by Jack
Rasmus
On May 7,
2016, France elected Emmanuel Macron, the former banker, as its next
president. The voting result was 65% for Macron, a newcomer in the
election cycle who didn’t even have a political party, but who did
have the massive business backing and traditional political elites
united behind him, providing unlimited media and financial assistance
to his campaign.
Approximately
25% of all voters in France, the most in nearly fifty years (since
1969), abstained from voting, however. It is also estimated that 25%
of Macron’s 65% vote margin were voters who voted ‘against Le
Pen’ and the far right national front party, and did not vote ‘for’
Macron. How solid is Macron’s support, and whether the French
people support what will be his continuation of European
neoliberalism, remains to be seen.
Macron’s
victory as an ‘independent’, with no party, just a ‘movement’
called En Marche, was made possible by several unique developments
during the recent election cycle.
First was
the convenient scandals that early on knocked out of the election
cycle his other business-backed challengers, Juppe and Fillon. It
appears the political elite may have encouraged the publicizing of
the scandals in order to unite business, bureaucracy, traditional
elites, and professional classes behind one candidate, the newcomer
Macron. Business interests were thus united, while the left and right
alternative parties were divided.
Another
convenient development enabling Macron’s election victory was the
failure of the French left to unite early behind a challenger. The
Socialist party’s candidate, Benoit, was burdened with the massive
failure of the Socialist Party that ruled France under Francois
Holland, the outgoing president, who leaves office with barely 5%
popularity. Benoit’s candidacy in part split the left alternative.
The strongest ‘left challenge’ was led by a new face, Melenchon,
who started late in the campaign and could not shift the election
media-driven message from ‘vote for Macron to stop Le Pen and the
far right’. Other left parties failed to unite behind Melenchon as
well.
A
tactical failure in the campaign appears to have been the ‘leaks’
posted on the internet about Macron’s campaign and backers. Whoever
was behind them is unknown, but the leaks appeared just a hour before
the ‘black out’ on the election last friday, not enough time for
voters to digest the results. As in the US, the media and Macron
are now claiming Russian hackers were behind the leaks.
Other
similarities with the US 2016 election are also interesting. US
voters last November rejected the US Democrat party’s neoliberal
policies advocated and defended by Hillary Clinton, thinking they
would get something else in Trump. Trump won by creating the
appearance he was against these policies. However, in just 100 days
it is now clear Trump represents a continuation of the same US
neoliberalism–with a nasty social twist of anti-immigrant,
anti-environment, anti-social program overlaid on traditional
pro-business tax cuts, deregulation, and bilateral free trade
proposals.
Macron
further represents a strategy to save European neoliberalism similar
to that which Britain and the US economic elites put forward in the
1990s when they put Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in office.–i.e.
so-called ‘new democrats’ at the time. Emmanuel Macron is
France’s ‘new democrat’, and a reflection of elites in France
putting a ‘shiny new young face’ on its prime politician just as
UK elites did with Tony Blair and US with Bill Clinton. Macron is
thus the ‘Tony Clinton’ (or ‘Bill Blair’ if you prefer) of
France. However sustaining a ‘Tony Blair’ or ‘Bill Clinton’
strategy and solution in France may not be possible at this juncture,
nor in the case of France in general. Time will tell if the ‘shiny
young new face’ solution works in France, given its current
discrediting in UK and US.
Macron is
also a former banker, and therefore also represents the trend of a
deepening influence and control of bankers and finance capitalists in
the governments of the advanced economies like the US, UK, Japan and
Europe in general.
In the
US, big bankers like Goldman Sachs now run nearly all the key cabinet
positions and agencies in the US administration under Trump.
Under Obama in 2008, all the recommendations for cabinet-agency
positions put forward by the megabank, Citigroup, were eventually
adopted by Obama. France 2016 appears a continuation of this trend,
as banker-finance capitalists maneuver in new ways to retain their
dominance of the political system in the advanced economies in an age
of growing economic disruptions.
Macron
has promised to pick up the baton of ‘labor reform’ in France
introduced by Socialist Party Holland. That means laws that will
weaken unions, collective bargaining, allow firing of workers,
eliminate strikes, cut social benefits, privatize the healthcare and
education systems in France. So now the conflict in France moves
from the electoral arena to the workplace. During the recent
election cycle shopfloor resistance in France continued to grow
rapidly. Many unreported short strikes were called to protest the
plans to implement the new anti-worker labor laws. It is not unlike
what began to occur in 1967 as DeGaulle and the capitalist parties
laid out plans to strip workers of rights and benefits. That plan
resulted in nationwide strikes and a shutdown of the economy and
widespread protests called ‘May 1968’, which in turn led to the
resignation of then president, DeGaulle. Will Macron’s presidency
be a repeat? Is France now embarking on the same trajectory with
Macron, who like deGaulle, has vowed to aggressively implement the
anti labor reform laws? The largest union in France, the CGT, has
already called for more intense opposition at the company level and
preparation for a general strike. Whether Macron, a champion of the
anti-labor laws is willing to stake his presidency on the direct
conflict with labor at the economic level will be interesting to
watch.
As US
workers today cross their fingers and hope that Trump isn’t lying
about bringing jobs back to the US (which he is), France’s workers
may be preparing for a confrontation in coming months of a more
united and militant kind. It will be interesting to see how far the
Macron-Business-Banker elites in France are willing to go to face off
the growing militancy ‘from below’ in the coming months.
In any
event, with the election they have bought themselves some additional
time. Watch the stock markets boom in Europe on Monday, as investors
intensify their financial bets on the rise in stock markets in
France, Europe and elsewhere and cash in on yet more capital gains
and financial profits.
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