French elections: centrist to face rightwinger in second round

Over 84 percent of registered voters cast their ballots April 22 for one of the dozen candidates running in the first round of France’s presidential election. The two candidates going on to the May 6 second round are Nicolas Sarkozy of the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), who got 31.2 percent of the vote, and Ségolène Royal of the centrist Socialist Party with 25.9 percent. These vote totals are the official results released by the Ministry of the Interior.

French demonstrators say ‘quarantine’ fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen.

While the U.S. news media are presenting the second round as a clear choice between left and right, it really is a choice between a candidate, Royal, who offers a soft approach to controlling and exploiting the workers and the oppressed and another candidate, Sarkozy, who has a hard and abrasive approach.

Sarkozy has been particularly hostile toward the working-class families of North African and sub-Saharan African origin who live in the suburbs, or banlieues, of French cities. There was a large turnout of voters there.

In 2005, the banlieues erupted in a six-week-long rebellion over racist police repression, poor housing, lack of jobs and lack of opportunities. Thousands of cars, government buildings—like police substations and post offices—and bank branches were burned.

Sarkozy was interior minister at the time, and in charge of putting down the rebellion. He used violent force and vitriolic denunciation, calling the protesters “scum and riffraff” who should be “power hosed out of their communities and France.” A large majority of those arrested were French citizens, born in France, although often with parents or grandparents who were immigrants.

After the revolt, there was an intense voter registration campaign in the banlieues, along with a major effort to document their grievances and let the broader French public know what they are. Over a million people in the banlieues registered and most of them voted April 22.

This revolt was a major but not open issue in the campaign. The pro-capitalist candidates preferred talking about identity, nationality and patriotism. Royal accused Sarkozy of inflaming divisions and opening up gulfs among the French people. Her solution, however, was to urge students to learn the French national anthem and for families to keep a French flag in their pantry to display on patriotic holidays like Bastille Day.

Sarkozy urged tough enforcement of existing laws and tough new laws. He wants illegal immigrants rounded up and expeditiously sent home.

Sarkozy also wanted to win some of the supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the candidate of the National Front (FN). The FN is called “far right” but a better characterization of it is “fascist.” Le Pen boasts of having been an intelligence officer during the Algerian War, and a number of 2002 news reports conclusively tied him to cruel, bloody torture of supporters of Algerian freedom during that war to maintain France’s empire.

In 2002, because the Socialist Party candidate did so poorly, Le Pen managed to come in second. At that time the vast majority of left voters cast their ballots for the center-right Jacques Chirac, who won in a landslide.

Le Pen’s presence in the 2007 campaign opened up a huge debate on the left. The question was whether to vote for real left candidates who opposed the neoliberal policies of privatization and cutting social services that were favored by all the capitalist candidates including Royal—or to vote for Royal to make sure she, and not Le Pen, would make the second round.

This debate cut the left parties’ vote totals, which all together was only 10.5 percent. It was particularly sharp in the Communist Party, which drew under 2 percent of the vote, an historic low. But all the parties and organizations on the left had to address it.

Many believe that if the left parties had been able to maintain the unity they achieved during the campaign that defeated the European Union Constitution in 2005, they would have been able to run a more powerful campaign to challenge the neoliberal policies of the major capitalist parties.

The left party that most clearly solidarized itself with the struggles of the banlieues, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), did the best among the left with 4.1 percent of the vote. Neither the Workers Struggle party, the ecologists nor anti-globalization leader Jose Bove was able to have a significant impact.