PARIS, May 26 — The fascist National Front (FN) party is the big winner of the European Parliament elections, held yesterday. The French ruling class might opt for fascism in the foreseeable future if its election circus is not strong enough to enforce its economic and political will.
In any case, however, workers have no stake in voting for one or another of the bosses’ electoral parties. Our class can never achieve liberation under capitalism. Only destruction of the profit system and its state through communist revolution can enable the working class to free itself from the oppression, exploitation, racism, sexism and imperialist wars of capitalism.
While according to a Harris poll, only 43 percent of the electorate cast ballots, the FN received 25 percent of the vote, the conservative Sarkozy-led Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party got 20.8 percent, and the Socialist Party (PS) 14 percent. Given the low total vote, the FN’s figure represents 11 percent of those eligible. It will send 25 deputies to the European Parliament, ten times the number it previously had.
While the media emphasized the far-right totals as an anti-European Union (EU) vote, it played down the fact that the election in France really represents a groundswell of racist hatred against black Africans and Arabs from the Maghreb (North Africa). It was part of an anti-immigrant, racist and neo-Nazi vote that swept across Europe. In Britain, as in France, the far-right won a quarter of the balloting. In Hungary, the deeply anti-Semitic Jobbik party finished second. In Greece, the anti-immigrant neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party won seats in the EU parliament for the first time.
In France, the two “respectable parties of government” — the UMP and the “lesser evil” Socialists — are greatly discredited. Since the Socialist defeat in the March municipal elections, Socialist President François Hollande has made a turn to the right, naming racist Manuel Valls as the new Prime Minister. Valls is infamous for saying, while mayor of Evry, that too many black faces at the municipal flea market gave the town a bad image.
In April, the governing Socialist Party voted an austerity package featuring cuts of 50 billion euros to government programs that mainly aid poor workers, a wage-freeze for government workers and 55 billion euros (75 billion US$) in annual tax breaks and reductions in social security contributions for French corporations — all to help them compete better against rivals in other imperialist countries. So workers no longer believe in the Socialists. The UMP is embroiled in a major scandal and workers do not see it as an alternative either.
According to Joël Gombin, a researcher for the Fondation Jean-Jaurès think tank (linked to the Socialists), while the top fascist leaders, Marine Le Pen and Florian Philippot, based their campaign on hostility to the European Union, trying to make their fascist party “respectable,” the main motivation for FN voters was to express their racism.
According to a May 25 Ifop poll, 88 percent of FN voters said “immigration” was the determining issue. But in 2012, only 193,600 immigrants came to France. Clearly, the issue is not the number of people immigrating to France. Actually, of the country’s 63 million population, 12 million first- and second-generation immigrants live in France (2008 figures) and 8.3 million are citizens. The 4.7 million people who voted for the FN in the EU elections want to expel these people for purely racist reasons.
The Communist Party (PCF) was the largest party in France after World War II. Today, after decades of class collaboration, it is just another election machine run by and for careerists. The Left Front, an alliance of the PCF and other fake left parties, won only 6.3 percent of the EU Parliament vote. The absence of any communist leadership has allowed workers to be won to the racist idea that immigrants are their enemy, not the bosses. Voters over 60, who experienced the 1968 general strike, voted least for FN, only 21 percent.
The ruling class has already experimented with fascist mobilizations, notably two “grass-roots” movements. One was the violent anti-tax “red bonnet” protests in Brittany in February, in which local bosses organized their employees to protest. The other was the anti-gay “Manif pour tous” (Demo for all) protests that began in 2013. They brought out hundreds of thousands of right-wing Roman Catholics, and on Feb. 2, 2014, were infiltrated and manipulated by fascist thugs.
In the near future, it is probable that the extra-legal fascist groups that gravitate around the FN will be emboldened to attack blacks, Arabs and leftists.
So now the French ruling class has two options. Either it can rely on the “respectable parties of government” to impose austerity on the working class — François Hollande has already stated that his government will not change direction. Or, if Hollande’s Socialists and the UMP are too discredited and too weak to enable the ruling class to enforce its austerity, the rulers would drop the mask of democracy and move to out-and-out fascism.
All this could result in a UMP-FN electoral alliance in the 2017 presidential elections. Like Hitler’s Nazi party in 1933, the fascist FN would come to power “legally.” Only the emergence of a true communist party could lead the working class out of this morass of capitalism’s election fraud, smash the fascists and topple the ruling class with communist revolution.