Macron Wins With a Minority of Votes

Macron won the French Presidential election, but with a minority of votes, making it a pyrrhic victory, and indicative of things to come. Macron won 58.2% of the valid votes cast, but, firstly, 28.01% of voters did not turn up to vote, and of those that did only 91.4% cast a valid vote, with 6.35% casting a blank vote, and another 2.25% casting an invalid ballot in protest.

On that basis Macron's 58.2% vote, represents only 53.19% of votes cast, and only 38.29% of the total electorate. Still, of course, proportionally more than that of Le Pen, but hardly a mandate either, with a bigger proportion of the population deciding to either abstain, or to actively cast a protest vote than voted either for Macron or Le Pen.

Macron's supporters have, of course, highlighted the fact that he is the first candidate since Chirac to win re-election, but that simply illustrates the dire condition of French politics. With 13 million voters abstaining, it was the lowest turnout since 1969, indicating the fact that French voters disdained of the choice between either the right-wing nationalist politics of Le Pen or the right-wing Thatcherite policies of Macron. Its again an indication of the dire condition of politics that the Thatcherite politics of Macron were repeatedly described by the media as centrist, and also that large sections of the Left, and of social-democracy, seeking opportunistically to rally support around the “lesser-evil”, on the basis of “my enemy's enemy is my friend”, went along with such a description.

With Macron unable to seek another term as President, he now has five years in which to wreak further havoc with those same Thatcherite, anti-working class policies. The French Social-Democrats suffered the same fate as Pasok, as a result of repeated adherence themselves to Thatcherite/Blairite policies, with Hollande's left talking, and rapidly rightward actions, being the last straw. The French Socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo obtained just 1.74% of the vote in the first round. The social-democrats of the French Communist Party did little better with just 2.28%.

The so called Left candidate, Melonchon, secured 21.95%, showing the extent to which French workers actually do want a credible workers' candidate to vote for offering at least some nod in the direction of their interests, much as happened with the historic rise in Labour's vote in 2017, when Corbyn became Leader, similar to the rise in support for Labour when Michael Foot became Leader in 1980. However, Foot, Corbyn and Melonchon all suffer the same defect, which is that their radical social-democratic politics remain constrained within that social-democratic framework, and what is worse, it is made impossible, and reactionary by the economic-nationalist ideology that dominates it.

Melonchon's economic nationalism was little different, in content, to the policies espoused by Le Pen, which is why around a third of his voters said they would vote for Le Pen in the second round, despite him calling on them not to do so. It is the same petty-bourgeois economic nationalism, and statism that led people like Nye Bevan to support the Moseley Memorandum, put forward as such an economic program by Oswald Moseley in the 1930's, first when he was a Labour Minister, and which became the foundation of his economic policies for the British Union of Fascists.

And, that same convergence of the petty-bourgeois, statist, reformist Left with the statist Right, was seen again in the 1970's with those like Tony Benn and Michael Foot, who lined up to oppose the EEC, with the National Front. Petty-bourgeois nationalism and statism is the cancer that continually eats away at the heart of the labour movement, in all countries. It was the foundation of it lining workers up behind their respective ruling classes for the slaughter of WWI and II, and is being seen again, now, in relation to those elements lining workers up behind NATO imperialism against Russia and China, as the world heads inexorably towards WWIII, which truly will be the war to end all wars, as humanity itself is destroyed.

Attention now turns to the French parliamentary elections, and with Le Pen's NR party having only 7 seats, the factors that led to the support for Macron, as the least shitty option, in this election, will not apply. The French workers need to rebuild and renew their political organisations, both for those elections, and for the class struggle that lies ahead.