The media are hailing Emmanuel Macron’s election as President of France as a victory for their own bourgeois-liberal agenda. But analysis of the results gives a very different picture.
Macron is a former merchant banker who was recruited by the reformist President Hollande to the position of Finance Minister. The idea that he could attract the support of the majority of working class voters and French youth is laughable. In fact 3 million voters cast blank ballot papers, and a further million spoiled their papers. So about an eights of everyone who cast their votes actively participated in the election just to say ‘A curse on both their houses’.
The abstainers were also notable. More people decided not to vote than in any presidential election in nearly fifty years. The last time so many abstained was in the aftermath of the 1968 revolutionary actions when the right wing had suppressed a rising by workers and youth.
The media may crow about a resounding victory for the centrist consensus. But it is more a case of a defeat for neo-fascism.
You can be sure a lot of the workers who cast their vote for Macron were actually casting their vote for the only candidate left standing against the neo-fascist Marie Le Pen. When the Left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon was narrowly eliminated in the previous round, opponents of Marie Le Pen were left with the choice of abstaining, voting for Macron or spoiling their ballot paper.
Melenchon had stood on a platform of opposing austerity (or ‘cuts’ as I prefer to call it), calling for withdrawal from the EU and extending workers’ rights. He came within 2 percentage points of defeating Marie Le Pen. And that would have left Macron campaigning for cutbacks and attacks on workers’ rights against Melenchon’s anti-austerity rhetoric.
The French working class did not vote for Macron. To the extent that he got any votes from French workers, they were voting against fascism.
Macron now has the daunting task of trying to impose his neo-liberal programme on the French working class. With youth unemployment standing at around 24% he may find he is sitting on an explosive situation.