Meanwhile October 2015 was the 10th anniversary of the risings in the Banlieues, still home to 4.5 million people and still ghettos where more than half live below the poverty line and 40% of the youth are unemployed. These are the areas in France which enthusiastically mobilised behind Hollande following his promises. After 10 years of failure - except for the small social layer who have used state interventions to rise above their neighbour's circumstances - the Banlieues have abandoned Hollande. These areas today have also emphatically turned their backs on French social democracy.
Both these social upheavals have called time on one of the two great parties that have dominated post-1968 France.
As for the Republicans, the other great party of modern French history, the growing incoherence and fear of the EU's refugee policy associated with ISIS attacks following the Syrian war has stimulated a nationalist resurgence to its right. Already the State of Emergency, provoked by the murder of 130 Parisians in November 2015 has been extended 4 times by the Hollande government, and is currently to be ended only by July 2017.
2017 is the year of French elections. The class wide battle of 2016, its retreats and its successes, its novelty, drama and insurgent atmosphere, its popularity in opinion polls, but also its inability to reach out across wider society, the continuing unmet need to crystallise a new political leadership, this underdeveloped revolt, has gone on to shape the chaotic, response of the French left. The failure of the EU economically and in its confused and fragmented responses to refugees, combined with ISIS attacks and the endless, purposeless State of Emergency, has mobilised the right - but yet also without coherent direction.
The far left, the most obvious repository for the activist forces of 2016 to find their home, is riddled with confusion. For example Phillipe Potou, a leader of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, (a split from the Anti-Capitalist Party) has had difficulty assembling the 500 signatures required to mount a Presidential challenge. The major far left hopeful, the long standing Jean Luc Melenchon, has morphed his Communist Party alliance under the umbrella of the Left Party, into an individual based movement called 'Unsubmissive France.' In different ways both show the as yet unformed capacity of the far left to be able to represent even the most progressive forces that 2016 unleashed, let alone the wider reach out to the Banlieues or France's disaffected working class. The mounting tragedy is the lack of their connection with the millions who have finished with Social Democracy. Far left parties are too small and isolated. At a wider, Melenchon level, they are being turned into 'trust' campaigns focusing on the individual 'hero'. But this European version of Chavas in Uruguay or even Tsipras in Greece has already passed its sell by date.
Social democrats have ended up voting for Benoit Hamon as their presidential candidate. (He is dubbed France's Corbyn - the leader of the UK Labour Party.) In a deeply sophisticated political culture, Hamon was the only social democrat candidate with a genuine program. His utopian ideas (750 Euros a month for all French citizens without jobs for example) are tied to fantasy economics (no income tax increases; state money to the unemployed will free them to create their own enterprises). So, no nasty class conflict. A Silicon Valley solution to globalisation and late capitalism which mobilises the intelligentsia, but which shows no real political intelligence when it comes to the gaping fissures and possible, indeed essential unities yet to be created in modern French politics - that has failed so badly in the hands of social democratic France and the EU's failing versions of globalisation.
Meanwhile Francoise Fillon won the Republican vote in a classical right wing version of utopia because of his Thatcherite intentions, his religious tempered social programme and, together with his (Welsh) wife, an outstanding, uncorrupted reputation. (Essential after Sarkozy, Christine La Guard, now of IMF, etc., etc,.) Except it turns out he has thieved hundreds of thousands of Euros from the state, paying for fake jobs for his wife and his children. Fillon was the bookies' shoe-in for President. But that was 48 hours ago.
In the context of the crisis of both traditional French Parties - as well as the unresolved shape of the far left - two apparent oddities emerge out of the mists of history to 'resolve' the French 'problem.'
The first of these is Emmanuel Macron, who hints at his political legacy in the title of his 'movement' 'Let's Go!' (Or "Forward.') Besides his packed meetings, Macron has powerful supporters behind the scenes. Some years ago he was identified as a member of ‘les Gracques’ — a discreet centre-left pressure group loosely staffed by influential chief executives and civil service mandarins. They are pro-market socialists who long ago gave up on the Socialist party. Macron talks about himself, his wife and his family. He offers a mystery and an absence. The absence is his lack of association with either mainstream party and his mystery is the blank canvas on which voters can write their own desires. Here we have France's technocratic version of Berlusconi; the managerial solution to the failure of politics. Invented in 1930's France, we now have a new generation that despises history and seeks an anti-politician! Macron contests French polls with Le Pen for top billing.
In the context of the crisis of both traditional French Parties - as well as the unresolved shape of the far left - two apparent oddities emerge out of the mists of history to 'resolve' the French 'problem.'
The first of these is Emmanuel Macron, who hints at his political legacy in the title of his 'movement' 'Let's Go!' (Or "Forward.') Besides his packed meetings, Macron has powerful supporters behind the scenes. Some years ago he was identified as a member of ‘les Gracques’ — a discreet centre-left pressure group loosely staffed by influential chief executives and civil service mandarins. They are pro-market socialists who long ago gave up on the Socialist party. Macron talks about himself, his wife and his family. He offers a mystery and an absence. The absence is his lack of association with either mainstream party and his mystery is the blank canvas on which voters can write their own desires. Here we have France's technocratic version of Berlusconi; the managerial solution to the failure of politics. Invented in 1930's France, we now have a new generation that despises history and seeks an anti-politician! Macron contests French polls with Le Pen for top billing.
And finally, Le Pen junior. In establishment circles French expectations regarding Marine Le Pen rely completely on the relatively permanent 77% of the polls that say the French, in the end, will vote for anyone rather than her. French commentators sagely explain the lock on the 2 stage Presidential election, where she would always be up against a single opponent, and she will never get a 50% plus vote in a 2 horse race. Nevertheless Le Pen starts with 25% plus ratings. And decades of voting shows that, unlike the UK, the US, Germany etc., France has 2/3 million solid fascist supporters in their voting population, with their roots in Vichy and Algeria, and who will not always restrain themselves within electoral politics.
Now Fillon's moral laxity opens another door - to his right. Le Pen leads the most 'traditional' party in France. It is a movement that predates WW2. Fillon's failure means Le Pen can reach out beyond her long-term base in the direction of those in fear over immigration and towards those who seek nationalist solutions to the damage caused by globalisation. Imagine the electoral temptation of a British UKIP, but now in France without the equivalent of a hard core Tory right wing to divert its progress.
Most international and many French commentators describe the coming elections as a 'right shift' in French society. This is the simplistic conclusion emerging out of the collapse of the Social Democratic Party and the general fear of more ISIS attacks. The reality is both harsher and more significant. Undoubtedly France will be the axis on which the whole European/Western crisis swivels. But the elements that are coalescing and repelling each other, underneath the coming Presidential carnival, include a social revolutionary aspect as well as fear and political alienation. France's left political organisations may well require as great a non-sectarian reformation as the corrupt, 'ancien regime' needs its overthrow. Traditional French politics no longer work at either level. But that does not rule out insurgency and the creation of new, bold progress; not in the most revolutionary country in Europe and not in the absence so far of drastic social defeat.
Now Fillon's moral laxity opens another door - to his right. Le Pen leads the most 'traditional' party in France. It is a movement that predates WW2. Fillon's failure means Le Pen can reach out beyond her long-term base in the direction of those in fear over immigration and towards those who seek nationalist solutions to the damage caused by globalisation. Imagine the electoral temptation of a British UKIP, but now in France without the equivalent of a hard core Tory right wing to divert its progress.
Most international and many French commentators describe the coming elections as a 'right shift' in French society. This is the simplistic conclusion emerging out of the collapse of the Social Democratic Party and the general fear of more ISIS attacks. The reality is both harsher and more significant. Undoubtedly France will be the axis on which the whole European/Western crisis swivels. But the elements that are coalescing and repelling each other, underneath the coming Presidential carnival, include a social revolutionary aspect as well as fear and political alienation. France's left political organisations may well require as great a non-sectarian reformation as the corrupt, 'ancien regime' needs its overthrow. Traditional French politics no longer work at either level. But that does not rule out insurgency and the creation of new, bold progress; not in the most revolutionary country in Europe and not in the absence so far of drastic social defeat.
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