with explosives. She bears this distinction because her father is said to have been struck dead by lightning after carrying out the pagans’ order to execute her (by decapitation, if you want to know).
… and cut out of its wrapping Photo: Tony Cross
French secularism notwithstanding, the menu de Sainte Barbe is apparently traditional when civil engineering projects finish. It consists of a leg of lamb, well-wrapped and plunged into hot tar to cook, fished out, dunked in cold water, cracked open and served to the horny-handed sons of toil.
… and passed on to the serving team Photo: Tony Cross
We, several hundred of us, ate it on paper plates, accompanied by small potatoes. What did it taste like? Delicious, although not quite as meltingly tender as I had expected.
… and served to the hungry masses Photo: Tony Cross
We partook of our rugged repast in the shadow of a huge piece of machinery, one of the cutters of the digger, if I’m not mistaken, named Steffie-Orbival after a female digger driver who has muscled her way into the masculine world of civil engineering – or am I out of date here? – and suspended – the machine part not the driver – from a gigantic crane, to the delight of selfie-takers.
Then, finally, we could mount a gantry and look down 20 metres at the beast itself, slumbering still but ready to rip into the soil, cutting what will become Line 15 all the way around the capital.
Some pretty impressive stats
Steffie the heavy machine operator about to be snapped by the press Photo: Tony Cross
I’m going to get a bit breathless here:
Thirty such machines will dig 170km of tunnels, the longest underground railway in Europe.
This one will dig up the equivalent of eight pyramids of Giza.
There will be 68 stations, the deepest of which, next door to us at Saint-Maur-Créteil, will be 52 metres beneath the earth.
The finished network will comprise 200km of line, as much as the actually existing metro.
Above all, the Greater Paris project will be a long-overdue recognition of reality – the reality that Paris is not just the increasingly socially cleansed city of 2,250,000 inhabitants within its now-notional walls but also the less aesthetically pleasing sprawl around it that is home to seven million people.
Travelling on a commuter train into the city, you catch a glimpse of a nightmare of overcentralisation and overcrowding.
At rush hour on the line I take to work, RER A, there is a train every five minutes. That’s on a line that splits in two at Vincennes and more trains come in on the other fork. It’s a tribute to the network’s staff and the technology that there aren’t collisions. To get to the station, I have already crossed a road – rue Louis Talamoni, as it happens – which will be jammed by 8.00am. Our train takes us over a motorway packed with cars coming from the east, which connects with another equally packed motorway coming from the north and the ring road, which is in a more or less permanent state of congestion.
So the new lines are essential to reduce that congestion and the plague of pollution that goes with it. The Greater Paris project, when the politicians have finished squabbling over how it will be put into practice, should begin to tackle the division between Paris and its outskirts. On the downside, it may get in the way of a serious effort to decentralise France and repopulate deserted rural and semi-rural areas, which should surely be possible in the digital age.
Changes – social and political
Workers attend to the machinery after it has been put in place Photo: Tony Cross
Meanwhile, we home-owners are obviously all wondering what it is going to do to house prices. Push them up, presumably, which is good news if you’ve bought but not if you’re thinking of buying, but by how much and when? And what will that mean for our towns?
Champigny has already seen some small demonstrations of anxious home-owners because property developers are buying plots on residential streets to build blocks of flats for future commuters. The householders say that will spoil the tranquil ambiance of their streets>. One suspects they also fear it will affect the value of their properties.
The local council has drawn up a very necessary plan to revamp the scruffy town centre, probably the only Place Lénine in France. But the Communist Party, struggling to keep one of the last major local councils it controls, may also be getting nervous at the prospect of an influx of yuppies, which may account for their eagerness to build more social housing. Although, with a recent opinion poll finding that 83% of under-40s think that capitalism is a system that doesn’t work well, maybe they should be optimistic about the prospect of an influx of younger voters, so long as they do a bit of work on their image.
Public spending v tax handouts
How the Grand Paris Express should look Map: Hektor/Wikimedia Commons
There has been a glitch.
Entirely predictably, the Grand Paris Express will cost more than predicted. Much more. The estimate has gone up from 19 billion euros to 38.4 billion, which has given France’s top financial authority palpitations, committed as it is to the EU’s austerity-inducing target of reducing public debt to 3.0% of GDP.
Fortunately, the government is going against its own economic doctrine and maintaining the project, particularly since some of the lines are needed for when Paris hosts the 2024 Olympics. But there may be some cuts in expenses and some lines may open later than planned. Not ours, fortunately.
And it’s all paid for from our taxes! Which is a good thing. Grand Paris Express will improve people’s lives, be good for the environment, create useful jobs and boost the economy. In fact, when the latest statistics showed that France experienced its highest growth for six years in 2017, there was no real evidence that it was due to tax cuts, labour reforms and the election of a president the bosses adore. But there was a confident prediction that the massive public investment in this project will ensure that the trend continues.
So it’s a worthwhile investment for our collective benefit. That is why the continuous propaganda against taxes, which offers bribes to the majority to go along with huge givebacks to the rich, is so dangerous. It is to the shame of mainstream social democrats that they have gone along with this ideological assault on collectivism and their own legacy.
The majority of French voters have rejected Marine Le Pen. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the elected president is a free-market fanatic whose programme inspired a record number of people to cast blank votes.
Election posters in Champigny-sur-Marne on 7 May 2017 Photo: Tony Cross
Had Le Pen won the presidency, another country would have succumbed to the revamped right-wing populism represented by Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Orban and Brexit – not fascism, in my view, but a new kind of majoritarian authoritarianism endorsed by popular mandate, fuelled by fear of the future and resentment of the establishment, finding its expression in xenophobia and prejudice.
Emmanuel Macron could hardly be styled a courageous defender of minorities but he did resist Le Pen’s racism in the campaign TV debates, which is more than can be said for the mainstream right candidate François Fillon and, for that matter, more than can be said for Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls while in office.
So we’ve escaped a national-level version of the discrimination, repression and racist rabble-rousing the far right has let loose on the towns it controls. And Le Pen’s National Front (FN) seems to have big problems ahead.
Crisis for National Front
The result, and Le Pen’s disastrous performance in the few days before the poll, appears to have plunged the FN into crisis.
In one sense, they don’t have so much to complain about. They achieved a record 10.6 million votes, nearly double their score when Marine’s dad, Jean-Marie, made it to the second round against Jacques Chirac 2002. That’s a lot of Islamophobes – or, at least, a lot of people prepared to go along with the FN’s hatred of Muslims, immigrants, Roma and other minorities to poke the “elite” in the eye, which should, but won’t, give the “elite” pause for thought.
But, and this is really worrying, they could have done even better.
Le Pen ran an effective campaign up until the last few days. Then she had the bright idea of picking a holocaust-doubter as her party’s interim president (he also thought that beating up commies was a good political education but that received less media attention) say that France was not responsible for the wartime rounding up of Jews, call Fillon and his party “shits” (the FN claims she just said they were in the shit) and, worst of all, behave just like her father’s daughter during the crucial final TV debate.
The debate performance – where she was caught out lying, blustered, bullied, slouched and grimaced like the chip off the old block she is – has probably destroyed the “dedemonisation” strategy that had been working pretty well for Marine and her pals.
The FN’s canal historique is already sharpening its knives. Its best-known representative, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, one of only two FN-affiliated MPs at the moment, said on Sunday evening that the party must consider its strategy in the election after the “disappointment”.
And, if reports are to be believed, the rank and file is in disarray. An anonymous FN official told the Mediapart website that a the party’s post-debate postbag contained a number of torn-up membership. And the “fachosphere” – the far-right social media network – is full of recriminations, mostly against Marine Le Pen and Florian Philippot, the FN vice-president who’s seen as the Svengali behind the dedemonisation strategy and the party’s “social” turn.
One is tempted to ask whether Le Pen threw the debate deliberately. As a Trump admirer, she must have read his comment that leading a country is harder than he’d thought. Being the party of mean-minded, resentful opposition has been a profitable business for her family, making them millionaires. Had the FN watered down its opposition to the EU, the real point of difference with the Fillons, Sarkozys and other tough guys of the mainstream right, it could have undergone the same transformation as Italy’s MSI and joined a coalition government some years ago.
But no, the FN leaders were riding a wave of anti-establishment resentment mixed with xenophobia and seemed genuinely to believe they were on the road to power on their own terms. Hence the disappointment today.
It remains to be seen if the backbiting will hamper their campaign in June’s parliamentary elections. A good result there could staunch the crisis.
Macron and extremes
Something else revealed in that TV debate is that Macron is not a very skilful politician.
He’s an intelligent man, a skilled technocrat who knows his facts.
But Le Pen destroyed herself, he didn’t destroy her.
When she posed as a defender of gay and women’s rights during an attack on a Muslim group that supported him, he failed to remind her of her own party’s record on those questions – the potential for mockery was great but Macron doesn’t do funny. When she justified her claim that the wartime deportation of Jews was not France’s responsibility but that of the Vichy government, he let it go without even a mention the former collaborators who helped found the party. Apparently, he also doesn’t do history.
This is not just a historical quibble. Obscuring the party’s Nazi origins and airbrushing out its anti-Semitism are a key part of the dedemonisation strategy and Macron passed on an opportunity to deal it a powerful blow.
In short, Macron has no political culture, which is also the problem of his newly founded En Marche ! movement. Apparently, the political experience that his presidential campaign lacked was made up for by Socialist Party traitors, working against their own candidate, Benoît Macron, in the first round and even more openly for a republican front – nominally anti-fascist but in reality more pro-Brussels – in the second round.
That was also apparent in his speech after the result was announced. In what he imagined was an olive branch to supporters of Le Pen and left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he told them they had voted for “extremists”.
Repeating the old canard of the “extremes” meeting up is hardly a way to win over the seven million who voted Mélenchon in the first round and Macron’s assurance that he understood voters’ “anger, anxiety and doubts” is undermined by his obvious lack of empathy with ordinary people on the campaign trail.
With 25 percent abstention, the highest since 1969 when France’s youth was radicalised by May ’68, and an absolute record of four million blank votes, Macron can expect trouble.
His programme, for the most part a collection of micro-measures and expressions of good intentions, is ardently pro-EU and pro-capitalist. Despite a promise to revive Europe’s connection with “the people”, Macron is determined to press on with reducing the debt through austerity, the very policy that has done so much to help demagogues like Le Pen. On the economy it’s more of the same – tax cuts and subsidies for employers, in the desperate and so far unrewarded hope that they will be bribed to invest, longer hours, later retirement and less social protection for employees.
He has promised to bring in more changes to labour law in the summer, his main proposal being to encourage company-level negotiations on working hours and other conditions, a further undermining of collective bargaining and trade union solidarity.
Mélenchon’s seven million votes mean that, for the first time for years, the left is not demoralised.
Rather it is in combative mood, witness all those blank votes. So strikes, demonstrations and social upheaval are guaranteed, indeed the first took place on the afternoon after the election.
Parliamentary elections – who know what will happen?
It’s all very well winning the presidency but afterwards you have to form a government.
For someone who doesn’t actually have a real party that’s a problem.
And, with the mainstream parties rejected by voters in the presidential election, everything’s up for grabs in June’s parliamentary election.
Will Macron succeed in destroying the Socialist Party, as seems to be his intention, with his assurance that En Marche ! won’t endorse any candidate standing under another party’s colours?
Will the mainstream right Republicans lose their more liberal MPs, tempted by the prospect of ministerial positions?
Will voters be as ready to reject sitting MPs as they were to turn their backs on their parties’ candidates in the presidential first round?
Will the FN pick up MPs in some of the 95 constituencies where Le Pen won more than 30 percent in that round?
Can Mélenchon and his allies build on the presidential campaign success and win more seats?
I don’t know the answers to these questions and I don’t think anyone else does, either.
Which means that the parliamentary poll is going to be another cliffhanger and, whatever happens, French politics will never be the same again.
Read my analysis of the result for RFI English here
