Posts Tagged ‘French Politics’
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, as his own EU Fraud Scandal unrolls, Defends French honour in Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup of Jews.
France’s charismatic far-left leader Melenchon embroiled in EU fraud scandal. France 24.
An investigation into alleged misuse of European parliamentary funds by members of a number of French political parties has been extended to include far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, a judicial source said on Tuesday.
The preliminary investigation – already targeting members of France‘s centrist MoDem party, conservative party The Republicans and the Socialist Party – was opened after a member of Marine Le Pen‘s far-right National Front asked the Paris prosecutor to look into the issue.
Le Pen is herself under formal investigation for breach of trust in a separate case on the same subject.
According to Le Parisien daily newspaper, three people who were Melenchon‘s parliamentary aides while he was a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2017, are to be investigated.
Being a target of a preliminary investigation or a formal investigation in France does not necessarily lead to a trial.
Melenchon, now a member of the French parliament, leader of the France Unbowed party and a vocal opponent of the government of centrist Emmanuel Macron, denied any misconduct in a weekly briefing on Tuesday afternoon.
In a Blog post titled Jupiter déraille Jean-Luc Mélenchon offers his own take on the important questions of the day.
He begins with an extended reflection on the role of the French armed forces, and bemoans the loss of national control over the Force de frappe and the provision of military equipment. Pontificating on Macron’s cuts in funding for these ends, on Trump’s Paris visit (against which, perhaps I am wrong, La France insoumise mounted no public protest) and the reception of the r Netanyahu, the Israeli far-right PM, the Man of Destiny wonders if budget cuts are in line with the strategic objectives of France. Not to mention the land’s national independence, threatened, it appears by an “improbable plan de rapprochement militaire avec l’Allemagne”. he speculates that Trump and Macron share the same goals, “Trump et Macron partagent la même vision à propos des alliances et des guerres en Europe.”
Mélenchon’s real beef is that Macron accepted French responsibility for the round-up of French Jews at the Vel’ d’Hiv’. “dire que la France, en tant que peuple, en tant que nation est responsable de ce crime c’est admettre une définition essentialiste de notre pays totalement inacceptable.” To say it was France, as a people, as a Nation, was responsible for the crime, is completely unacceptable.
No it was not France, but Vichy.
“Non, non, Vichy ce n’est pas la France !”
For those who are surprised this is the standard Gaullist argument.
Wrong or Right.
What is perhaps more objectionable is the effort to outdo Charles Péguy in lyrical eulogy and a wrathful defence of France.
We should all remember the words of the leader of La France insoumise.
“…qu’on accepte d’en parler avec le souci de l’amour que nous devons à notre pays avant tout autre.”
That one should speak of such things with the concern and with the love that we owe to our country above all others.
Perry Anderson and the French Left After Macron.
PERRY ANDERSON AND THE FRENCH LEFT AFTER MACRON.
Part Two of a response to The Centre Can Hold.
In Part One of this critique we suggested that Perry Anderson’s analysis of the result of the French elections barely proceeded further than the affirmation that the “centre left” was a lieutenant of capital, that he lacked any notion of the specificity of different French government ‘neoliberal’, pro-capitalist politics, that his account of Macron’s victory was barely more than a tale of how the electorate was hoodwinked by the media and the establishment.
We noted that Anderson’s analysis of the role of France as a ‘hinge’ in the European Union, which he permits himself some meagre speculation on the potential effects of Macron’s Presidency on the EU. If as he claims these changes will be largely ‘cosmetic’, though one would not imagine that measures resulting from France pressure, to ensure debt relief for Southern Europe would not look like face paint to those affected, what is then the role of oppositions? Our conclusion, which dwelt on the radical utopian alternative of Dardot and Laval, suggested the ambitious scope of radical alternatives to the existing EU.
Anderson’s assumptions about the EU underpin much of The Centre Can Hold. One can note that the theme, clearly stated in 2012 against his critics, that Brussels, led by Germany, “corralled” EU members into fiscal “stability. One of his critics, Jan-Werner Müller, offered at that time an account of the “conscious delegation” of powers that constitute the inter-state body. It may be, Müller indicates, that Germany could, if the will were there, shift towards a more open system of EU decision-making. (1) This premise suggests that rather less than a total rejection of the existing institutions – reform – might be possible. That Europe is indeed a changing body is further indicated in the fate of Anderson’s speculation about the Union as “deputy Empire” of the US. Here does this stand now? No doubt the reign of Emperor Trump, who promoted Brexit, requires a further analysis.
The Jargon of Resistance.
But when it comes to looking at French elections perhaps this is not the point. New Left Review, we have to remind ourselves, has turned into the Organ of Resistance. In an Editorial in 2016 we were treated to a lengthy treatise on Left Oppositions (I will not refer to the article on Poetic Resistance in the same issue). Susan Watkins indicated that “in the last few years” “left oppositions started to produced national political projects with an impact at state level”. This covered Greece’s Syriza, Italy’s Five Star Movement (…), Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, and apparently, Scottish independence campaigners.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s 4 million Presidential votes in 2012, as the candidate of the Front de gauche (FdG), a bloc of his own group, the French Communists and leftists involved in groups such as Ensemble, figured on this list. He features equally amongst the “charismatic leaders” with his old style “oratory”. A paragraph, informed by sources which can guess not unfavourable to the leader of what was then the Parti de Gauche (PdG) complained of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF). It was “mummified”, a “ball and chain”, and, over egging this already egg splattered account, amongst the faults of the PCF, “In the National Assembly it regularly supports the Socialist government against the positions of the Parti de Gauche.” Writing in this vein the Mélenchonistas were given star rating, along with the thousands attending Nuit Debout rallies – over the, unmentioned, trade union led millions-strong campaign against the El Khomri labour reforms.
With the NLR condescension Mélenchon was judged “in part” social democratic, but with more ‘heterodox elements” “including sweeping constitutional change – not a social-democratic trait”. Those familiar with the Journal’s views on such issues, will realise that the importance they attach to the calls for a 6th Republic, although the Editor fails to mention that the same banner has been raised by a number of the left inside the Parti Socialiste (2014: Appel de socialistes pour une sixième République).
La France insoumise.
Shift forward a year, the formation of La France insoumise (LFI), the effective end of the Front de Gauche, and the 2017 Presidential elections. Against the ‘pale figure” of Benoît Hamon. We have the Grand Orator Mélenchon standing with the backing of hundreds of thousands of on-line supporters and – on the ground – “groupes d’appui”, organised supporters.
“..the change was more than just organisational. Fascinated for some time by the success of heterodox governments in Latin America, he drew particular inspiration from the example of Rafael Correa in Ecuador, like him a former minister of a social-democratic party, who had pioneered the idea of a ‘citizen’s revolution’, rewriting the constitution, redistributing wealth and protecting the environment. This was the way forward, to abandon the exhausted schemas of the traditional European left for a radically progressive populism, summoning the people to battle against the elites in control of a bankrupt political and economic system. Impressed with the strategic insight of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, encountered in Argentina in 2013, Mélenchon set about applying their lessons at home.”
We pause for a moment to consider this.
A Movement not a Party.
La France insoumise is a “movement”, not a party. Mélenchon declares, “Il peut disposer des moyens d’être représentatif de cet ensemble globalisant qu’est le peuple en réseau de notre époque” That is, it can be a network that represents the people ‘globally’ in our era. Is it democratic? “Le mouvement n’a pas à être « démocratique » au sens basiste que souvent on donne à ce mot dans les organisations politiques où l’on doit alors affronter le climat de confrontation des courants et des textes qui les fondent avec les votes contradictories.” The movement is not ‘democratic’ in the the grassroots sense of the word in political parties, where different tendencies and resolutions are presented confrontationally, or with oppositional voting.” The movement is as “collective” as possible (“c’est d’être aussi collectif que possible”) In other words, there is no formal debate over competing views, or, more significantly, any means to do so – LFI operates internally through cyber-space with the direction set by….the leadership. For his supporters Mélenchon is the “embodiment” of the programme; there is no need for opposition to him. Inside La France insoumise there are, as yet, not plans for a place for a democratic opposition or channels for one to exist. It is run, as report after report indicates, by a core of close Mélenchon advisers from the PdG.. (2)
A further pause, La France insoumise its admirers claim, is not a tactic, a political ‘start-up’ adapted to the new era of personalised politics. But what is it? The organisation is more that symbolically linked to other models – we shall discard the reference to Ecuador (which few will have heard of and which counts for even less than erstwhile evocations of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela), but to Podemos. LFI is not, nevertheless, the product of a French Moviemento 15 Mars, no mass street protests preceded its launch, and only the figure of the producer of Merci Patron François Ruffin stands in for the brief flash of the Nuit Debout square occupations.
La France insoumise was first and foremost the vehicle for Mélenchon’s Presidential ambitions. It was a temporary body, It is secondly an ambitious claim to ‘federate the people’ into something resembling the ‘left populism’ of Laclau and Mouffe. Although one should be wary of politicians claiming intellectual authority from fashionable figures (Hamon has also claimed to be influenced by Mouffe: Benoît Hamon, Inspirations au programme), there is more than a little of a demand for “equality and popular sovereignty” in LFI’s version of ‘agonistic’ (conflictual) democracy to feel an imprint. In place of class conflict in the sense of a contradiction rooted in a mode of production, classic social classes, we have the opposition between the People (demanding equality and sovereignty) and the Elite/Oligarchy. We have an even more rudimentary opposition between Friend and Foe (Carl Schmitt), beneath this. Political reform, “sweeping constitutional change”, a ‘citizens’ insurrection’ through the ballot box, are designed to clean the institutions of the corruption of the oligarchs and to bring alive the general will inside a new Republic, one that can (and this is repeated) ensure French independence (3)
Le Grand Replacement ..of the Left.
It is finally, a movement whose central strategy is to replace the existing left, not to unite it, not to bring together it for common objectives, but to call for traditional left-wing parties to …sod off (dégagez!) For those wishing to pursue this analysis from the numerous criticisms levelled at Mélenchon and LFI, they will find many more critical accounts, so abundant that one might have thought a reference or two might have crossed Anderson’s mind….(4)
LFI’s patriotism, and rejection of any reference to class in favour of the conflict between the People and the Oligarchy, can hardly escape the casual observer.
“La France insoumise banned red flags and the Internationale for the tricolour and Marseillaise at its meetings, appealing to all patriots regardless of class or age to rise up against the decaying order of the Fifth. Borrowing the cry that drove out Ben Ali in Tunisia, Dégagez!—‘Clear out!’—became the leitmotif of the campaign.”
It takes a strong stomach to digest this, one no doubt fortified by memories of 1950s PCF tricolours and references to national liberation heroine Jean d’arc. Is there more criticism, at least more than implicit, from Anderson? Perhaps this sentence could still be expanded… “In reality, the two anti-systemic forces, rather than aggregating to a common populist insurgency, largely cancel each other out. However similar their critiques of the social and economic system, insuperable moral and ideological differences on immigration hold them apart at opposite ends of the political spectrum, where each freely demonizes the other.” Immigration, FN as a ‘scarecrow’ used to rally people behind the Macron and the Republic……..and there it ends…
Or not. Anderson is soon bored by French Politics and drifts back to geopolitical, European, issues. He notes that, “the balance of forces in a neoliberal but not yet neo-federal system of power militates against dramatic changes”. The final paragraph of The Centre Can Hold talks of the single currency, the Euro, and the possibility of a French exit from it. Recasting monetary union, is, Anderson pats Mélenchon on the back, a “geopolitical” issue, not a technical one. Of that, all we hear that can be brought down to immediate relevance is the question: can there be an effective means to compel Germany to help a reform of the EU?
The future of La France insoumise, as it announces a Convention in the autumn, remains to be analysed. Will it become a real party? Where will it go? Many suggest that Melenchon has still not come to terms with the idea that he will not be President. In the National Assembly, having made a splash, there are strong independent figures in the group of 17 who may have their own ideas about the direction it should take. One thing is certain, neither the PCF (10) the PS (45 seats), nor the rest of the left, including Hamon’s own new movement, the mouvement du 1er Juillet nor the extra-parliamentary left, nor the union federations, look ready to be “replaced” by Mélenchon. The failure of LFI’s stunt this week, holding on its own, without trade union backing, rallies against Macron’s new labour reforms, indicates the limits of how far its “recuperation” of social movements can go. (5)
********
(1) After the Event Perry Anderson. Beyond Militant Democracy. Werner Müller. New Left Review. No 73. 2012.
(2) Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Le peuple et le ‘ mouvement ‘ November 2016
(3) The Democratic Paradox. Chantal Mouffe. Verso. 2005. A much more detailed critique of Laclau and Mouffe’s influence on ‘left-populist’ politics is in preparation. The motif of French independence, militarily, economically, and related themes, such as “producing French”, stand out in the pages of La France insoumise’s programme, L’Avenir en commun. 2017.
(4) See: La France insoumise – « L’ère du peuple » et « l’adieu au prolétariat » ? jeudi 3 novembre 2016, par JOHSUA Samuel, MELENCHON Jean-Luc Rousset provides the best summary. Mélenchon, France insoumise, populisme : questions sur la séquence électorale 2016-2017 et ses implications ROUSSET Pierre.
(5) La France insoumise se met en chantier – Vers une convention fin octobre ? BESSE DESMOULIERES Raphaëlle
Trump Celebrates Fall of the Bastille.
Trump: Guest of honour to celebrate Bastille Day.
This is how he arrived (from top Sketch artist/Ace reporter, Plantu).
Robbie Travers has yet to post on his appearance.
Despite this hiccup everyone else that matters has and was there to celebrate Bastille Day.
You can watch the splendid event direct here:
Live: Trump, Macron attend Bastille Day military parade.
A less exalted commentary is available below (L’Humanité).
This appears about the sum of the protests:
Before the day this took place.
‘The Centre Can Hold’: Perry Anderson, French Politics in the Era of Macron, A Critique. Part One.
‘The Centre Can Hold’: Perry Anderson: a Critical Look.
Part One.
“Chaque pensée devrait rappeler la ruine d’un sourire.”
Each thought should evoke the ruin of a smile.
Syllogismes de l’amertume. Emil Cioran.
For Perry Anderson “the revolutionary working class went AWOL somewhere around 1970.”
Roger Scruton. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. Thinkers of the New Left. (1)
Has the 2017 French Presidential contest, followed by the June Parliamentary elections, redrawn the political map not just in France but also across Europe? Emmanuel Macron’s conquest of the Élysée (66,10% of the vote), in a second round against the far-right Marine Le Pen (33,90%), marginalising the Parti Socialiste (PS), eliminated at the first hurdle with 6,36% and Les Républicains (LR), at, 20.02% is said to have seen off the anti-European Union “populist revolt”. Others talk of his pro- EU “populism of the centre”. Some on the left draw comfort from the respectable score in the initial contest, 19,58% for Jean-Luc Mélenchon of la France insoumise.
The success of Macron’s brand new, ‘start-up’, movement-party, La République en marche (LRM), with 314 seats, and close allies, the MoDems, 47 MPs, out of 577 députés, is overwhelming. Backed by ‘compatible’ deputies from the fragmenting Socialist Party and the Republican centre-right, which now dominates the French lower house, the Assemblée Nationale, illustrates, it is claimed, the obsolescence of the old-party form. To some this has shaken up not just the old French blocs of left and right but introduced a new form of political representation. For Pierre Rosanvallon Macron, and his still-standing opponents, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen, are the “personalised”, “direct catalysts of popular aspirations” (Idées. Le Monde. 17.6.17) Introducing Perry Anderson’s The Centre Can Hold (click for full text) The French Spring. New Left Review’s (NLR) Programme Notes begins rather with political economy. Macron, liberal in economics, and liberal (in the American sense) socially may mark another shift. “Has neoliberalism finally arrived in force in Paris and if so what are the implications for Europe?”
Macron’s journey from liberalising Minister of the Economy (2014 – 2016) in François Hollande’s Socialist Government, some tussles with Prime Minister Manuel Valls – not to mention mass protests against labour reforms – to the entry of the former high-flying Banker and Civil Servant into the gilded chambers of the Élysée, is a tale worth telling. That it did not happen without help, unwilling as much as willing, is recalled. Attacks on finance soon forgotten Hollande had rapidly begun “tilting to business and tailing Berlin”. Nor is the inability of his governments to tackle mass unemployment, poverty, to stand up to EU financial ‘rigour’, forcing the Mediterranean members to suffer the blast of monetary discipline and ‘restructuring’, unchronicled. The President’s manifest failings, low, described in Valérie Trierweiler’s Merci pour ce Moment (2014), and high, beginning with Hollande’s opinion of himself, and the both at the same time, as revealed by Gérard Davet and François Lhomme, are there for all to read, or at least the media’s extracts and commentaries. The outgoing tide of Hollande’s support, the his “self-destruction”, the mass protests and strikes at labour law reform (Loi El Khomri) under PM Manuel Valls, to “please business” – Anderson at least does not finger the EU for that measure – paved the way for the marginalisation of the Parti Socialiste. The transfer of PS card-holders and, above all, notables, to the new Master, was preceded by the mobilisation of an active core behind Macron’s Presidential bid.
Tenebrous back-door manoeuvres
Macron appeared, in short, Anderson affirms, at length, more than a providential “embodiment of all that was dynamic and forward-looking in France”. Behind this public portait, Anderson suggests that not only was their was transfer of allegiances, the use of PS networks, and the development of an establishment cabal behind him, there was a vast media-political operation, with wider business and ‘civil society’ support. Le Canard Enchaîné, with, he notes, close links with the “tenebrous world of back-door manoeuvres” and the “manipulative operations of the French intelligence services” leaked evidence of the abuse of public funds by Macron’s right-wing rival François Fillion. Dubbing the satirical weekly the Great Elector we are treated to Anderson’s lengthy speculations on the origins and motives of those who may have used these leaks to destroy the candidate of Les Républicains.
If Anderson is to be believed, “Macron’s background guaranteeing he would be a business-friendly icon of deregulation of the kind Hollande wanted” the transfer of the President’s claque to a new icon was well judged. The Centre Can Hold describes him marketed as part of “a movement transcending the outdated opposition between Right and Left in France, for the creation of a new, fresh politics of the Centre, liberal in economics and social in sensibility.” Enough people bought the message for an electoral landslide to take place.
Opponents were trounced, deals were made, François Bayrou was squared, the middle class were quite prepared…Anderson has, we can be sure, not revealed more than a fraction of the contents of a hefty shelf of breathless Secret Histories of the 2017 Election Campaign. That the new Boss has been sometimes ungrateful, the Editorial suggests, at least to his one-time Patron, and, we could add, to those, like Valls, with whom he has accounts to settle will doubtless lend piquancy to the narrative.
This entertaining, depressing but far from unprecedented story, is only part of a larger picture. The ‘operation’ succeeded as a consequence of the withering on the vine of the Parti Socialiste’s social base and the political impasse of the party that has failed in recent years to manage more than Léon Blum’s “exercise of power”, without conquering the solid bastions that give a real lever for social change.
The Republic of the Centre.
The NLR Editorial locates the origins of the PS’s difficulties in relief against a long line of attempts to create a Republic of the Centre, a term taken from the widely read. La République du centre (1988). In that book, subtitled, La fin de l’exception française, Pierre Rosanvallon, with François Furet and Jacques Julliard, announced the end of French ‘exceptionalism’, above all the persistence of an electorally and socially significant radical left. For Anderson President Mitterrand “had laid the foundations of a stable Republic of the Centre: no longer dependent on the individual charisma of a national hero who was distrustful of parties, but now solidly anchored in a cross-party ideological consensus that capitalism was the only sensible way of organizing modern life.”
Crucial to this turn was not the “stable republic”, a cross-party consensus and left-right alternation of power, but the left’s acceptance of the market. Since the Mitterrand ‘turn’ in 1982-3, the Socialists have constantly drifted, but they have always been marked by efforts to create a market-friendly liberalising ‘republic’. Anderson does not cite exactly why this change happened, here, or in his previous writings on France, where we learnt that it was ‘neoliberal’ and a “decisive turn towards the logic of financial markets”. Indicating, rather than defining ‘neoliberalism’, with the label Hayek stuck on it too boot, obscures what lay at the origin of their trajectory. (2)
The 1982-3 ‘moment’, a conjuncture that brought together political and economic strategic change with a cultural shift towards the market, remains marked in PS history. The Mauroy government, abandoned a strategy, reinforced with the entry of Communist Ministers in the cabinet, of nationalisations, proactive industrial policy, and increased consumption, came as the first Mitterrand governments failed to reduce unemployment or stimulate growth. Put simply, with the world in recession, going it alone was not working. Warnings of economic disaster starring the President and Prime Minister in the face during the summer of 1982 and the judgement that the franc risked going through the floor, strained the country’s membership of the European Monetary System (EMS) to breaking point. Retrenching at this point was more than a “pause” in reform. The government suddenly dropped all the idea of top-down ‘statist’ economic intervention. The initial wave of nationalisations (which remained in place for the time being, including important parts of the banking system) were not the ‘instrument’ of economic growth and social change. Industry had to be “restructured”, that is modernised at the cost of closures and layoffs; budgets had to restrained. The PS, soon free of a vestigial alliance with the Communists (PCF), came to grips with what they considered the impossibility of ‘Keynesianism in one country’. The “mutation” of modern capitalism was embraced.
What remained of a left-wing ambition beyond clamouring for creative destruction and extolling model entrepreneurs? For Anderson, it was the European ideal. For Mitterrand Europe was France’s future and economics had to follow. The two term President seized on “the inspiring ideal of Europe”, that is, staying within the EMS (European Monetary System). It was in its service that the French were called upon to “liberalise and modernise themselves.”
That the austerity programme in 1983, and the zealous pursuit of ‘modernisation’ under the subsequent PM Laurent Fabius, has marked the governing French left ever since is not in doubt. But the alternative answer, argued by the Minister of Industry, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, for France to “go it alone” outside the EMS, may well have led, as his opponents claimed, to a collapse in the franc, and to France going cap in hand, for help to another international “neo-liberal’ institution, the IMF, with an equally severe plan for budget cuts. A left-winger might well ask about the reaction of the labour movement. From Mitterrand’s victory in 1981 to the policy change, there was little popular activity, and the brief displays of CGT militancy that followed the exit of the Communists from government never rose beyond fragmented protest. (3)
The Centre Can Hold spills the beans on some more confidential reasoning, “In private, Mitterrand—more candid than his successors—knew what that meant, as he confided to his familiar Jacques Attali at the outset: ‘I am divided between two ambitions: the construction of Europe and social justice. The European Monetary System is a condition of success in the first, and limits my freedom in the second.’ Once the eu was in place, every market-friendly initiative could be extolled or excused as required by solidarity with Brussels.”
Is this another way of saying that French politicians, like political figures across the Continent, put responsibility for the unpopular consequences of market-friendly policies, which they fully support, onto ‘Europe’? Or is it to say that “pooling” sovereignty through the EU had given rise to an “accumulation of powers” by the “elites of the Council and Commission and their subordinates”, as Anderson put it in The New Old World (2009)? Is he suggesting that Keynesianism in one country was a viable option, and should have been pursued, regardless of the absence of mass popular mobilisation, and whatever the consequences for the ERM, and France’s position as the “hinge of the European Union”?
One way of avoiding these hard questions is to call upon the people to speak. That is, to demonstrate that, despite having filled their ears with Brussels’ wax, French politicians, unlike Ulysses, have had difficulty in resisting – much much later – the Sirens of popular discontent. Anderson fills several paragraphs with evidence that the masses recoil at pro-market reform. The Centre right has many object lessons in this, “as Juppé discovered in 1995 and De Villepin in 2006.” He then turns to the more difficult task of explaining how ‘neo-liberalism’ could be introduced.
The Centre-left, by contrast, was a better Lieutenant of Capital. It “was the better equipped of the two blocs actually to introduce neoliberal reforms. Resistance to these was always most likely to come from the popular classes where the larger part of its own social base lay, in particular—though not exclusively—from the trade-unions, where only the collaborationist cfdt could be relied on to swallow virtually anything…..still claiming to represent the injured and oppressed—and interpret their best interests—the PS was in a more favourable position to neutralise such opposition, as Valls’s success in ramming through a labour law to please business in 2016 showed. So too it was no accident that over the years the Centre-Left privatised many more public enterprises than the Centre-Right.” Except, of course, that these policies played sufficiently badly with the “popular classes” to contribute to the mass defection that caused this instrument to shatter. As their electoral disaster and the transfer of support elsewhere, including, Anderson notes, many went to La France insoumise.
Fighting Neo-liberalism.
From this account one might ask what is ‘neo-liberalism’ other than any pro-business policy? And what is the alternative other than the resistance of the masses to these measures? And where did these pro-market measures originate? Are they domestically determined, or can we, as appears to be suggested with the evocation of the ‘European ideal’ assign it to forces within the structures of the EU. The New Old World lists a lack of a common democratic will at the European level, the construction, from these quarters, of a Hayekian “semi-catallaxy” of free markets beneath, and an apparatus removed from accountability and stuffed with “prebends”. This picture looms only faintly over the present article. Even that charge-sheet against “self-satisfied” Europe seems feeble set against, to cite a representative from a mountain of critical literature, the account of a neo-liberal European Union apparatus in Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s Ce cauchemar qui n’en finit pas (2016) They talk of a “Empire des normes”, budgets, debts, “le bloc idéologique néolibérale”.
Dardot and Laval’s call for countervailing international democratic coalitions, and an “espace oppositionnel mondial” has so far, been largely unheeded. Yet despite the obstacles, the Union remains an area of “pooled sovereignty” in which national governments, if no longer unanimous about ‘rescuing the nation state’, still enjoy the determining power. That the EU – and Anderson, as we will see, homes in on the future of the Eurozone – can be shaped by political will. That domestic policy formation remains the key to change, that Macron’s decisions matter, and efforts to mould or block them, are at least one of the keys to the success or failure of neo-liberal, or, more simply, pro-business acts and legislation. And what could be the role of an opposition to undo Macron’s plans?
END OF PART ONE.
PART 2 TO FOLLOW: THE LEFT AFTER MACRON.
References.
(1) Page 232. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. Thinkers of the New Left. Roger Scruton Bloomsbury. 2015.
(2) Prognoses. The New Old World. Perry Anderson. Verso. 2009
(3) See Pages 326 – 333. Les Socialistes français et le Pouvoir. Alain Bergounioux and Gérard Grunberg. Fayard. 2005. Pages 362 – 376. Mitterrand A Study in Ambiguity. Phillip Short. The Bodley Head. 2013.
French Socialists fragment further as Benoît Hamon quits Party to found left ‘Mouvement du 1er juillet.’
Hamon: I’m Leaving the Socialist Party, not Socialism.
Alors qu’il lançait son Mouvement du 1er juillet, le vainqueur de la primaire a annoncé qu’il abandonnait le PS. (Libération)
Benoît Hamon, this year’s presidential candidate of the French Parti Socialiste (during which he scored a humiliating 6,36%), has announced his departure from the Party on Saturday afternoon at the first meeting of his Movement 1 st July, Reuilly in Paris. “I spent thirty long and beautiful years in the Socialist Party. I loved this party, I loved it passionately. Today, I am leaving the party but I do not leave Socialism and the Socialists, “ he said. They were nearly 10,000 present at the rally, according to the organisers. The former MP continued “I have not changed my beliefs, but it is time for me to turn the page.” He added, I’m not saying farewell to the Socialist Party activists.”
Hamon, with a background of many years of work in the PS, as a party spokesperson (2008 – 2012) including serving as a Minister (2012 – 2014) he played a leading role amongst its left-wing tendencies, including amongst the ‘frondeurs‘ who criticised the drift, fiscal orthodoxy, and market friendly politicies of President François Hollande and his governments, considers that he and his new association will be part of the foundations with which the French left will be able to build a new “common Home”, ( ‘la maison commune de la gauche’).
For the recent Presidential contest Hamon was selected as the candidate of the Parti Socialiste through the publicly open “primary” of the Belle Alliance populaire (BAP) launched by the PS and its close allies.
In the second round he won with 58,69% of the votes (1,181,872 ballots). His rival, former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, lost with 31,48% (831,871).
Despite signing an agreement to respect the result Valls (and it is alleged many others close to President Hollande) lost no opportunity to sabotage Hamon’s campaign. Amongst those who blamed the left-wing ‘frondeurs’ for the collapse of the French left vote, Valls was at the forefront of those who backed Emmanuel Macron. The right-winger left the PS a few days ago to more clearly show his support for the ‘centrist’ new President. Valls now sits as an MP as part of Macron’s La République en marche (Manuel Valls quitte le Parti socialiste et rejoint le groupe LRM à l’Assemblée).
Hamon accuses Macron of representing a social minority. His counter objective to bring together that social majority with the left to become a political majority.
“Notre objectif, c’est que la majorité sociale d’ici cinq ans, et pour commencer d’ici 2020 aux élections municipales, redevienne une majorité politique” (le Point)
Amongst those present at the new movement’s first public meeting were former Ministers Philippe Martin and Dominique Bertinotti, Green politicians, Jannick Jadot and former Green party (ELEV) leader, Cécile Duflot as well as representatives of the Communist Party (PCF) Fabien Guillaud-Bataille and (a former leading member of the Trotskyist Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, at present a member of the PCF) Christian Picquet.
More Le Monde: Benoît Hamon annonce qu’il quitte le Parti socialiste.
This report summarises the contributions of the meeting. All were agreed, despite their differences on the need for “new structures for the left” “reinventing” the and building anew the left. (tous, malgré leurs divergences, s’accordaient à dire que la gauche devait se « reconstruire », « se réinventer » et abandonner ses vieilles structures.) on the ruins of the PS which seems now to be like a Church without believers.
In a Tweet Hamon said to members of the PS that he did not say adieu but see you again
In his pre-Presidential book, Pour La Génération qui Vient (For the Coming Generation 2017), Hamon begins by describing his own generation (he is still in his forties), born after the post-War boom, a cohort that has known four decades of crisis. Yet today, he continues, politicians look backwards to an “imaginary” country, a land now ‘besieged” and in “decline”. The supporters of fear and nostalgia have to be faced up to, there is no “homme providential” (Man of Destiny) that can save us, no saviour, “Au culte assumé du chef, la gauche a toujours oppose la force d’un espoir collectif” (against the claims of the cult of the Leader, the left has always put forward the power of collective hope, Page 18).
We hope that Hamon can fulfill his objectives.
The new association, the Mouvement du 1er-Juillet, will be based on participative democracy and local committees.
Simone Veil, a Courageous Fighter for Women’s Freedom, passes.
Simone Veil, the revered French politician who survived the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and defied institutional sexism to push through a law legalising abortion in France, has died on June 30th 2017. She was 89.
A widely respected figure across the political divide, Veil was the first female leader of the European Parliament and the recipient of France’s highest distinctions, including a seat among the “Immortals” of the Académie française, the prestigious state-sponsored body overseeing the French language and usage. She was renowned for her endeavours to advance women’s rights and the gracious but steely resolve with which she overcame male resistance throughout a remarkable life scarred by personal tragedy.
As one of the more than 76,000 Jews deported from France during World War II, Veil appears on the Wall of Names at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, under her maiden name Simone Jacob. So do her father André, her mother Yvonne, her sister Madeleine and her brother Jean. Of the five, only Madeleine and Simone survived the ordeal, though Madeleine would die in a car crash just seven years after the war.
Simone was the youngest of four siblings, born in the French Riviera resort of Nice on July 13, 1927, in a family of non-practising Jews. Her father, an award-winning architect, had insisted her mother abandon her studies in chemistry after they married. Like most other Jews in France, he reluctantly obeyed orders once the Nazi-allied Vichy regime came to power in June 1940, registering his family on the infamous “Jewish file” – which would later help French police and the German Gestapo round up France’s Jews and deport them.
As French nationals living in the Italian occupation zone, the Jacob family avoided the first round-ups, which targeted foreign Jews, mainly in the northern half of France that was occupied by German troops. But they suffered the sting of anti-Semitic laws, which forced André Jacob out of work and led to Simone adopting the name Jacquier to conceal her origins.
The situation worsened after September 1943, when the Nazi occupiers swept all the way down to the Riviera. Simone, then aged 16, had only just passed her baccalaureate when she was arrested by two members of the SS on March 30, 1944. The Gestapo soon rounded up the rest of the family with the exception of Simone’s sister Denise, who had joined the Resistance in Lyon. Denise would later be detained and deported to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, from where she returned after the war.
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Still only 17, Simone returned to France devastated by the loss of her parents and sister, but determined to pursue the career her mother had been denied. She studied law at the University of Paris and the Institut d’études politiques, where she met Antoine Veil (1926-2013), a future company manager and auditor. The couple married in October 1946, and would go on to have three sons, Jean, Nicolas, and Pierre-François.
Simone Veil began work as a lawyer before successfully passing the national examination to become a magistrate in 1956. She then took on a senior position at the National Penitentiary Administration, part of the Ministry of Justice, thereby securing a first platform to pursue a lifelong endeavour of advancing women’s rights. She notably strove to improve women’s conditions in French jails and, during the Algerian War of Independence, obtained the transfer to France of Algerian female prisoners amid reports of widespread abuse and rape.
Switching to the ministry’s department of civil affairs in 1964, Veil continued to push for gender parity in matters of parental control and adoption rights. A decade later, her appointment as health minister in the centre-right administration of President Valéry Giscard D’Estaing paved the way for her biggest political test. She first battled to ease access to contraception, then took on a hostile parliament to argue in favour of a woman’s right to have a legal abortion.
“No woman resorts to an abortion with a light heart. One only has to listen to them: it is always a tragedy,” Veil said in a now-famous opening address on November 26, 1974, before a National Assembly almost entirely composed of men. She added: “We can no longer shut our eyes to the 300,000 abortions that each year mutilate the women of this country, trample on its laws and humiliate or traumatise those who undergo them.”
After her hour-long address, the minister endured a torrent of abuse from members of her own centre-right coalition. One lawmaker claimed her law would “each year kill twice as many people as the Hiroshima bomb”. A second berated the Holocaust survivor for “choosing genocide”. Another still spoke of embryos “thrown into crematorium ovens”.
“I had no idea how much hatred I would stir,” Veil told French journalist Annick Cojean in 2004, reflecting on the vitriolic debate decades earlier. “There was so much hypocrisy in that chamber full of men, some of whom would secretly look for places where their mistresses could have an abortion.”
The bill was eventually passed, thanks to support from the left-wing opposition, though Veil had to withstand the affront of swastikas painted on her car and home. Today, the “loi Veil” enjoys overwhelming support in France, where few mainstream politicians dare to challenge it.
…she was elected to the Académie française, becoming only the sixth woman to join the prestigious “Immortals”, who preside over the French language. Her ceremonial sword was engraved with the motto of the French Republic (“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”), that of the European Union (“United in diversity”), and the five digits tattooed on her forearm in the inferno of Auschwitz, which she never removed.
Le Monde: Mort de Simone Veil, icône de la lutte pour les droits des femmes
Libération: Simone Veil, une femme debout.
The extreme right hated Simone Veil, and still do,
This is a recent Blog piece.
Un site d’extrême droite se réjouit de l’état de santé de Simone Veil
The Communist Party leader saluted Simone Veil.
Former French Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls, quits Socialists, is humiliated by Macron, and faces Challenge over Electoral Fraud.
Valls, Humiliated by Macron, Now Faces Charge of Electoral Fraud.
Former French prime minister Manuel Valls said Tuesday he was leaving the Socialist Party, with a source adding that he would now be allied to President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist group.
“Part of my political life is coming to an end. I am leaving the Socialist Party, or the Socialist Party is leaving me,” the 54-year-old told RTL radio.
Valls, who was prime minister under Socialist president Francois Hollande from 2014 to 2016, was rejected by Socialist voters in the party’s primary to choose a candidate for this year’s presidential election.
The party chose hard-left candidate Benoit Hamon instead and he failed to reach the run-off of the presidential election in May as France’s two main parties fell at the first hurdle for the first time since 1958.
Emmanuel Macron sealed the humiliation of his Socialist former bosses yesterday when Manuel Valls was allowed to sit with the president’s MPs in parliament but excluded from any post of responsibility.
Mr Valls, right, the former prime minister whose own presidential ambitions were sunk by his young economy minister, said that he was quitting the Socialist party and would sit as an ally of La République en Marche, Mr Macron’s new centrist group.
“Part of my political life is coming to an end,” Mr Valls, who served for nearly three years as President Hollande’s prime minister, said. “I am leaving the Socialist Party, or the Socialist Party is leaving me.”
His passenger status with the all-conquering La République en Marche is likely to be bitter…
The Times
Latest news:
Valls Faces Challenge to his election. His La France insoumise (FI) opponent Farida Amrani who lost out to Valls in the recent legislative contest by a narrow 139 votes, alleges forged signatures, voter intimidation and the shredding of ballot papers cast for his opponents.
Farida Amrani a déposé un recours contre l’élection de Manuel Valls : “Des dizaines de signatures ne correspondent pas” Radio Bleu.
Législatives : Farida Amrani aurait des photos et vidéos contre Manuel Valls
La candidate de La France insoumise dépose un recours pour faire annuler la victoire de son adversaire dans la 1re circonscription de l’Essonne. RTL
