Franch News

Live from Paris France: Macron’s victory, and why the earthquake will continue John Mullen So, the presidential elections here in France are over. As well as being a mechanism for choosing a powerful head of state, they are also a 24 hour a day media show. Were the candidates as witty in the debate as the candidates were five years ago? How were the camera angles negotiated? Do you think the two would-be presidents have difficulty sleeping the night before? What will they be eating at the party if they win? It can be hard to remember that the election affects ordinary people’s lives. For Le Pen, who came second with over 10 million votes, 3 million more than in the first round and 5 million more than 5 years ago, this cannot be seen as a defeat. The mainstreaming of her racist, islamophobic and hardline law-and-order ideas and policies is likely to continue, encouraged by future governments as by recent ones, as a diversion from the fact that they have nothing to offer the working cla...

Between the two rounds : A political earthquake in France and the fight against Marine Le Pen John Mullen On Sunday the 23rd April we discovered that the second round of the presidential elections would be between Emmanuel Macron, a neoliberal who has already declared his intentions to continue to tear up Labour protection laws without even a parliamentary debate, and Marine Le Pen, an unsuccessfully detoxified fascist leader. Hardly an envious situation for anticapitalists of any country, even if the historic vote (19.6%) for the radical Left programme of Jean-Luc Mélenchon brightened the picture up somewhat... Since then, a fierce battle of public image has been raging between the hard right Macron and the Front National’s Le Pen. Macron, who has never been active against fascism, has been visiting holocaust memorial sites, while Le Pen, whose voting record in the European parliament shows how little she cares about workers, is spending her time at factory gates. She has also bee...