25.03.2004

Mixed message

The March 21 first round of the French regional elections saw Jacques Chirac’s rightwing UMP punished for its anti-working class policies and full frontal assault on France’s system of social security. Unfortunately, however, it was not the alliance of the country’s two main revolutionary groups that reaped the benefit, but the mainstream left parties, whose own neoliberal record in government up to 2002 had opened the way for Chirac’s current attacks.

While the Parti Socialiste, Parti Communiste Français and Greens polled 40% in total (as against 34% for the UMP and allies), the joint Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire-Lutte Ouvrière lists won just under five percent. Although this was a marginally higher percentage than that obtained in the equivalent elections in 1998, it was desperately disappointing compared to the two groups’ performance in the presidential elections of 2002, when the LCR’s Olivier Besancenot and LO’s Arlette Laguiller together totalled almost 10%.

This last figure is the minimum necessary that lists must achieve in order to progress to the second round in any given constituency. But the LCR-LO bloc fell well short of the 10% threshold in all 21 regions and 94 departments. While the winning of over a million votes nationwide is no mean feat, the fact that these were more or less evenly spread across the country, rather than concentrated in particular localities, meant that there was no chance of a morale-boosting success in the second round (in 1998 - before the undemocratic 10% barrier was introduced - one LCR and seven LO councillors were returned in the Nord-Pas de Calais region under the PR system).

In a joint statement after the results were announced, the two organisations condemned the “electoral method that favours the dominant parties”, which meant that there are now “no revolutionary representatives on the regional councils despite our increased vote”.

The revolutionary left’s best performance was in the Sarthe department, where it won 7.49%, and in the Picardie and Limousin regions (over 6.5%), but it exceeded 5% in seven regions and 4% in all but four. The overall achievement establishes the LCR-LO as the country’s fourth electoral force, but still far behind the third - Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National, which held its 15% share and qualified for next weekend’s second round in 19 of the 21 regions.

Putting on a brave face, comrade Laguiller declared the campaign to have been useful nevertheless: “We are not electoralists,” she said, and it was necessary to convince workers that there are “other ways to change their lot”. The problem is that those “other ways” did not really feature in the LCR-LO campaign, based almost exclusively on an economistic wish list of opposition to redundancies, cuts, privatisation and demands for better wages, working conditions, pensions and services.

The common protocol agreed between the two groups has the stamp of Lutte Ouvrière all over it. Partly the problem is that they cannot agree on some very basic policies - the LCR’s orientation to the anti-capitalist ‘movement’ and the European Social Forum, for instance, or LO’s effective support for Chirac’s ban on the islamic headscarf (going just a bit too far for the LCR). Neither of them take seriously the question of the way we are ruled - specifically, in France, the building of a movement from below to overturn the undemocratic Fifth Republic with its monarchical president and system of undemocratic ‘checks and balances’.

When it comes to the protocol’s section on the EU elections, it seems that LO has let the LCR have more of its way. While the comrades state that they are against the European Union of the capitalists, they are also “against the ‘sovereigntists’ of right and left”. They declare themselves “partisans of a united Europe, from one end of the continent to the other - the Socialist United States of Europe, free of borders and the dictatorship of industrialists and financiers alike” (‘Common protocol’, November 13 2003). However, apart from opposing the constitution, the protocol makes no demands on the EU for the here and now.

The French Communist Party, the PCF, in contrast to the revolutionary left, has reason to be pleased with its performance in the regional elections - particularly after the disastrous showing of its presidential candidate, Robert Hue, who polled less than 5% in 2002. This was especially the case in view of the fact that the party is divided three ways on its attitude to elections - not least as regards the alliance with the Parti Socialiste.

After the debacle of the ‘pluralist left’ administration from 1997 to 2002, the PCF left wing has been agitating for a break with the PS in elections - at least in the first round - and for the party to stand on its own. However, a group around national secretary Marie-George Buffet favours a new ‘People’s and Citizens’ Left’, an alliance that actually came into being for last Sunday’s elections in the key Ile de France region, which includes Paris. The third PCF grouping wants to maintain the alliance with the PS, come what may.

All three can take comfort from the elections. In 14 regions the PS-PCF-Green alliance held together - and in 13 of them topped the poll. In six others the PCF stood autonomously, crossing the 10% threshold in two. And in Ile de France, where comrade Buffet topped the PCF’s ‘open’ list (which also featured unemployed activist Claire Villiers), its 7.2% easily surpassed the 3.99% achieved by LCR-LO, headed by Arlette Laguiller herself. A parallel battle took place in what used to be the red heartlands of Seine-St Denis, a department within Ile de France. This time comrade Buffet won over 14% to comrade Arguiller’s 5.67%. Similarly, a large part of Olivier Besancenot’s vote in the presidentials was this time taken by the PCF - he won only 3.24% as head of the LCR-LO list in Paris, well behind the PCF.

Perhaps the biggest setback for the left bloc was in the Nord-Pas de Calais region, where the LCR-LO had high hopes of beating the 10% mark and as a result in all likelihood seeing its councillors re-elected in the second round. In the event it picked up only 5.11% - less than half the PCF score. Here the PCF ran a vigorous campaign, posing left in a successful attempt to win back its traditional voters from the Trotskyist bloc.

Lutte Ouvrière comrades in the region had at first opposed the alliance with the LCR, fearing it might jeopardise the re-election of its councillors. No doubt they will be far from happy now. There was a more substantial opposition to the alliance within the LCR, however, which has now resurfaced with a vengeance over the bloc’s recommendation for the second round.

No doubt against the leadership’s better judgement, the LCR had gone along with LO’s insistence that there could be no question of calling on their voters to switch to the ‘pluralist left’ if the LCR-LO was eliminated. Remember, this same leadership had actually called for a vote for Chirac, the main representative of capital, in order to defeat Le Pen in the second round of the 2002 presidentials.

But this time, in line with the common protocol, the LCR leadership issued a statement which said that LCR-LO voters would “determine freely for themselves” how to vote on March 28: “It is clear that our electors will vote neither for the right nor the extreme right. Some will abstain, other will vote for the left … It is up to [the Socialist Party] to convince those who voted for our lists in the first round” (March 22).

This statement was issued in response to the ‘Appeal of 24 members of the LCR national leadership’ - the minority (representing almost 30% of the membership) which had opposed the alliance with LO: “For our part, we take our responsibilities seriously and call on left voters … to mobilise massively on March 28 to beat the right and the FN by voting for the left lists.” This faction looks to build “a new party” from “beyond the far left alone” (March 22).

In my opinion, these oppositionists are correct inasmuch as it is the duty of communists to “take our responsibilities seriously” when it comes to giving a lead. Leaving it to individual supporters to decide what to do for themselves is a clear abrogation of duty. However, the actual advice offered by the LCR oppositionists - who see their most important task as reducing the number of Front National councillors to an absolute minimum - is questionable, to say the least.

Nowhere is the FN in a position to gain control of a department or region. Communist tactics should be aimed first and foremost at winning workers to the need for a genuine Communist Party, armed with a revolutionary programme of extreme democracy. Except in the most unusual of circumstances, that cannot mean writing a blank cheque to the parties of the establishment left.

If the PS neoliberals still claim to stand for the workers, they should be challenged to prove it by accepting a raft of minimum demands in our interests. If, under the pressure of its left wing, the PCF declines to form a common list in a given department or region with the PS, a tactical vote for Buffet’s party might also be considered.