The shipwreck of the left
International Viewpoint #244 April 1993
THERE was little call for surprise over the results of the French general elections. The triumphant return of the right has come on the backs of the rout of a "left" that had progressively shed all its principles. HELENE VIKEN — March 25, 1993*
T HE responsibility for the scale
of the crushing defeat of the left lies squarely with the Socialist Party (PS) of President François Mitterrand, which has held governmental power for ten of the past 12 years. This is true not only in the sense that the voters have deserted it in droves but also because it has stubbornly clung to a two-round simple majority electoral system!. This has ensured that the already clear victory of the right in terms of winning 40% of the votes (and only 26% of registered voters) in round one will become a tidal wave in terms of seats in the The SP's legacy for the left is a parliament where 80% of the deputies are reactionaries, who will now hold all the levers of power.
The largest number of votes in the first round went to the Republican Assembly Party (RPR) of Mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac. In second place was the Democratic Union of France (UDF of former president Valery Giscard D'Estaing - and in third Jean-Marie Le Pen's neo-fascist National
It is true that the UDF is somewhat fragile. There are important differences on Europe and the difficult economic and political situation will leave big problems for the victors, who would in fact probably have preferred a less overwhelming victory.
This is all the more true given the success of the National Front. Many expected the ground to be cut from under the feet of this party by the certain victory of the traditional right, but in fact it has maintained a solid electoral base. It will now present a challenge to the new majority and a pressure towards radically rightwing policies.
The strong showing for the NF despite a 4.
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0 lack of media coverage of its campaign shows that in France a proportion of the population has been won over in lasting fashion by a fascist party and is now wedded to a series of nationalist, racist and police
Furthermore, the size of the victory — exaggerated both by the electoral system and the collapse of the "other camp" leaves the right in the paradoxical situation of enjoying unchallengeable institutional power with the express support of only one in four registe-
To be sure to some extent this result expresses a rightward shift in French society. The National Front and traditional right as a whole won 60% of the votes cast. But this is. in the first place, the result of its knockout win over the PS and the absence of any alternative on the left to that party.
Even under a proportional electoral system, the vote on March 21 would have given the right an absolute majority in parliament and the PS would have been sharply reduced. The Socialists had attempted to use the evidence of the opinion polls predicting a big rightwing victory to scare voters back into its camp, but this campaign clearly fai-
Furthermore, the rate of abstention, at a national average of 31% in the first round, clearly worked to the detriment of the left.
Adding on the many young people not registered, and others who have fallen off the lists, more than a third of potential voters did not bother to turn out. In some strongly working class constituencies the abstention rate was much higher than the average - 40% in such traditional strongholds of the workers' parties as Aubervilliers and Saint-Denis for example.
This is the result both of disgust with the political establishments — and the discredited candidates they put forward - and of the withdrawal from social involvement resulting from protracted crisis and longterm unemployment.
There were also record numbers of spoiled ballots, particularly in the constituencies where the PS suffered its most dramatic losses. The overall rate rose from 2% in the 1988 elections to 5.27% in the first round this time - revealing yet another part of the left's electorate who could think of no other way of expressing their frustration.
The Socialist Party has lost four million votes since 1988. Whatever its ups and * A version of this article appeared in the March 25 issue of Rouge, weekly paper of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR - French section of the Fourth International). 1. All candidates who gain 12.5% or more of the number of registered voters (not of votes actually cast) in the first round can go through to the second. Often candidates withdraw in the second round in favour of the front-running left or right candidate in line with national or local agreements.
Second round knockout
THE second round of the French elections on March 28 confirmed the results of the first round on March 21. In particular, despite frenetic efforts by the Socialist Party, there was little sign of any last minute rallying round that party in the face of the expected huge rightwing majority. Indeed, the rate of abstention rose to 32.44%.
International Viewpoint #244 April 1993 downs in the past twenty years, the PS has never before lost so much of its traditional base — to abstention, spoiled ballots, ecological candidates, dissident leftists and the right.
Thus, these results are not simply an expression of some inevitable alternation in
The latest estimates are that the right will have more than 480 seats, and the left 90.
power by two formations who oscillate
On the right the leading party will be the RPR with 242 seats followed by the UDF round the centre ground. For the left it is the with 206 with 36 seats going to other right formations.
end of the epoch opened up by the Union of
On the left, the PS got 67 seats (down from 282 - a figure that included a number of the Left, and of the Socialist Party as Mitternon-PS "allies" - in the outgoing parliament) and the PCF 25 — the latter registering rand reshaped it 20 years ago, and thus of the
"Mitterrand era" and the "left" in its existing shape.
The fascist National Front (NF) failed to gain any seats, as did the ecology candi-
The Socialists' pretensions to undivided hegemony over the left have meant that all
Leading members of Socialist Party governments lost their seats, including former the left's representation has gone down with
Prime Minister Michel Rocard, whose "big bang" scheme for reconstructing the the PS ship. No Socialist leader has been centre-left has thereby lost further credibility. * spared, from whatever current.
Former PS prime minister Michel
Rocard, looking towards the forthcoming presidential elections, has dramatically proposed a "big bang" on the left, in which the discredited PS would disappear into a new left formation. However, given the pull of the victorious right and the opportunities opened up by internal alignments within the new right majority, centre forces are unlikely to want to fill their allotted role in schemes to save the bacon of the losers.
Furthermore, such a scheme needs a PS
"hard core" when what is in prospect in that party is fiercely destructive battles powered by the search for scapegoats for the debacle.
And, finally, who on the left will want to join in a realignment towards the centre when the rout of the Socialists is clearly seen as a punishment inflicted by the left's natural voting base on all those who have systematically abandoned every attempt to defend their interests.
The Communist refuge?
The French Communist Party (PCF) has
"resisted well" as the papers here put it.
However, it cannot "resist" the overall disaster of the left. Its own decline set in a few years ago and it has not succeeded in reversing the downward trend. Indeed, it has lost
430,000 votes since 1988. If a vote for the
PCF has been a refuge for some left voters it hardly represents an overall alternative to the
PS.
This refuge has a strictly limited appeal, and this is true both of those loyal to party leader Georges Marchais and the various types of dissidents still running on the party's tickets. Its decline in historic bastions such as Seine-Saint-Denis in the erstwhile
"red belt" around Paris has been confirmed.
And cases where it came out ahead of the PS are the result of the collapse of the latter's score, not of big increases for the PCF.
Much was expected of the ecologists. In only a slight fall from 27 seats. vain as it turned out. They showed that it is possible to lose more than half of a potential electorate in three weeks — quite an unusual feat in electoral history — despite immense puffing by the media. While the alliance of the two main ecological currents, the Greens and Brice Lalonde's Ecology Generation (GE), may have lost 4% to the confusion caused by the appearance of numerous "false Green" candidates, many of their candidates were too well known - given the media exposure — to be seriously harmed by such confusion. In any case only 16 of their candidates went through to the second round, only two of them ahead of the SP.
Both the bright prospects and thedisappointing achievements were the result of the fact that many on the left saw the ecologists as a potential baulwark against the debacle of the left. Their vacuous campaign, which avoided all thorny issues, and examples of collusion with the right at regional level -as well as the highly visible sight of former minister Brice Lalonde chopping and changing his line from day to day on the TV, seriously compromised their unsullied image and cast suspicion on their real intentions.
Lalonde both shook Rocard's hand and made it understood that he could work in a government of the right - making it obvious that he was planning to go where the grass was greenest. This was an absolute disaster for a movement whose real chance of success lay in appearing as a clear alternative on the left and which had made a big point out of its independence and probity. Of the two big ecological formations, the Greens have by far the most serious orientation and a far more developed programme — but their independent profile was blocked out by the leader of the GE with whom they
Hopefully, the Green movement will draw a serious balance sheet of this experience. Sections of it have been prominent in campaigns against the Gulf War, in favour of the Third World, against Maastricht Europe, for the 35-hour week and for the right of immigrants to vote, and this is why they built up momentum before the elections.
Candidates supporting the appeal "Commitment for a Change on the Left" ("L'Engagement") attempted to provide a reference point for the realignment of a principled left, with modest success. Unable to have a national impact, and lacking any media attention, they were able to undertake some useful campaigns at a local level, stimulating debate and collaboration between different currents on burning questions of the day.
Where presented on PS and PCF lists they shared the electoral fortunes of those parties and where they were run in opposition to those parties they had small scores of between 1 and 5% - in a similar band to those of the far left lists presented by Lutte Ouvrière and the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR — French section of the Fourth International.
In any case, there is plenty for the left to do. The right will go on the attack right away over such obsessions as restrictions on civil liberties, anti-immigrant measures and stepping up police powers. An assault on social gains, in particular the minimum wage, privatization and attacks on women's rights will not be far behind. The left will have to organize united resistance to all this.
But, over and above the various concrete struggles looms the crucial issue of the building of a new representative force on the left to replace that of the Mitterrand epoch. The LCR, through its own campaign in the election and its involvement in the "l'Engagement" has already shown itself ready to address this central problem. *
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