The foundations

The coming together, in France, of forces to the left of social democracy in practice arose from this 2005 campaign. The campaign enjoyed range of groups acting together: the French Communist Party (PCF); far-left forces and especially the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) – forerunner of the NPA; currents from the left of the Socialist Party such as PRS, ‘For a Social Republic’, led by Jean-Luc Melenchon; and community groups and unions such as ATTAC, the Confédération Paysanne and Solidaires, the Confederation of SUD and other social movement unions.

Following on from this success, several calls were made attempting to sustain this alliance in the 2007 presidential election. These attempts failed however, mainly as a result of the refusal of the LCR and the PCF to come together and the 2007 election was marked by an electoral fragmentation for these forces. The LCR’s presidential candidate, Olivier Besancenot, received the least bad result, with just over 4 per cent of the vote. Following on from this result the LCR transformed into the NPA, which – for a short time – dominated this space to the left of the Socialist Party, enjoying a significant media impact and favourable opinion polls. This was a situation that was something of a flash in the pan ahead of the creation of a new alliance, the ‘Left Front’ (Front de Gauche).

The Left Front was made possible by the resignation from the Socialist Party of both Jean-Luc Melenchon and the PRS, which would join with the PCF and a small breakaway group from the NPA to form the “United Left” (Gauche Unitaire). At the time of its birth, the Left Front did not appear to be any more credible or attractive than the NPA, with whom Jean-Luc Melenchon proposed to make a permanent alliance for the 2009 European elections and regional elections of 2010. Melenchon’s offer was rejected by the NPA however. This was based on an incorrect prediction that the Left Front would rally unconditionally to the Socialist Party, and an overestimation of the impact of the admittedly considerable charisma of the NPA’s spokesman, Olivier Besancenot. In the 2009 European elections, the Left Front trounced the NPA. This advantage was only amplified in the regional elections in 2012, and became crushing in the presidential election.

Today the Left Front consists of the PCF – a party historically in decline but which still has a militant potential and an important activist network of elected representatives; a series of small organisations coming mainly from the far left; and the ‘Left Party’ (Parti du Gauche or PG) of Jean-Luc Melenchon that formed at the start of 2009 at the same time as the wider Left Front by the PRS and activists from other backgrounds. The PG is a party that wants to combine the ideas of the labour movement with the French Republican tradition and, more recently, environmentalism.

Melenchon argues that a worsening debt crisis and a deteriorating economic situation, will lead to significant political and social instability, a foretaste of which is provided by Greece. Hence the need for him to remain completely independent of the Socialist Party in representing an alternative to social democratic ‘crisis management’, and to focus his attacks on the National Front and the extreme right, which he fears has been one of the main beneficiaries of the growing crisis, and finally to develop a centralised and disciplined party, a party that will be the only one capable, according to his point of view, of being able to work and organise in the coming troubled period.

Alongside the PCF and the PG, several small member organisations of the Left Front were in discussion with other currents that have supported the campaign of Jean-Luc Melenchon or are interested in the momentum it has generated, such as the ‘Anti-Capitalist Left’ (Gauche Anticapitaliste, or GA), the current that broke with the NPA over the issue of uniting with the FG, the ‘Alternatives’ – those activists from ‘Europe Ecology / the Greens’ who disagree with the alignment of the Green Party with Socialist Party positions, and participation in a government formed by Francois Hollande.

The aim of these discussions is to create a new political movement within the Left Front, that could present a vision focussed on social issues, but also internationalism and alter-globalisation, and immigrant rights, environmentalism, defending the ‘right to the city’ and digital rights.

The rootedness of a radical vote

The results of the elections were very interesting in a number of ways and have highlighted that there is solid support for left-wing politics in France. To this however, we must add that the far-right National Front enjoyed a very high level (17 per cent) of support, repeating its 2002 success, and with a massive vote amongst those working class sectors confronted with international competition, but also in rural areas of the North and East of the country, where an employment crisis and the withdrawal of public services place a key element of the population in ever more precarious circumstances.

At the same time, the election was also marked by the breakthrough of the ‘Left Front’ and its candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, who, with over 11 per cent support, is enjoying a great success to the left of the centre-left Socialist Party after a very active campaign, one of whose most striking aspects was the mounting of three giant outdoor meetings each attended by around 100,000 people in Paris, Toulouse and Marseille.

This result is interesting for two reasons. It shows first of all, the rootedness of a radical vote to the left of social democracy. The total of votes for candidates to the left of the Socialist Party in presidential elections since 1995 has been – with the exception of 2007 – between 11 and 14 per cent. In 2012, the voice of the Left Front, Workers’ Struggle (Lutte Ouvrière) and the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) represent 13 per cent of the vote – far more than the 9 per cent achieved by those to the left of the Socialist Party in 2007. A score comparable to that of 1995, which involved replacing François Mitterrand, the first socialist president of the 5th Republic, or 2002, in which the outgoing parliamentary majority was left-wing. After a period of ‘left’ government, the radical left is always stronger as many people from the left feel disappointed by the policies of social-democrats. In 2012 it was viewed as vital the punishment of Nicolas Sarkozy and the right-wing parliamentary majority, in a context where many observers stressed the need for the ‘useful vote’ against the right, and feared a breakthrough of the Front National would weaken, as in 2007, the left of the Socialist Party.

This result is interesting because unlike 1995, 2002 and 2007, it marks the first successful attempt to rally the ‘left of social transformation’, a subject to which we will return.

This electoral success is largely the product of three factors. First, it comes after a series of significant and sizable social struggles, the most important of which was the movement to defend retirement at age 60, a movement that inspired millions and millions of demonstrators some 18 months ago, in the autumn of 2010. It is also a response to the platform of Francois Hollande, the Socialist Party leader and now President, a programme that sticks to the main outlines of austerity policies implemented by all European governments with only two detours: a tax policy that would be less favourable to the most wealthy than the programme of the right; and a desire to mobilise Europe, such as the European Investment Bank to kick-start a European recovery. In comparison to such a moderate programme, the Left Front and Jean-Luc Melenchon were able to defend a radical platform of social redistribution and a tougher attitude toward financial markets. Lastly, his success is also the expression of a left-wing refusal to European policies of austerity, which places these developments on a continuum that dates back to the 2005 campaign against the proposed European constitution.

The evolution of a left future

The future of the Left Front will obviously depend on the evolution of the social and economic situation and the strength of social struggles that could develop in France. But it will also depend three questions that remain unanswered.

The first issue, decisive in the short term, is the relationship with the Socialist Party and specifically on government involvement. It involves both a general strategic problem regarding management of government institutions and an immediate tactical question: whether to participate in this particular government, that of Francois Hollande. At the time this paper was written, all the actors of the Left Front ruled out any such participation, arguing that none of the conditions that would allow such an alliance to have been fulfilled in any way, given that this government will put austerity at the centre of its policies. It seems that this judgment is to be confirmed after the parliamentary elections next month, which are crucial for the continuity of the Left Front beyond the presidential candidature of Melenchon. In the longer term, the question of institutional management will have to be seriously discussed, as the PCF has traditionally participated in all executives of the left without ever really discussing political orientations. Meanwhile, the PG and the forces that are in the process of regroupment believe it absolutely necessary to have a discussion and programmatic agreement – including the key points that separate them from the parties of the right – with other leftist parties before any participation in the executive.

The second question concerns the structures of the Left Front. At the moment, the Front is just a coalition of parties and political forces that has only allowed the participation of individuals during the presidential campaign via local ‘citizens’ assemblies.’ In the medium to long term, the Left Front can be transformed into an attractive and militant political force if it is transformed and democratised in allowing direct participation by individuals in all decisions, both local and national. This is an essential discussion, but one that has yet to be launched between the various partners within the Left Front.

The third question, and perhaps most important one, concerns the direction of the Left Front. A question that can in turn be broken down into two further ones: What are to be the relations with popular struggles and social movements? And what are to be the main perspectives to be developed by the Left Front? The Left Front has demonstrated its ability to conduct active, politically relevant electoral campaigns that deliver significant results. However, it has yet to conduct any advocacy campaigns on political or social grounds outside elections. This will be an important issue for the months and years ahead. The relationship with the movements must also be discussed while avoiding two pitfalls: the subordination of social movements to party-political forces that are “by nature” superior in importance; and a separation of tasks that would allow the political forces to manage institutions and elections while social movements are left confined to the sphere of social relations. What the Left Front’s perspectives on these issues are to be requires debate and discussion. To put it briefly, if social issues must remain central as austerity policies became more widespread in Europe, these issues remain at risk of confining the Left Front to a defence of social gains without taking into account other issues that concern the whole of society and especially the younger generations, notably immigrant and digital rights, etc.

All these issues will be at the heart of the debates of the Left Front and its individual components, whether in existence or in the process of being formed. They are also being discussed by the different forces in Europe that are developing to the left of social democracy: Germany’s Left Party (Die Linke), Greece’s Syriza or Portugal’s Left Bloc (Bloco de Esquerda). Exchanges on these experiences across Europe, learning from the successes and failures of these political formations, will be vital if we are to advance and define alternatives to the current crisis of the European Union!

By the time you read this, the area of wooded dunes near Calais may have been cleared of the shanties that are home to over a thousand migrants and would-be asylum seekers. They come from countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan, all seeking security in the UK.

In July, French immigration minister Eric Besson denied that the bulldozing of the camps was imminent and pledged that humanitarian organisations would be fully involved in any clearance plan. Calais deputy prefect Gerard Gavory immediately contradicted him, emphasising that the operation was to take place soon, that no notice would be given to the organisations providing humanitarian assistance, and that those in the camps would be forcibly deported if necessary.

Both the French and the British authorities want to get rid of the camps, considering them an embarrassing eyesore for tourists, and an emblem of the ‘disorderly’ movement of non-Europeans who insist on ignoring national borders in search of safety. Proposals include setting up a new detention centre for migrants in the British-controlled part of Calais docks to make control and removal easier.

In July, Gordon Brown announced that £15 million would be spent on more detection devices to search lorries leaving French ports for the UK, and in return French premier Nicolas Sarkozy promised to speed up the removal of undocumented migrants. Efforts have also been made to persuade those seeking asylum to claim in France rather than the UK.

The UN High Commission for Refugees full-time representative in Calais, along with NGOs such as France Terre d’Asile, has tried to disabuse the migrants of their hopeful fantasies about life in Britain; and in May the French authorities made it possible to claim asylum in Calais, instead of in Arras, 100 kilometres away. But the presence of relatives and friends, the enduring belief in British fairness and the Dublin Regulation laying down EU member-states’ responsibility for asylum claims all deter claims in France. The last allows removal to the migrants’ point of entry into Europe – generally Greece. Here await inhuman conditions, a refusal rate of 99.9 per cent and deportations to torturing states.

Whether or not the expected bulldozing happens, the migrants have more immediate problems. Apart from the ever-present threat of arrest and deportation, and the reality of frequent police round-ups and attacks with tear gas, they have to contend with living in utter destitution (since if they don’t claim asylum they are ineligible for any welfare benefits). For shelter, most have dwellings of plastic sheeting, cardboard and ply. There is no running water and no sanitation. In June a 32-year-old Eritrean drowned while trying to wash himself in the canal, and recently the insanitary conditions have led to an outbreak of scabies.

Salam, the main voluntary group working with the migrants, distributes food daily at seven coastal sites as well as providing legal advice and help. It has negotiated with the local authority to allow the provision of showers by a Catholic aid organisation, but no one knows when they will start or what conditions will be attached.

Most of the hostility to the encamped migrants comes from this side of the Channel. The Daily Mail, for example, has run scare stories about human chains of asylum seekers across Calais motorways carrying out knifepoint robberies of British tourists. But these stories have no basis in fact. The border police at Coquelles have had no such reports, and the Calais police denied the Mail’s story that they advised holidaymakers to keep car windows and doors closed.

The No Borders camp at Calais in June brought over several hundred protesters. But solidarity with the migrants attracts police harassment. The camp was blockaded and demonstrations in the town were attacked by police, who made more than 20 arrests. Meanwhile, harassment of volunteers distributing humanitarian aid continues, under French laws that criminalise assistance to undocumented migrants.

The immigration minister denies that this law, designed to target traffickers and profiteers, penalises solidarity. He has promised to meet solidarity groups and to extend exemptions for social and medical workers. But Salam notes that the proposed exemptions don’t cover volunteers, and point to the recent prosecution of its vice-president, Jean-Claude Lenoir. Although he was acquitted in July of insulting a police officer, the prosecution has appealed.

No Borders Brighton’s ‘Mailwatch’ is at
http://nobordersbrighton.blogspot.com

Regular mass strike waves and the growth of the student movement over recent years have sharpened the demand for a real radical left party, and the economic crisis and Sarkozy’s ‘billions for the bankers’ policy, pumping money into propping up private banks, have raised the temperature even more. The combination of Sarkozy’s policies (swingeing cuts in education, tax cuts for the rich, the privatisation of the post office and more troops for Afghanistan to name but a few) and the lukewarm opposition of the Socialist Party have increased the political space for the radical left.

New parties and movements

In February 2009, two new left parties will have their founding conference in France, while a third, looser entity, La Fédération, will also be setting up shop. These organisations aim to propose winning strategies and analyses to the movements, of which there are many. Public sector trade unions called for a mass day of strike action on 29 January, while the movement for Gaza is enormous. The school student movement in December already forced the education minister into a humiliating climbdown: he has had to abandon his flagship reform of high schools, at least for the time being.

Meanwhile, strikes by illegal immigrants have resulted in many getting papers, and train drivers, airline staff and teachers have also been involved in industrial action. Media workers on public television channels went on strike against Sarkozy’s plan to give himself the right personally to appoint their new boss. Sarkozy commented in December that the French like to decapitate their kings, and has been reduced to repeating in interviews that ‘anti-capitalism is not the solution’.

New Anti-capitalist Party

Nonetheless, the first new party of 2009 will be the New Anti-capitalist Party (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, NPA) set into motion by Olivier Besancenot and the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire. The LCR and its ideas have a popularity that goes far beyond its three or four thousand activists. In 2007, 62 per cent of the population ‘had a good opinion’ of Besancenot, and he has recently been voted ‘best opposition voice’ because of his outspoken support for strikes and immigrant movements.

The NPA is an attempt at a broader party than the LCR, one that will be based on opposition to capitalism, but not insisting on members being attached to any specific model of revolution – it has been called ‘almost revolutionary’. In its first few months it is likely to surpass 10,000 members. Preliminary events showed a promising dynamic – several towns got more than a thousand people to their meetings, and nationwide there are 400 constituent committees.

The LCR will dissolve into this new formation, the rest of the NPA members largely coming from trade unionist circles, the student movement and the many activists of the non-party left. No other major national political current has decided to join, partly because of sectarianism on both sides. Debate rages inside the NPA about what alliances are acceptable. On one side are those who are worried that the NPA will lose out by working with people who haven’t really broken with the neoliberal wing of the Socialist Party. On the other are those who fear that the new party could be missing a chance to unite with wider forces with the double aim of winning more partial class victories in 2009, and of demonstrating in practice the quality and desirability of the NPA.

Other NPA debates include whether to redefine socialism as ‘eco-socialism’ and whether to concentrate on working in the major trade union federations or support much smaller but more radical unions. On more theoretical issues, there are red-green, syndicalist and libertarian ideas aplenty alongside Marxism.

The Left Party

The other new party is the Parti de Gauche, launched by Jean Luc Mélenchon and supporters who have left the Socialist Party, which is, in their view, hopelessly headed for full-scale Blairism. Openly based on the German Die Linke model (though far smaller), it is supported by a growing group of intellectuals and local and regional elected figures. Cheerfully opposed to ideas of revolution, Mélenchon believes there is space for a campaigning radical reformist party to the left of the Socialist and Communist parties. His party-in-embryo is printing campaign material against Sunday working and in defence of public services, while organising a series of discussion meetings with each of the forces of the radical left.

A number of grass-roots activists hesitate between the two parties. Could these parties have been wings of a united radical left party, in the way that Die Linke in Germany has revolutionaries and reformists and many undecided inside it? The possibility was dashed when the radical left did not manage a united candidacy in the 2007 presidential elections, but the jury is still out on who was most to blame. In the future, the two parties just might be able to work together, and the economic crisis makes it urgent that they learn to do so.

It is interesting to see that despite Mélenchon leaving the Socialist Party, the level of class struggle in France ensured that the Blairite wing of the Socialist Party represented by Ségolène Royal (who was keen to ally with moderate conservatives) was defeated at the recent conference by a centre-left alliance around Martine Aubry, who presents a slightly more human face of capitalism that at least involves a higher minimum wage and rent controls.

La Fédération

Finally, a third new organisation, La Fédération, is trying something more modest. Convinced that a new united party has little chance of flowering (and even that the party form is no longer appropriate for the 21st century), a series of red and green groups have set up La Fédération to coordinate common struggle, while people can remain in the parties they come from (or don’t). La Fédération includes the few hundred ‘Communists for Unity’ who are on their way out of the Communist Party, and the ‘anti-neoliberal unity collectives’ who go back to the united and successful campaign against the European treaty in 2005.

Despite widespread anger against Sarkozy, and the popularity of strike movements, French trade union leaderships are massively ‘new realist’, calling for days of action on separate days, unable to believe that a real challenge to Sarkozy is possible. The influence of a combative radical left is necessary, but unity is hard to build. The New Anti-capitalist Party seems to me a real step forward, although ideological purism remains a danger. Of the three new initiatives, the NPA is far and away the one that attracts the most students and school students; many universities have a committee. La Fédération is fiery but often excessively grey-haired.

On a negative note, there seems to be no real progress on that terrible blind spot of the French left – opposing Islamophobia is in practice a taboo, and paranoid secularism is common. In a 2007 poll, 49 per cent of radical left voters felt Islam was ‘negative for French identity’ – and that’s compared to 44 per cent in the population as a whole. Arson attacks against mosques provoke practically no comment from the radical left.

The struggle continues to build a powerful radical left, capable of winning over a very numerous new generation of activists thrown up by recent mass movements, while avoiding unprincipled alliances with the pale pink ‘left’, which puts managing capitalism before struggling for change.

John Mullen is an NPA activist in Agen. He blogs at johnmullenagen.blogspot.com

JM: The official founding conference will be in January 2009. For the moment there are 400 committees for a ‘new anti-capitalist party’ all over France. The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) was the force which proposed and coordinated the foundation, and it will dissolve itself in a couple of months time. I attended the November national delegate meeting as one of the delegates for my town.

The meeting was very encouraging. The new party initiative is obviously attracting many people, some of them young, others experienced union activists, mostly (apart from the LCR members), people who have not been in a party as such before. Obviously, for the moment, there’s quite a concentration on the preparation of a programme to be voted on at the founding conference. Nevertheless many committees have been active in campaigning on the issue of the financial crisis, defending schools and universities against budget cuts, defending illegal immigrants against expulsions and so on.

JJ: 400 committees seems like an impressive number of groups for an organisation that hasn’t yet launched. How do these committees operate? How large are they, for instance would you have more than one in a town? Essentially are they the new party in waiting or are they the campaign for the new party?

JM: It is impressive. In Montpellier, a day long regional meeting got two thousand people to it, a similar regional meeting in Marseilles got 1500, other towns had huge meetings. National commission meetings on ecology, on politics in working class neighbourhoods and so on have produced wide debates and proposals. Essentially, the committees are already the new party-in-embryo – every week there is a national political leaflet given out in almost all the towns. But the committees also have much autonomy. In one town there will be a public meeting on the financial crisis, in another a symbolic invasion on the local hypermarket to protest against the government’s refusal to raise the minimum wage. The LCR is already very much a federal sort of organisation (for better and worse), and this will no doubt continue.

But the party-in-embryo does not yet have a regular publication, an essential element for a campaigning party. Nor does it yet have a proper financial structure, though plans have been made for subs based on income. There is a website and a weekly paper should be set up two months after the founding conference.

JJ: So what’s the thinking behind the new organisation? After all, even more than in the UK, France has no shortage of left groupings.

JM: The massive strike waves and political movements of the last few years have shown that there are many, many people in France who would like to build a political alternative on the radical left. Olivier Besancenot, the spokesperson of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has recently had significantly higher popularity ratings than Sarkozy or his prime minister Fillon. But this widespread sympathy for radical left ideas has not led to people joining far-left parties to anything like the extent one might think. And the socialist and communist parties are generally identified as ‘the parties who don’t change much when they’re in government’. The new anti-capitalist party was called for by the LCR, the idea was for a party that is based on struggle, where elections are secondary, but which doesn’t ask members to all identify with a specific revolutionary or Trotskyist position.

JJ: Who’s currently involved in this initiative?

The only big organisation involved is the (soon to be ex) LCR. And a few thousand individuals, quite a few of them are well-known local or even national leaders of the non-party radical left, which has been quite big here for a number of years. Inside the NPA, some activists want to draw the lines of the party fairly narrow, to be absolutely sure not to include people who are too quick to ally in local or regional government with the Socialist party and their acceptance of neoliberalism. Others would like to make the party considerably broader, because they are worried that people who put mass movements and strikes at the centre of their politics, and are firmly opposed to the dictatorship of profit, will be kept out of the party if the lines are drawn too narrowly. Discussions continue on this. But in the present name of the party, ‘anti-capitalist’ represents the compromise position at present. We want people who are opposed to capitalism, who generally believe that capitalism cannot be given a human face.

This means that inside the party, you have people close to anarchism, close to radical green politics, close to Guevara’s ideas etc.

JJ: Do you think the current crisis in the Socialist party is something that might bring dividends to the new project? The Left party in Germany certainly benefited from having a leading SPD member behind the project from the start. What are the prospects for attracting the best parts of the communists, socialists, Lutte Ouvrière and, I guess, the Greens?

JM: Recent economic and political events will certainly boost the new party. It is not hard to get people to listen to anti-capitalism these days – waves of sackings are making sure of that. And the relative paralysis of the Socialist party and the Communist party will make it easier for the NPA to build support.

The situation is, however, complex, and the NPA is not the only organisation trying to crystallise the radical left. To go through the parties briefly:

The Trotskyist organisation of a few thousand activists, Lutte Ouvrière is opposed to the new anti-capitalist party to such an extent that it broke with a very long tradition by allying itself with the Socialist party in the municipal elections last April, rather than risking an alliance with the LCR and the non-party radical left.

For Lutte Ouvrière, all these people in the NPA are not revolutionaries and therefore not interesting. Over the last few years, Lutte Ouvrière has been completely cut off from any of the big unity political campaigns (against the European constitution, against Le Pen etc). They stick strictly to ‘workplace issues’ and are in decline because of this. They have just expelled the minority current from their ranks because this current wanted to work with the NPA.

The leadership of the Communist party won a good majority at its conference for a ‘business as usual’ motion putting alliances with the Socialist party at the centre of its strategy. All minority motions did very well though. Whole sections of communists are leaving the party (many favourable to a federation of the radical left). But their paper and good analysis of the economic crisis mean they still have an audience.

The Socialist party has seen two historic events in the last six months. First, a significant split to the left by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has now established a new party ‘Le parti de gauche’ on the model, he says (but much smaller) than the German Die Linke see [Flunking the written]. It will be founded very soon, and will attempt to fill the gap between the Socialist party ‘let’s manage capitalism more humanly’ line and the ‘almost revolutionary’ line of the NPA. It could become an important force, it’s hard to say.

The second key event is that Ségolène Royal, the Tony Blair of the Socialist party, was defeated by an alliance much to the left of her (though not that left), on a very close poll. This is excellent news, and means that left arguments will be more audible. The radical left should be able to point up the difference between the left speeches of Martine Aubry, the new leader, and the lack of support for key struggles from this absolutely electoralist party.

Finally, some of these fragments, as well as teams from the non-party left have just set up a federation of left forces and activists, to try to overcome the bittiness of the radical left. The idea is that different forces and individuals can run joint campaigns, but don’t need to leave their own organisations – dual membership is encouraged. This federation is backed by a number of important figures.

The upshot of all this is that the NPA has important decisions to make about who to work with and on what. For example, for the European elections in 2009 – is it better to have united slates of candidates across the radical left (I think so) or to have an independent NPA slate, to be able to put forward a clearer platform?

The tendency within the NPA is to rock forwards and backwards between sectarianism and unity politics. I am not talking about mad small-group sectarianism (because the new party will start with many thousands of people). But that sectarianism emphasises our differences with other groups, and finds a host of reasons why we cannot work with them, even for limited aims. There is a real tendency inside the NPA to think ‘we are the only real left’ or ‘of course, we want unity: people from other organisations should leave them and join us instead, then we’ll be united.’ The tendency towards sectarianism is the biggest danger for the NPA. The numbers, relative youth, enthusiasm, energy and real pedagogy for explaining key issues are the most important positive points.

JJ: In this country there has been an ongoing difficulty with left unity projects where revolutionaries have been determined to hang on to their autonomy within the broader alliance. To the extent, that it can create, I think, unnecessary conflicts and distrust of separate agendas. What’s the position of the LCR, as the most significant organised current in the NPA, on this tricky balancing act between retaining distinct organisation within the NPA and submerging their efforts in to it?

JM: An old and tricky problem, and you and me won’t necessarily see it in the same way. In my opinion the problem comes when differences are not discussed but separate agendas are pushed forward in rather hidden ways.

I personally would like to see the NPA declare ‘The NPA is a party which has some people who are revolutionaries and others are not. Debate will continue within the party on these issues, while together we build all the struggles which are needed to oppose the dictatorship of profit.’ This is not really happening. There is a tendency to hide differences. So for example, on the question of whether the NPA is a revolutionary party or not the posters will say ‘A party to revolutionise society’ and a whole number of other formulations that avoid the question.

This ‘formulation politics’ was already one of the banes of the LCR. On a difficult question, find a formulation, which upsets no one, instead of deciding the question. Some of the formulations had no meaning …

So, it is an ongoing question. To emphasise, the aim of the LCR is not to control the NPA, the LCR is officially dissolving itself and there is no plan to maintain an LCR current inside the NPA. I think its likely that the different currents that were in the LCR will end up setting up three or four currents in the NPA, which seems fine to me. As Socialisme International, our tiny group of comrades, along with a couple of dozen others, will certainly set up openly a current based on IS ideas (close to SWP theories).

To sum up, the NPA is a very exciting initiative and everyone should build it. The new economic crisis means workers have even more of a need for a party based on class struggle, and there is a new generation of young activists being built very quickly. I hope the NPA will quickly work with wider federations, and in this way help to win partial victories on important points, while continuing the debate on how to definitively eliminate capitalism.

John Mullen is an anti-capitalist activist in the south-west of France and editor of the review [Socialisme International->http://pagesperso-orange.fr/revuesocialisme/]

Jim Jepp blogs at The Daily (Maybe), the adventures of a socialist in the Green Party

These proponents of the Anglo-Saxon ‘free market’ model hope that Sarkozy will put the left in its place.And who knows, maybe he will convert the French to the neoliberal agenda that, so far, a majority of them has stubbornly rejected.

In France and across the world, there is a real shiver about this election: will Nicolas Sarkozy manage to stop the cyclical movements of rebellion against neoliberal policies? Over the past 15 years, French workers have successfully defeated the greatest attacks on their social state. This is unique in the west. This French singularity angers those who feel that neoliberal economics are not politically and ideologically driven, but the best science can offer.

In 1995, the general strikes against the austere policies of the Juppé plan paralysed the country’s transport for over a month, yet they received great popular support. The government had to withdraw the plan and subsequently the right lost the 1997 elections. In 2005, the French voters rejected the European constitutional treaty by a large majority, on the grounds that the document would facilitate the dismantling of public services and would place Europe under the yoke of unfettered markets. In 2006, protestors saw off the attempt by the De Villepin government to undermine labour laws for younger workers.

Will Sarkozy emulate Margaret Thatcher and tame the French trade union movement? Will he manage to undo French labour laws or undermine the right to strike? Will he, in short, break the strong egalitarian ethos of French society? And, if he is successful, will the Socialist Party finally cease to be ‘socialist’ altogether and come in line with the post-Thatcherite New Labour?

It is too early to answer those important questions. However, it is possible to reflect upon the demise of the French left.

First, the left should have never lost this election. After three resounding electoral victories against an unpopular right-wing government in 2004 and 2005, this crushing defeat is quite extraordinary.

Despite a robust anti-Sarkozy mobilisation in the second round, Ségolène Royal was more emphatically defeated than Lionel Jospin in 1995. Given the tactical voting on the left, her 25 per cent in the first round constituted quite a mediocre result. In other words, Royal did not prove an electoral asset as expected, but rather a liability.

Second, Royal was facing the most detested and loathed French politician (except Jean-Marie Le Pen). Borrowing heavily from the American right on economic and moral issues, Sarkozy’s politics are totally at odds with the more egalitarian, secular approach to politics of mainstream French politicians. It is also ironic that Sarkozy managed to come out of the televised debate against Royal as the calmer and more tolerant of the two.

Third, it is clear that voters have shifted to the right when one looks at the presidential election results. In particular, Sarkozy has appealed to large sections of the working class (some of them being former Front National voters). However, there is nothing new here.The trend started in the 1980s, but it did not stop the left from winning a number of elections since then. Furthermore, it seems unwise to jump to the conclusion that popular support for the right represents an adhesion to Sarkozy’s free-market policies. Things are more complicated than that.

It is clear that Sarkozy’s strong stance on immigration, law and order and national identity appealed to working-class voters. It is far less obvious that the same voters would approve of the policies of economic deregulation, or back the dismantling of the social state.

Sarkozy shrewdly talked about the ‘right to work more and to earn more’, an indirect attack against the 35-hour week implemented by the socialists. Royal did not argue consistently against this fallacy.

Currently, any working hour above 35 hours is paid at a higher rate. Sarkozy plans to scrap those higher rates. This means that most workers may soon have to work more and earn less than at present. Instead of counter-attacking on this point, Royal could only evoke the rigidity of the law, giving further ammunition to Sarkozy to rubbish a truly progressive reform.

Fourth, the socialist candidate focused the first part of her campaign on the issue of ‘participating democracy’; a theme that appealed to the middleclasses, but has not struck a chord with the rest of the population. Critics described the whole experience as gimmicky and not a genuine exercise in direct democracy along the lines of the participatory budgeting of the Workers’ Party in Brazil. ‘Participatory meetings’ were organised across France, but they mainly attracted Royal’s supporters of Désir d’Avenirs clubs. After promising the public that it would have a stake in the drafting of her manifesto, Ségolène Royal’s controlling approach proved very disappointing. In reality, her policy platform was a compromise between some of the moderately reformist aspects of the socialist programme and her taste for Blairite soundbites on law and order.

Furthermore, there was no clear evidence of genuine popular input in the ‘presidential pact’ that was put to the French voters.

Conversely, Royal did not consistently attempt to underline the correlation between free market policies, social insecurity and delinquency. When Sarkozy declared that people ‘are born paedophiles, and it is also a problem that we do not know how to treat this pathology’, he amazingly got away with it. Royal could only reply that it was a matter for the scientists to discuss. The patriotic overtones of her campaign (the flag, the national anthem) looked artificial and out of step with the internationalist tradition of the Socialist Party. It was above all an awkward move given that this is the natural territory of Le Pen and Sarkozy.

Ségolène Royal is obviously not the only person responsible for this débâcle. The sectarianism of far left parties that failed to unite in the first round played an important part in demoralising leftwing voters. Further to its successful campaign against the European constitution in 2005, the far left could not agree on a common candidate. All the major parties of the left are to blame for this incredible missed opportunity.

Both the Communist Party (PCF) and the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) wanted to impose their own candidate (respectively Marie-Georges Buffet and Olivier Besancenot). The internal struggle to lead the antineoliberal camp appeared to be more important than a realistic and effective opposition to Royal’s Blairite line.

The late involvement of José Bové – the altermondaliste activist – further fragmented the far left. Had it rallied behind a common candidate, it could have hoped to score above 10 per cent of the share of the votes. Instead, many voters who supported those parties in 2002, transferred their votes to the socialist candidate in the first round. Their main objective was to avoid a repeat of 2002, when the left failed to qualify for the second round.

It remains to be seen whether the French radical left – one of the most important in the west – can overcome those sectarian divisions in the future. Sarkozy’s hard right policies and the prospect of the Socialist Party shifting further to the centre, could offer that opportunity. But it is not clear whether the ‘old enemies’ on the far left will decide to seize it.

Because it is the main party on the left, however, the Socialist Party must take most of the blame.The party ‘elephants’ decided to back Royal in late 2006, despite the fact that until then she had played only a minor role in party debates. They did so because at the time opinion polls predicted that she would easily beat Sarkozy.

Consequently, the moderate but socially reformist programme of the party was shelved. Royal was given carte blanche to develop her campaign themes, mixing Blairite soundbites, humanistic generalities and tough remarks on law and order.This was at best an erratic campaign, at worse, a farcical one.This electoral episode has underlined once more how cynical and how detached from popular realities this current socialist leadership is.

Philippe Marlière is senior lecturer in French and European politics at University College London

EW: It’s not just a slight majority opposed to the treaty in The Netherlands, according to the latest polls. Last week the polls were indeed still fifty-fifty between the yes and the no, but the polls that came out yesterday and today show between 60 per cent and 64 per cent for the no. So, we see there’s been a huge development during the last week, which I think has a lot to do with the fact that the Dutch government is campaigning very strongly in favour of the constitution. Although I’m sceptical of opinions polls, I’m more and more convinced that this is really happening. I had never imagined when we started our campaign that it would have developed in this direction.

SG: Although the number of undecided people is going down steadily – you know the polls are just about neck and neck in France as well – people are worried about what happens afterwards, because the government has been leaning on the chaos argument. Our answer to that is ‘well no, you just go back to where you are today. We currently have the Nice treaty and in the past there has been a treaty about every three years, so there is no reason to think this won’t keep going on as usual’. But this time we won’t turn back, because there has been a major public debate and people are now far more aware of what European policies actually are. So now we can have a genuine debate about which direction we want to go.

What are your main criticisms of the constitution?

SG: Valérie Giscard d’Estaing, a former president of France, was named as head of the constitutional convention that produced this document. The members of the convention, 105 of them, were named from above, they were appointed. About two thirds of them were either European or national parliamentarians, but they were not elected by the citizens to do this. Then there were some others supposedly representing civil society. So that’s the first criticism: the non-democratic aspect. A constitutional convention is normally an elected body, so that it comes in a sense from the people. This constitution does not come from the people; it comes from an appointed group.

EW: I could talk about this for hours, but the main basic message is that this constitution is not democratic and that if we accept it we could be left with an absolutely inadequate situation for the next 20 years or so. I think that’s very dangerous for the future of European co-operation. The second basic argument is that a constitution should be readable and accessible to the population. It should not be a document of 480 pages, with some 400 more pages of appendixes and declarations. That’s really crazy.

SG: The members of the convention worked for about two years and were only supposed to deal with the balances of power, as you would normally do in a constitution. Besides this, they were supposed to constitutionalise the Charter, a fundamental declaration of rights which had been placed in the Nice Treaty but had not been formalised beyond that. Then, for reasons that I am not really clear on, Giscard d’Estaing himself decided to include part three, which is around three quarters of the document and which is this whole list of very detailed policies.

EW: This document contains a lot of policy. It includes a whole chapter on economic policies basically fixing Europe on a neo-liberal framework. That kind of stuff should not be present in a constitution because if the European governments would like to subsequently change that policy choice it would not be possible, it would be anti-constitutional. So that’s very dangerous and very easy to explain to people. The inclusion of this whole chapter on neo-liberal policies in the constitution is one of our main points of critique.

Another important criticism is the militarisation of the EU. The document includes key articles saying that the member states of the EU will improve their military capabilities every year. This has been turned around by part of the left, who say that improving doesn’t necessarily mean spending more, but if you know where these proposals come from then you get worried. They are the product of a working group which included several representatives of the European military industry, and who want to sell their goods. That’s why they were very happy to have these paragraphs in the European constitution.

SG: Part three includes a whole list of policies in every area, agriculture, environment, police co-operation, justice, the central bank, etc. But the main thing is, however, that the objectives of the union define it as an economic space where you have freedoms of movement for goods, services, people and capital, and a space in which competition is free and unhindered. Competition comes into the text 47 times, the word market 78 times, the phrase social progress is not mentioned at all, or once I guess, and unemployment is not mentioned at all.

We have many objections to the content of this document, but the major one is that this text is not amendable, is not revisable. It’s not amendable because you need a triple unanimity across all 25 countries. To amend the constitution there first has to be a convention, which has to reach a consensus. Then they hand the baby to the heads of government, who also have to be unanimous in agreeing the proposed changes. Then it goes into a process like the one we are going through now, of either parliamentary approval or referendums, and that also has to be unanimous otherwise the constitution cannot be changed. So it is considered by anybody who has read the thing to be virtually impossible to amend.

How have the French and the Dutch governments reacted to the no campaign?

SG: The French government uses the argument that there is no ‘Plan B’, and that just because France says no that doesn’t mean that the other governments will be willing to renegotiate. Our response to that is that somebody has got to put a stop to this and, legally, if France votes no this document is out. It’s out for everyone.

President Jacques Chirac also says ‘we will be the black sheep of Europe.’ The government are trying to make people believe we would be living under a different law from the rest of Europe, that everybody else would have the constitution but we would have something different, and they have been confusing this with a new article that says that any state has the right to leave Europe. So they are promoting ambiguity on this point.

But in fact we feel that after the vote there would be a great deal of time for debate and that the balance of power would change drastically. If we win that means that the Socialist leadership is discredited, the president is discredited and the prime minister too – the result will be political upheaval throughout French politics. Then we can also have a real debate about what we want next with our comrades in other countries. That is what should happen. But first we have to say no, this is not the model we want for Europe and the world.

EW: In Holland they have just approved a special budget of four million euro to campaign for the yes, because they were very afraid of the no. We have initiated a court case to either demand that this money is not spent, or that the no campaign should get equal access to the media and equal amounts of money, because this is completely out of proportion. The no campaign has had 400,000 euro in total, and that has been spread over a number of groups. My own group, which is the main active group campaigning for the no, only got 30,000 euro, so we can compare our 30,000 with their four million.

Anyway, I think we can be happy that the government is so disliked by the Dutch population at this moment, because it has been implementing hard line neo-liberal social policies. There were a lot of trade union demonstrations at the end of last year and I think that what we see now in this clear shift toward the no is a kind of pay-off.

SG: I would like to thank former European Commissioner Frits Bolkenstein, a former member of the Dutch government, for coming to France and defending his directive, which is about the freedom of movement of services and about how the laws of the country of origin apply and not the law of the country in which a service is rendered. And he said he didn’t believe in all this referendum stuff, that people were elected to vote on these things and they just should be allowed to get on with it, and that ordinary people should not be involved in this debate. So that was a real help. That was a big boost to us.

EW: The Dutch government has made a lot of public relation mistakes. One of the main governing parties, the Liberals, made a TV advertisement in which they showed some pictures of Auschwitz, Srebrenica – which is a big Dutch trauma – and then the Madrid bombings, and the concluding message was ‘we need an EU constitution to make Europe better and safer.’ So afterwards the Liberals thought ‘oh well, maybe it is not such a good idea to broadcast this,’ but unfortunately for them the clips were already circulating on the internet. This is a good example of how the government is completely lacking arguments to sell the constitution. They are really falling back on empty statements about why Europe is so important.

SG: The French government is pulling out all the stops. They are panicking. The business people had said ‘we are not going to actively campaign because we think it wouldn’t be a good idea, it might be counterproductive.’ But this week over a hundred major business leaders have signed an appeal for a yes vote. The defence minister has said: ‘if you don’t vote for the yes, Europe will be shot to hell.’ They are really panicking. Chirac appeared on TV with a group of carefully selected young people, and two members of ATTAC were thrown out because they said they were too partisan. So the remaining kids were supposed to be very obedient and nice, but they asked questions about our future that Chirac wasn’t able to answer, and the polls for the no went up after that. So we thank Chirac too. And then there’s the prime minister. Every time he goes on TV it helps us.

People are also voting against the expression of neo-liberalism in France that they have been suffering since the present government was elected in 2002.

How and why did you begin to work around the referendum?

EW: We started about one and half years ago. Basically, we were a group of people coming from a broadly left perspective who had been working on EU issues for a long time. I have been working on EU issues from the mid-1990s and was involved in the alternative summit in 1997 during the negotiations for the Amsterdam Treaty.

We sat together and strategised on how to approach this referendum question and how to ensure that it would not be possible for the government to say ‘when you say no you are a xenophobe,’ which would have put us in the same corner as the right-wing populists.

SG: The French debate on the constitution began in a rather low-key way. We haven’t been working on it for one and half years, but we have been working on it since last summer. ATTAC brought out a list of 21 demands to the intergovernmental conference in 2004, none of which was satisfied, except that equality between men and women was put in the objectives, but that was only one out of 21 demands; the others were not satisfied. Then a process began which I can’t really explain, because this is the biggest debate we have had in France since 1968. I don’t know where this comes from. It must be the fact that nobody has been asked to give his or her opinion about Europe in the last 13 years. The last time was around Maastricht, in 1992, and they kept saying (the government and Giscard d’Estaing and the people who wrote the constitution) ‘well, don’t worry about part three, this is not really the issue, that is just a recap of all the things that were in the previous treaties, so you have been living under that and you will be living under it.’ But people didn’t really know Europe was all encapsulated, all written down in a single document. Our adversaries never quoted the text. Once you start to quote it, and people find out what’s actually in this and find out what’s going to be constitutionalised and not revisable and not amendable, they get scared to death.

In terms of organising against the constitution, that really began with the ‘call of the 200′, which was a document signed by 200 people coming from different parts of the left, including movements, trade unions, parties, etc. That spearheaded the formation of collectives all over France. Now there are between 800 and 900 grassroots collectives at the departmental level, city level, or sometimes even smaller. These collectives have been organising debates all over the country. I have been in debates ranging from 100 to 5000 participants. The right gets nowhere near these kind of crowds.

EW: At the start of our campaign we wanted to involve social movements and NGOs. Our idea was to form a kind of platform as we had done at the time of the 1997 counter-summit, the European summit from below, but we found out that none of the NGOs was ready to take a real position on the constitution. In particular, they were afraid to publicly opt for the no side. So basically it was impossible for us to form that kind of coalition.

We then decided to focus on influencing the terms of the debate. We began by writing articles on the constitution ourselves, and we also asked some people from different political origins, for example from the Social Democrat party and the Green party, to do the same. So, we even have pieces written by members of parties that support the yes vote, plus content analysis and criticisms of the constitution gathered in one book. We also produced other kind of materials, such as a brochure in which we outline our main objections against the constitution. And I think that has been very important, because from the right-wing side there has been no good content, there has been almost no content, and I think that has been a great advantage for us.

SG: We have produced a lot of materials. Books about the constitution are best-sellers. ATTAC produced a little book with a picture of Chirac together with Francois Roland, who is the general secretary of the Socialist party, on the cover of a popular weekly called Match. The headline was ‘they said yes to each other.’ You know, it looks like a gay wedding, and we have a picture of them ice-skating together and they say yes to each other. In this booklet we answered all the arguments of the Socialist party and the centre-right UMP. This sold 38,000 copies in the first week. Then we brought out another book which explains the Constitution step by step.

Not every criticism of the constitution comes from the progressive camp. What other political forces are supporting the no vote?

EW: Part of the right is mobilising around this issue, and they have been campaigning for the no as well, but until now it’s amazing that we have been able to get more media coverage than them. Until this week it was basically only our voice that was arguing for a no vote in the media. Now Geert Wilders, a right-wing populist politician, is touring with a bus, so that generates some media attention for him, but still it’s impossible for the government to say that if you oppose the constitution then you must be a right-wing xenophobe.

SG: I think the yes side is the one advocating a pure and hardline neo-liberalism. It’s about taking Europe into an American model in which there is little social protection, and there is competition of everybody against everybody. Public services would be hugely downgraded, free education and free health could be very seriously hit. So the yes side is really offering an American model of competition, in which it’s the market that decides and there is very little politics. The people will be dispossessed of the possibility to decide much of anything.

The European Left is divided around this issue. Why are some political parties supporting the yes vote?

EW: In The Netherlands the Green Left party says yes to the constitution. So the only left party campaigning for a no vote is the Socialist party.

The Green party argues that although this is not an ideal treaty, it makes some progress in terms of improving democracy at the EU level. Their evaluation is also that, within the current political context, if you have a renegotiation there is little chance that anything better will come out. They are saying that the treaty will make Europe better at dealing with unemployment, that it contains lots of improvements on environmental policy, etc. We think that these claims are very questionable, but that’s their line of argument.

SG: I see a lot of similarities between The Netherlands and France. The Socialists had an internal party referendum and the leadership came out long ago for the yes (it was about 60-40). The result is that the Socialists are now split, because two major figures in the party leadership have come out for the no. One is the former prime minister Laurent Fabius, and another, Henri Emmanuelli, leads a tendency which is the furthest to the left. The party leadership has accused them of playing the game of the far-right fascists, and they have been insulted and vilified by their own party. This does not go down too well with the rank and file. In every poll, more than 50 per cent of people who identify themselves as Socialists say they will vote no. The same thing goes for the Greens.

How do you respond to arguments defending the alleged progressive aspects of the Constitution?

SG: Part one of the constitution is about the distribution of power and also contains the military clauses. It says very clearly that NATO is going to be the major component of the defence of states which belong to the EU. That’s in part one, but still the European Parliament does not have the power to initiate legislation or to raise taxes, and it has none of the powers of a normal parliament in a normal country.

Part two is the fundamental charter of rights. Many people have problems with this, particularly in France, because it’s regressive compared to the French constitution and to other constitutions that have been written since the 18th century, including the initial declaration of the rights of men and women. One of the clauses of the charter, for instance, says you have the right to look for a job but not that you have the right to work. Work is not treated as a fundamental right. But the right to work is the basic grounding of unemployment compensation, so this is a very serious regression. There are others. Many women feel that the simple mention that ‘everyone has the right to life’ without any mention of women’s gains in various countries is a serious omission, and feel that this section was so worded because in various countries, including Portugal and Ireland, there is no right to control over fertility, abortion, etc.

There are various other things that seem regressive to us and at the end of the charter it states ‘this creates no new tasks or obligations for the EU and any court decision about it is not a claimable right.’ In other words, court decisions cannot enforce claimable rights. They can only decide whether the constitution is being applied or not.

EW: Our main argument is basically the democracy argument, so in response to what the Green party is saying we acknowledge that there are some small improvements, such as the fact that European Parliament in getting a bit more say over EU policies in some fields. Transparency in the Council of Ministers will be slightly improved as well. But – there’s always a ‘but’ going with these improvements – if you talk about transparency in the Council you must consider that most of the Council decisions are prepared in committees. The almost a thousand committees that exist today will remain as un-transparent as they are now. There’s absolutely no scrutiny about what they are doing, and that situation will not be changed by the constitution.

The European Parliament has over the years got more powers, but still you cannot compare it with your national parliament. The first thing is that there are no real parties: there are groups in the EU Parliament which some people think are parties, like the Social Democrats or the Christian Democrat group, but these do not really function as parties, they are just a conglomerate of national fractions which operate under an umbrella. There have been some attempts by the Greens, for example, to create a European Green party, but those are very provisional. So in that sense we have a very peculiar kind of politics, and it’s even more peculiar because you don’t have a government with a political party composition. Each country nominates its own Commissioner and the Commission behaves as a kind of government, but you don’t have the normal dynamics between governing parties and opposition parties that you’d see in a representative democracy.

SG: We also use the argument of democracy and the fact that economic policies are instruments that should not be in a constitutional document. There is a double executive proposed in the constitution: one is the Commission, which is defined as the only entity which can define the common good, that’s its job. And then there is a single president, who is elected for a renewable term of two and a half years. But that seems to be a recipe for in-fighting between two different sources of executive power. In other words, they get rid of the six-months rotating presidency, where it can go to Finland and then to Greece, and then to Ireland and so on. So they get rid of that, which may be a good thing, but in a way which doesn’t seem to be very productive.

Overall, though, our argument comes back to neo-liberalism. When the constitution was handed by the convention to the heads of states and governments, their additions and subtractions made it even more neo-liberal than it was when it came out of the hands of the convention. Perhaps that reflects the governments of Europe as they are today. But it becomes a problem because it is extremely difficult to change this constitution. As the 1793 French constitution says, ‘One generation should not subject future generations to its laws.’

People who have actually read the text of the constitution almost always come out of this difficult exercise determined to vote against it, despite the official financial and media propaganda for the yes vote, which says ‘its more democratic than what we had’.

If we lose the vote in France it will be a historic defeat. But I have faith in the intelligence of the French people and I think we can win.

Edited by Daniel Chavez for the Transnational Institute, with additional editing by Oscar Reyes

Transcription: Marita NadaluttiParis-based Susan George (SG) is TNI Associate Director, Vice-President of Attac France and an active campaigner against the constitution. Erik Wesselius (EW) is a researcher at Corporate Europe Observatory and the Secretary of the Comité Grondwet Nee (Dutch Committee for the NO Vote) in The Netherlands.

In this sense, the riots are merely a fresh wave of the violence that has become commonplace in suburban France over the past two decades. Led mainly by young French citizens born into first and second generation immigrant communities from the country’s former colonies in North Africa, these cycles are almost always sparked by the deaths of young black men at the hands of the police (whether through direct or indirect involvement), and then inflamed by the scornful response by the government.

The familiar pattern is now being repeated. Contrary to the first public statements of French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, the two French teenagers of Malian and Tunisian backgrounds who died on 27 October had not been fleeing the scene of a burglary. They were instead part of a larger group of youths who had just finished playing football and were trying to avoid the now constant police identity checks targeted on black teenagers as they rushed home to break the Ramadan fast. ‘We didn’t want to spend an hour at the police station,’ explained one 16 year old who was with the teenagers killed. ‘If you don’t have your ID papers they’ll pick you up and won’t listen to any excuses.’ Tragically, the electrical relay substation in which the teenagers took refuge from the police ended up taking their lives.

Four days after the deaths, and just as community leaders were beginning to calm the situation, the security forces reignited the fire by emptying tear gas canisters inside a local Mosque where hundreds of worshippers had gathered for the ‘night of Destiny’ – a particularly holy night of Ramadan. The official reason for the police action: a badly parked car in front of the Mosque. Having first denied the incident took place, the government then implicitly admitted it, but refused to take any responsibility and still refuses to apologise to the Muslim community. This cued an escalation in rioting.

But the growing spread of civil unrest to other poor suburbs across France – Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Rennes, Nantes and other cities – is unprecedented. For Laurent Levy, a founding member of the Movement of the Indigenous of the Republic, a network which campaigns against the ‘oppression and discrimination produced by the post-colonial [French] Republic’, the explosion is no surprise. ‘When large sections of the population are denied any kind of respect, the right to work, the right to decent accommodation, and often the right to even access clubs and cafés, then what is surprising is not that the cars are burning but that there are so few uprisings of this nature,’ he argues.

Police racism and impunity are major factors. A 2004 report from the National Commission of Security Deontology revealed a massive 38 per cent increase in police violence in France, a third of which had a racist motive. In April 2005, an Amnesty International report criticised the ‘generalised impunity’ with which France’s police force operates, specifically in response to the violent treatment of young men from African backgrounds during identity controls.

But the level and intensity of the riots stems ultimately from the openly provocative public behaviour of French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, who is renowned for routinely dismissing the inhabitants of les banlieues as ‘yobs’, ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘riff-raff’. His response to the troubles has been to step up this rhetoric, calling rioters ‘vermin’ (racailles) and blaming ‘agents provocateurs’ for manipulating the suburban ‘scum’. His statement that the suburbs need ‘to be cleaned out with Karsher’ (a brand of industrial cleaner used to clean the mud off tractors) has poured oil onto the fire.

Sarkozy’s political one-upmanship on law and order is a deliberate strategy designed to flatter the French far right electorate. It should be viewed in the context of his fierce rivalry with French prime minister, Dominique De Villepin, for the 2007 Presidency. In reality, little separates the two men politically but the fight for the Elysée seems to have left them fiddling and jostling for position whilst Paris burned.

There is no easy answer as to how France can escape this political race to the bottom. In the short term, the government must cease speaking about the suburbs as dens of ‘scum’ that need to be ‘cleansed’. Sarkozy’s lies about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the two boys, and his provocative deployment of a massively disproportionate police presence in the first days of the riots, have shown once again that he is unfit for public office. But the riots are ultimately not about two deaths or government arrogance. The underlying causes are decades of racist segregation, impoverishment, police brutality and disrespect, all now melding together into a fatal poison.

Incredibly, a simple gesture of regret could go a long way towards defusing the immediate tensions. At a press conference organised the morning after the gassing of the mosque, a young Muslim girl summed up a widespread feeling: ‘We just want them to stop lying, to admit that they’ve done it and to apologise. That’s the only thing that we are asking them to do’. It might not seem much, but in today’s France it would require a deep political and ideological transformation with nothing short of the recognition of these eternal ‘immigrants’ as full and equal citizens of the Republic.

An edited version of this article was first published in The Guardian on 8 October 2005

Gilles Kepel, one the French government’s favourite experts on Islam, recently described the UK’s strategy as a Faustian pact ‘whereby political asylum was given to radical Islamist ideologists in return for keeping Britain safe from violence’. Underpinning this perspective is a crude binary opposition between enlightened western democracies and the evil Islamist barbarians who take refuge within them, before exploiting their hosts as launch pads for Jihad.

The Juppé government’s response to the 1995 attacks was wide-ranging and brutal. It re-launched Vigipirate, a counter-terror offensive, mobilising 32,000 soldiers, riot police and intelligence services to control and monitor the population, in particular the deprived suburbs which were literally under siege. French police carried out violent and humiliating (yet almost always fruitless) raids on families and the neighbourhoods of suspects amid a public witch-hunt against Islamist networks. Uncorroborated police reports have sufficed for a long time in France to deport radial preachers to a country where they could face torture or ill treatment.

In the aftermath of the July attacks, commentators like Kepel were quick to argue that France’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy and campaign of so-called integration in the name of Republican values, embodied in the 2004 ban on the display of all religious symbols in schools, has spared the country terror attacks for a decade while Britain’s failure to follow Spain and Germany in adopting the French model has proved a spectacular own goal. However, as Tony Blair made clear in unveiling his government’s proposed legislation on 5 August, ‘the rules of the game have changed’. Suddenly, the French recipe for dealing with Islamic terror has been fêted by British politicians and media alike as the model to adopt in the war against domestic Islamic terror. It is no coincidence then that Blair’s August announcement set out almost identical measures to those introduced by France following the 1995 attacks.

But how would we regard the virtue of following the French model if, more than a decade after the first bombs ripped through the Paris Metro, enough conclusive evidence had been gathered to prove that the attacks carried out by Islamic militants were not fuelled by Islamic fundamentalism but were instead dreamt up and overseen by the Algerian secret service as part of a domestic political struggle that spilled over into Algeria’s former colonial master? The most comprehensive studies, including Lounis Aggoun and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire’s Françalgérie: States’ Crimes and Lies, the product of six years of research, including testimonies from former French government advisers and a number of ex-Algerian secret service agents turned whistleblowers, show that this is exactly what happened.

In 1991, Algeria’s main Islamic party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), won a comprehensive first round victory in the country’s inaugural multiparty general elections. This threatened to strip away the power of Algeria’s military generals, who had long controlled the North African state from the shadows.

Exploiting Europe’s fear of an Islamic government running Algeria, and the uncomfortably close relationship between the Algerian and French political establishments, the Algerian army intervened in the elections, halting the second round of voting by privately forcing the president Chadli Bendjedid to step down. A temporary Commission was formed to rule the country in the ensuing ‘crisis’. Not only did the Islamic opposition movement have to be discredited and crushed, but the haunting spectre of a violent and radical Islamism taking root off the coast of continental Europe had to emerge, to help garner international support for indefinite military rule.

The notorious DRS – the Algerian secret service – systematically infiltrated insurrectionary Islamic groups like the GIA and from 1992 onwards launched its own fake guerrilla groups, including death squads disguised as Islamists. Bizarrely enough, these terrorised some highly militarised regions reputedly sympathetic to the Islamic FIS party. In 1994, the DRS eventually managed to place Jamel Zitouni, one the Islamists it controlled, at the head of the GIA, consequently renamed the ‘Islamic Group of the Army’ on the Algerian streets. ‘It henceforth became impossible to distinguish the genuine Islamists from those controlled by the regime,’ says Salima Mellah, spokesperson for the NGO Algeria Watch. ‘Each time the generals came under pressure from the international community, the terror intensified’.

By January 1995, however, Algeria’s ‘dirty war’ began to falter. Despite all of the actions taken to discredit the FIS, most notably the murder of seven Italian sailors in July 1994 in Algiers, the Italian government hosted an historic meeting of almost every Algerian political party, including the FIS. The participants agreed to a common platform of demands, calling for a national enquiry into the violence in Algeria, the end of the army’s involvement in political affairs, the ‘effective liberation of the leaders of the FIS’ and all political detainees, and the return of constitutional rule and popular sovereignty.

In a flash, the generals’ grip on power suddenly became untenable. Yet, in their desperation to cling on, they hatched, with the help of the DRS, a plot that would prevent French politicians from withdrawing support from the military junta ever again. As Aggoun and Rivoire explain, French-based Algerian spies initially tasked with infiltrating and monitoring Islamist networks in the early 1990s were transformed into agent provocateurs. In spring 1995, Ali Touchent – an Algerian agent, began to gather and incite a network of disaffected young men from North African backgrounds to commit terrorist attacks in France. The DRS’s infiltrators, led by Jamel Zitouni, also pushed the GIA to directly eliminate some of the FIS’s high profile leaders living in Europe on the pretext that the FIS’s willingness to talk with the Algerian government made it anti-Islamic.

On 11 July 1995, cheikh Abdelbaki Sahraoui, a high-profile leader of the FIS living as a political refugee in France, was assassinated in his Paris mosque. The GIA claimed responsibility. Exactly two weeks later the bombing of the Paris Metro kllled eight people. After a further attack in the weeks that followed, Zitouni called on French President, Jacques Chirac, to ‘convert to Islam to be saved’. The resulting public hysteria against Islam and Islamism saw the French government abandon overnight its support for the Rome accord.

So what happened to the perpetrators? While several people, mainly French from North African backgrounds,,were found guilty of ‘association with terrorism’, the masterminds of the main attack were never caught. Strangely, despite being publicly identified by the Algerian authorities as the European ringleader of the GIA, named by French investigators as the key organiser and known by them since 1993, Ali Touchent miraculously managed to evade capture and returned to Algeria where he settled, very publicly, in a highly secure police quarter of Algiers.

France’s apparent inability to drag to justice those genuine responsible for the 1995 attacks is now known to be more than an accident. According to a book by Mohamed Samraoui, a former colonel in the Algerian secret service: ‘the French intelligence knew that Ali Touchent was a DRS operative charged with infiltrating pro-Islamist cells in foreign countries.’ In return for supplying the French with valuable information Ali Touchent was granted protection by the DST (French Intelligence), ‘which explains why Ali Touchent was never worried on French soil.’

This is not the only explanation for French collaboration with the Algerian government. Algeria is one of the main supplier of gas and oil to France, and an importer of its products. According to François Gèze of La Decouverte, one of the first French publishers to expose the involvement of the Algerian secret services in the ‘dirty war’, at the heart of this strong economic relationship is a tale of unimaginable political corruption implicating part of France’s political establishment. ‘French exporters generally pay a 10 to 15 percent commission on their goods,’ explains Gèze. ‘Part of this revenue is then “repaid” by the Algerians as finance for the electoral campaigns of French political parties. As John Sweeney from the Observer put it indelicately in 1997 quoting a political analyst: “Le pouvoir [Algerian military junta] has the French government… by the balls. They have made secret donations to French parties and politicians, so that they can blackmail them.”‘

What the true story of France’s 1995 brush with ‘Islamic terror’ reveals is that the attacks, while probably executed by a small number of Muslim extremists, were conceived and manipulated by vested interests involved in a power struggle that has led to the death of 200,000 people since 1992, and six times more civilian ‘disappearances’ than under the Pinochet regime. British policy makers would do well to understand the specific political context and complex colonial legacy of French-Algerian relations before they go looking for direct comparisons. The 1995 case is also a warning against blaming ‘Islamists’ for terror, whilst turning a blind eye to repressive actions of governments in the Arab world when they suit a western government’s agenda.

An edited version of this article was first published in The Guardian

The 10 point margin of victory was remarkable, given that the Socialist Party (PS), the parties of the centre-right, and the mainstream media overwhelmingly favoured the Yes camp. But arguably of greater significance is the unity that has been forged between the various parties, movements, trade unions and leading individuals of an emergent anti-neo-liberal, and to a large extent explicitly anti-capitalist, Left. On the ground, eight hundred local ‘collectifs unitaires’ formed the backbone of the Non de gauche campaign. But where now for the post-29 May Left? How to build on this victory?

The death and resurrection of the French left

Elected in 1981 on the promise of a ‘break with capitalism’, the PS, once in office, quickly abandoned any such radicalism. Indeed, the turning point of 1983 was a signal moment in the capitulation of European social democracy – radicalised after 1968 – to the Reaganite-Thatcherite counter-revolution of the New Right. Since then, French elections have seen an uninspiring alternation of neo-liberal administrations of centre-right and centre-left. They have become a game without risk to capital, robbing them of their meaning, resulting in widespread disillusion, abstention and, not least, the emergence of the far right.

The referendum, on the other hand, unambiguously posed the question of neo-liberalism at the heart of the vote. For the constitutional treaty, in tedious detail in its infamous part three, sought to set in stone unregulated competition (read ‘profit-making’) above all other considerations – human, social, ecological -and place the capitalist economy beyond public debate or democratic politics. It was an opportunity not to be squandered, reflected in the energy committed to the campaign by the parties and movements of the Non de gauche camp and in the fact that there was a clear ‘class’ vote against the constitutional treaty, with 80 per cent of industrial workers, 60 per cent of other employees, 70 per cent of those unemployed, and 63 per cent of those earning less than 3,000 euros (roughly £2,000) a month voting No.

The Non de gauche has been no bolt from the blue, but the result of several years of contestation, as the ‘pensée unique’ crumbles and the leaders of centre-right and centre-left are outed as so many neo-liberal emperors with no clothes. If the November-December 1995 strikes and demonstrations were judged by some the first revolt against globalisation,,it was the 1998 campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and the foundation of ATTAC that gave birth to ‘altermondialisme’ – seeking an alternative, non-capitalist, globalisation rather than being more narrowly, or even chauvinistically, ‘anti-globalisation’. This has helped to sink ancient differences between, amongst others, Catholic radicals and Marxists, Communists and Trotskyites.

Who are the principal players in this altermondialiste Left? Unlike the Labour Party, the PS operates with open factions within a relatively pluralist structure, resulting in a solid 40 per cent vote for the party’s left-wing currents at recent Congresses. While an internal referendum on 1 December 2004 – before the groundswell of opposition to the constitutional treaty had developed – committed the PS to campaign for a Yes vote by a margin of 58 to 42 per cent, the left of the party, and its leading figures such as Henri Emmanuelli and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, actively supported the No campaign. According to exit polls, almost two-thirds of the left electorate voted No, including a majority of PS voters. Similarly, the Greens, favoured partners of the PS and instinctively pro-European, voted by 53 to 42 per cent (with 5 per cent abstention) to support the Yes campaign – a surprisingly narrow margin, given that all the party’s leading figures, including Alain Lipietz, one of the historic leaders of the party’s Left, argued in favour of ratification. Yet 60 per cent of the Green electorate voted No, seriously damaging the party, at least in the short-term, and marginalising it from the altermondialiste Left where it should be most at home. Only one Green députée, Martine Billard, and a regional councillor, Francine Bavay, were active in the Non de gauche camp.

The only party on the parliamentary Left to campaign for a No vote – and thus the only party on the Left to receive campaign funds – was the Communist Party (PCF). It was happy to have found an issue on which it could reunify, and enjoyed a pivotal role in rallying the Non de gauche camp. Under the leadership of Marie-George Buffet, the PCF has successfully distanced itself from the PS, aligning itself with France’s energetic social movements.

Equally important has been the involvement of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) – the most unsectarian and libertarian of the parties of the revolutionary Left, and currently fronted by the youthful Olivier Besancenot – as a key partner in the No campaign. A majority of trade unions rallied to the cause, and there should be no doubting the central role played by ATTAC – ‘a movement for popular educational oriented towards action’ – and others, such as the Fondation Copernic, whose ‘Appeal of 200′ launched the ‘collectifs pour le non’.

The altermondialiste dilemma

A key strategic dilemma facing the altermondialiste Left remains its relationship to the PS – electorally the dominant force on the Left, around which the smaller parties currently orbit – whose future evolution remains an open question. While in Britain and Germany, for example, the political road may be harder and the choice easier – combating neo-liberal parties of the erstwhile centre-left head-on – the PS, despite its recent history, is not for the most part as committed to the neo-liberal agenda as New Labour or the German Social Democrats. And there can be little doubt that the PS Left has been strengthened by the result of the referendum.

All eyes have now turned towards the 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections.

While the option of a coalition of the centre is not out of the question, the electoral dynamic of two-round voting tends towards a choice of candidates of either Right or Left, placing the PS in need of the votes of the latter, and seemingly putting a brake on any overtly rightward trajectory à la Blair. In re-engaging with its own electorate – which voted No by a significant majority, despite the party’s campaign to the contrary – it is at least possible that the PS leadership, which confronts an emergency congress in the autumn in the wake of the referendum, will indeed tack leftwards. The real question is, to what extent and with what conviction.

A second curiosity of the French electoral system is a directly elected presidency, resulting in an unending jostling for position amongst various pretenders. Presidential hopefuls of the Yes camp such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jack Lang and François Hollande have all been weakened by the referendum result. The long-term winner in the PS may be Laurent Fabius, despite his being ousted from the party leadership in the aftermath of the referendum. Although he is very much a figure on the party’s Right, he was the only senior figure to argue for a No vote, perhaps wily enough to sense which way the wind was blowing.

As the horizon of 2007 draws near, the challenge before the altermondialiste Left is a large one. It enjoys sufficient resources – in parties, movements, well-respected individuals and policies and ideas – to rally considerable political support. Plans are already afoot to hold a national congress of the local collectives unitaires and there is considerable grass-roots pressure for the Non de gauche parties and movements to build an anti-neo-liberal coalition beyond the referendum.

However, while the Chiraquian inheritors of Gaullism are perhaps fatally weakened, others on the Right, such as the formidable Nicolas Sarkozy, wait in the wings. Can the altermondialiste Left remain united? Can such a disparate Left act as a counterweight to a rudderless ‘gauche lite’? Will the PS, outflanked on its left, espouse a certain radicalism, if only rhetorically or in mere opportunism, or perhaps, just perhaps, with conviction? Or will the Left of the PS, and those who rallied to the Non de gauche camp in the Greens and the PCF timidly submit, as during Jospin’s 1997-2002 government, to the big guns of the PS leadership?

How such a challenge is answered will have repercussions far beyond France.

The Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) estimates that around 60 pupils have ‘been ejected from the state school system since the law came into effect on 15 March 2004′. Of these, 42 Muslim and six Sikh teenagers were expelled from their schools, 11 Muslim pupils were enrolled in schools abroad including Belgium, Turkey and Germany, and at least one Muslim pupil left school altogether.

While these provisional figures match those of the French government, they are lower than those collected by another organisation, the Committee of the 15 March and of Freedom, which estimates that almost 70 pupils, mainly Muslim, have either been expelled or have abandoned school altogether. Another 26 students were reported to have ‘voluntarily’ left their schools during the period of dialogue between headmasters and pupils, and 77 Muslim students enrolled in schools abroad. Finally, according to both government and the Committee’s statistics over 500 pupils, overwhelmingly Muslim, have been forced to remove their ‘headgear’ since September 2004.

The Alsace-Moselle region has seen the largest number of young Muslims excluded. Ironically, this is the only region where Catholic, Protestant and Jewish religious teaching is allowed in State schools, as it belonged to Germany when the main laws on secularism were passed.

Perhaps the most shocking evidence of how the ban has been enforced, however, is that the majority of pupils have been expelled for simply wearing bandanas. This might, at first, seem a little strange – since a bandana can hardly be considered as ‘conspicuously marking religious affiliation’. It makes more sense, though, if you consider that the presumption of a pupil’s religion is often based upon their ethnicity so that the ban affects a specific kind of bandana wearer: those of African and Arabic descent.

Such a questionable racist measure would of course violate the principle of equality amongst users of public services, also enshrined in French law. But, according to Lila Charef, a former lawyer who accompanied many pupils during their disciplinary proceedings, this is exactly what has been happening in France under the new law. ‘Discriminatory controls based on ethnic background were made in many schools’, Lila commented. ‘A young French girl of North African descent who was called up in front of the disciplinary council rightly pointed out that another pupil who also wore a bandana had not had any disciplinary charges brought against her.’

The period of dialogue that is legally required before any disciplinary action is taken is also being used to degrade and humiliate pupils, in effect punishing them before they have even been judged. Those affected have typically found themselves isolated from the rest of their schoolmates, some moved for weeks from one empty classroom to another according to the needs of the school. In various schools, pupils have been deprived of recreation or access to dining halls to prevent them from having contact with their friends.

The State is still legally obliged to provide all pupils with continuous educational support until the exclusion measure has been put in place. However, the evidence shows that ‘educational support’ has usually meant photocopies of lessons, at best, rather than actual teaching, which has heightened the students’ sense of isolation and punishment.

‘What really struck me’, confided Lila Charef, ‘was the collective collusion against these children, who were forced to choose between their desire to study and succeed, as many of these pupils were brilliant students, and their religious convictions. I think this was the hardest thing for these girls.’