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NEWS & LETTERS, May 2004Our Life and Times by Kevin A. BarryFrench electionsIn March regional elections, French voters dealt a strong blow to the conservative government of Jacques Chirac and Jean-Pierre Raffarin. In the final round, their alliance received only 37% of the vote, while the leftist alliance of the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the Greens won 50%. Voters were reacting against government arrogance, especially in the wake of the labor mobilizations last spring. For despite protest marches and strikes that involved more than a million workers, the government had used its parliamentary majority to ram through a major rollback of pension benefits. In the first round of this year's regionals, the two main Trotskyist parties were also able to test their strength. Their share of the vote declined from 10% in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, to 5% this year. While this still represents a million votes for parties advocating a revolutionary transformation of the capitalist order, it was nonetheless a setback. In part, this was due to the fact that in 2002, a large pro-Trotskyist vote had helped pave the way for a Chirac victory, since it kept the Socialist Party off the ballot in the final round, as Chirac then faced the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen. The Trotskyists also lost ground this year due to their stance during that final round in 2002 when, unlike the anti-globalization movement, they refused to support the bourgeois democrat Chirac against the fascist Le Pen. Ominously, neo-fascist parties have persisted as the third force in French politics, with around 17% of the vote in the first round of this year's regionals. |
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