Serge Halimi
of Le Monde Diplomatique spoke to The Real News network about the new
golden boy of the elites in France, Emmanuel Macron.
Halimi
analysed, among other things, the origin of Macron's voters and the
fact that the parliamentary system in France favors the political
formations promoted by the establishment:
People are
getting really tired of having to choose between the 'lesser of two
evils'. And this time they decided not to do it all the more the
because of the fact that they knew from the very beginning that
Marine Le Pen stood no chance of being elected, and they didn't want
to give a mandate to Macron who would enact liberal poor market
policies and deregulate the labor markets. So it was really very
difficult for left-wing voters to give a mandate to someone who would
enact policies you would have to fight a few weeks after you helped
elect him.
Macron's
golden boy image and actions account for the fact that despite of his
landslide victory, 56 percent of the workers voted for Marine Le Pen.
Of course, Paris, which is the most bourgeois of the major French
cities, gave a landslide to Macron - received 90 percent of the vote
there.
You saw
in this vote, a prosperous and educated France that voted for Macron
and won. And the richer city is in terms of how much income it tax
its residents, the more likely the city is to vote for Macron, who
incidentally promised to eliminate much of the wealth tax.
One thing we
must emphasize, the fact that Macron is really the elected president
of the prosperous France and of the middle class, and that Marine Le
Pen got a lot of support from the working class. And this is
something that will stay during Macron's term, and I think the
policies he has in mind, especially the deregulation of the labor
market will insist on the features of his program, which is a program
meant for the wealthy.
The result
Mélenchon got was not the highest the left had in France. You had,
several decades ago, the Communist party that got more than 20
percent of the vote, but it's still a very good result he got in the
first round.
Now, the
question is the extent to which this result will translate in
parliamentary seats. And the parliamentary system is such that its
very unlikely that Mélenchon will get that many seats. We have 577
seats in the National Assembly, and most of the projections say that
Mélenchon will be able to get 40 or 50 seats at most. So, maybe we
will be surprised by what happens in the next few weeks, but the most
likely outcome will be Macron getting almost the majority of the
seats in the National Assembly. The right, getting 200 seats more or
less, and then, Mélenchon and the extreme right getting very few
seats because the system is rigged against parties such as the
National Front and the Left International Assembly.
Halimi
describes the characteristics of Macron's middle class voters that
fit to the description of the journalists who work in the mainstream
media, given by the sociologist Alain Accardo:
“Journalistic titles
hire journalists whose social background – socially, culturally,
educationally and morally – fits perfectly with what the current
capitalist order asks for. People working in media are mostly
middle-class types with the same interests, favouring consumerism,
hedonism, libertarian individualism and unconditional Europeanism
from Brussels.”
The
middle-class, which has not collapsed yet in France, still has the
characteristics that fit to the neoliberal regime. However, it is
obvious that this tank of voters has shrunk significantly, and the
establishment is struggling to keep them inside the desirable 'status
quo' with tricks like the supposedly 'fresh', apolitical image of
Emmanuel Macron, the threat of Le Pen's 'evil' figure that comes from
the Far-Right, or, the illusion that they have the right to
participate equally to almost every economic activity.
Yet,
the middle class is not homogeneous. The neoliberal nightmare that
Macron is about to bring for the workers, will effect also the lower
middle class layers. Macron then will discover that it will be very
difficult to find the right balance in order to finish the job for
the elites. He will have to get all the help he can from the
Brussels-Berlin axis, in order to secure the desirable conditions for
the new Feudalism.
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