France at the Crossroads

IN FRANCE, BETWEEN THE EVENING of Sunday, April 21, 2002 (first round of the presidential elections) and the evening of Sunday, May 5 (second round), it has been a slightly crazy fortnight, very tiring and trying, often inspiring too.

The presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round of those elections, which are the heart of French political life in the system of the Fifth Republic as it has operated for four decades, has literally sparked a mass uprising of the people a-typically national phenomenon that has deep roots reaching back to the Revolution. It began on the evening of April 21, and, from the following morning, high school students, sometimes only 12 or 13 years old, and university students struck and demonstrated all over the country. In Paris, the schools were on holiday, but the mobilization of young people was still powerful. And, to start with, totally spontaneous. The teachers followed the students. Then, finally, their parents, that is, the great majority of wage-workers, blue and white collar, together with pensioners and people of all sorts, of all conditions, and, of course, of all colors, came out on May Day, transforming the trade union rallies into gigantic multicolored forums. There were at least two million people on those streets that day.

The paradox of those days was the following: there was reckoned to be a fascist danger. High school students photocopied leaflets full of spelling mistakes explaining that in 1933 the Nazis had first come for the Jews, then the communists, then everyone, and that when those who had been passive were taken in their turn to the concentration camps, there was no longer anyone to defend them; and that there was a danger of the same thing happening in France, all at once, on the night of May 5! Yet during those two crazy weeks, anyone out and about in our country saw anti-fascists everywhere, usually young people, cheered on by older people at their windows, and no fascists. The fascists, without presenting themselves as such, gathered, under heavy police protection and in a woeful sort of way, in numbers of about 20,000 for their own May Day march and then for one single failed meeting, in Marseilles and that's all.

LE PEN'S VOTERS, HOWEVER, EXIST. Together with his rival Bruno Mégret, who can be placed to his right, he got five million votes on April 21, and he got about as many on May 5. But most of those voters are not fascists and do not come onto the streets. Only the stewarding squad of Le Pen's National Front (NF), the "Department of Protection and Security" (DPS), made up of a few hundred thugs, looks anything like a fascist militia or storm troopers; but the main concern of the DPS, at the two National Front rallies between the two rounds, was to prevent any excesses by skinheads so much did they fear a provocation that would be turned against them. The DPS is, besides, a den of mercenaries very much linked to the murkiest activities in Africa of the various presidents who have succeeded each other in France since the creation of the National Front in 1972, including the Socialist Francois Mitterrand.

It was in fact under Mitterrand, in the 1980s, that the NF, a fragile federation of neo-Nazi groups, old fighters to "keep Algeria French," fundamentalist Catholics, and networks of small shopkeepers and business people, became a political force, winning between 10 and 20 percent of the vote at elections. The disillusionment created among working people by the policies of the Left in power; the social setbacks which, though smaller than what happened at the same time under Reagan and Thatcher in the Anglo-Saxon countries, were nevertheless very serious; and, as immediate trigger, the crisis of the Right after its defeat in the elections of 1981, set the scene for the rise of a party whose favorite theme was denouncing Muslim immigration, using the living memories of France's colonial war in Algeria, in which Le Pen himself fought. The NF has never got as far as going over to action in the fascist sense of the term, that is, to forming combat groups: a few isolated attacks, and its May Day rallies, have been the only moves in that direction.

The party would never have developed without having gained from a constant stream of local elected officials, organizers, and intellectuals coming over from the mainstream Right-Gaullist (Jacques Chirac's RPR), Christian Democrat (the UDF, Union for French Democracy, a federation of parties which ran Francois Bayrou in the presidential elections), and liberal (DL, Liberal Democracy, the party of Alain Madelin, who is himself a former member of the groups which founded the NF). In 1998, those party activists, after electoral successes in the regional councils following several alliances with the mainstream Right (which have continued since then), "rebelled" against Le Pen, whose personal self-promotion and refusal to have too many alliances with the Right seemed to condemn them to political impotence. There was a split, and the majority of the apparatus and the activists of the NF went over to the National Republic Movement (MNR) of Bruno Mégret. Mégret got 2.3 percent of the vote on April 21, most but not all of which transferred to Le Pen on the second round. Ideologically to the right of the NF by virtue of the "racialist" and "differentialist" ideas of its intellectuals, the MNR has a grass-roots base comparable to the NF and can serve as an intermediary between it and the mainstream Right.

The electoral base of the NF, remote from these debates and battles, remained faithful to the person of the Leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who, however, found himself with a very much weakened party (and it still is such) on the level of organization and finances (he himself, a very wealthy man, has become its main financier). This electorate, voters who keep quiet and often are a bit ashamed of voting Le Pen, is mostly made up of "small people," shopkeepers and trade workers, farmers, and wage-workers in small non-union workplaces who vote like their bosses whom they are side by side with every day. A significant minority are former Left, especially Communist, voters. Between 1995 and 2002, the workers and the under-25s among them (including Mégret's voters) have diminished in number and in proportion. Le Pen has however made gains among the older and rural sections of the population, who are dissatisfied with their situation and made anxious by the campaign carried on for months, and started by Jacques Chirac, on the theme of "law and order," that is, of the dangers caused by the gangs of young people of Arab origin living in the poorest districts. But if we take into account the fact that, in the April 21 vote, Le Pen gained from the absence of two leaders of the "hard-line" orthodox Right, De Villiers (Catholic conservative) and Pasqua (anti-European Gaullist), it is clear that Le Pen achieved no breakthrough that day. The total of his votes and Mégret's was lower than the total of his 1995 votes and De Villiers'.

Such are the facts, contradicted by the panic-mongering we have had about "the workers voting for Le Pen," but which remain facts.

The actual absence of any fascist breakthrough was confirmed by the vote on May 5, when Le Pen made almost no gains. That was, for him, a serious political setback.

WHY THEN WAS THERE such a powerful mobilization? In revulsion against Le Pen and all he represents, of course, but also because the fact of having Le Pen and Chirac in the second round was seen, rightly, by millions of young people and workers as a scandal and an insult. That situation was due not to a significant breakthrough by Le Pen, but to the collapse of the traditional parties of the Left, with the Socialist Party (SP) down to 16 percent where its "potential" score was around 25 percent, and the Communist Party (CP) down to 3 percent, crushed behind two Trotskyist candidates. That collapse, in fact, went together with a very strong shift to the left. The three Trotskyist candidates got 10.5 percent between them which is a real shift, a real breakthrough. The majority of the abstainers (27 percent of the electoral roll) were people of the Left, disillusioned and saying so, and many of the votes of the three other candidates who came from the Left government coalition but presented themselves as more or less breaking from it, the "republican" Chevènement, the ecologist Mamère and the former campaigner for the independence of French Guyana, Taubira, were also critical left- wing votes. That an election shaped by such a radicalization, such a shift to the left, should lead to a veritable confiscation of the votes, with a choice reduced to the outgoing president, whom many hoped to see beaten and brought to justice for corruption, Chirac, and a fascist, produced a gale of rebellion.

At stake here is the undemocratic character of French institutions, born from a coup d'état in 1958. Indeed, what has just happened has much in common, in many ways, with the events of May 1958, of which the younger generation has only a very vague idea. It was a military coup by the far right in Algiers, which produced the "appeal" to General De Gaulle, presented as the savior of the nation, and immediately supported by a section of the Left. Even those who did not back him in 1958 later supported him against the military conspiracies of the same type, but aimed against him, of the partisans of "French Algeria." In some ways, the confiscation of democracy which was the result of the vote of April 21 rang like a coup d'état, and led to a huge rallying to voting Chirac from the overwhelming majority of the Left parties and the unions, in the name of a fascist danger represented by Le Pen, the heir of the putschists of 1958. The result may be to put the Fifth Republic and its re-elected president Jacques Chirac -- up until then the weakest, the most illegitimate, the most despised, that it had -- back in the saddle.

That rallying also drew in a large section of young people and rank-and-file workers, who voted Chirac with rage in their hearts and who reckoned that, to compensate for it, it was all the more necessary for them to demonstrate in the streets. As they said, they preferred the "super-crook" to the "super- fascist." But it must be said that, except from some high-school students, first-time voters regretting their own abstentions on April 21, in the rallies and the demonstrations there was no conflict between people about how they would vote on May 5, because all valued the sense of unity and strength that they felt. It was only the leaders of the Left, especially the CP, very much weakened and correspondingly more vehement, who tried to denounce the abstentionists and get them booed, without success. Often the husband voted Chirac and the wife cast a blank ballot (or vice versa), and in the upshot, though Chirac had 82 percent of the valid votes, he only had about 61 percent of the electorate, because the abstentions and the blank or spoiled votes, very much on the Left in their majority, reached 25 percent, still a very high rate.

THE LEADERS OF THE LEFT, and of the far left too, made light of the new government formed by Jacques Chirac following the second round, saying that it was only there to look after the "transition" to the Legislative Assembly elections scheduled in June.

They are comforting themselves with empty words. This government, led by an eminent mediocrity, Mr. Raffarin (from the Liberal Democrat party, the section of the mainstream Right which does not repudiate alliances with the NF), is well-structured, well-conceived, and seems entirely competent and intellectually efficacious to serve the interests of big capital, which is directly represented by the Minister of Finance, Francis Mer.

This government will immediately, without any parliamentary consultation, take far-reaching measures, notably on policing and taxes. The manner in which the ministries are grouped, and their titles, indicates that it plans to accelerate what is called in France "the reform of the state," something which the leaders of the Left also desire and which led to the big civil service strikes of spring 2000 under Jospin. It is about replacing public services, delivered by state functionaries, by local agencies of all sorts utilizing private contractors. This orientation is found in various forms in all the member states of the European Union.

As conceived, this government is not a government of "transition," but it stands to be enlarged after the Legislative elections. Its aim is to have those elections give a majority to the new "president's party" which is in the course of being formed through the merger of the majority of the mainstream Right, and for that majority to be able to "open out" both to the Left, towards the most right-wing sections of the SP, and to the far right. That aim is realistic, since on the Left the continuation of heavy abstention among workers and the worse-off, combined with "tactical voting" which will mostly benefit the SP after the great fright of April, and all in the absence of any new perspectives offered by leaders who are discredited in the eyes of their voters, will weigh heavily.

The problem for the Left is the following: in order to win these new elections, to give itself a new face which really declares that this time it will not govern together with Chirac and the bosses, but against them and for the workers. This new demand was expressed even before May 5, in demonstrations, meetings and rallies all over the country.

THE SP IS EXPERIENCING A FLOOD of recruits among young people. The rank and file of the party, where it is still organized in the local sections, is strongly demanding a sharp turn to the left. That demand is dimly reflected in the new program, adopted as an emergency measure, which declares, for example, that no more public services should be privatized. Coming so late, after numerous privatizations done by the Jospin government, such a declaration is a bit of a joke, not very credible to the Socialist Party milieu itself. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former Minister of Finance, very well regarded in the employers' circles, says that Chirac will have to be different after May 5, thus preparing the course whose announcement will bring defeat for the Left: a new cohabitation, decked out in colors of national unity, between the Left and the Right. Between the desires expressed at rank and file level and this sort of talk, there is a gap that will produce explosions in the SP. The "Socialist Left" tendency wants to avoid that above all, and, hoping to install itself in the center of a once again reconstructed SP, it argues for the absolute necessity of Left unity and single candidates of the Left for the Legislative elections, while omitting to say what the political mandate of those candidates will be. If it is about carrying forward the same policies once again, they will lose the elections.

A section of the Socialist Party (SP), represented by a young member of parliament, Arnaud Montebourg, who has been joined on this by the presidential candidates Noël Mamère and Christiane Taubira, says correctly that the candidates of the Left should commit themselves, in order to be able to be representatives who actually govern and do what their voters have voted for them to do, to fight to put an end to the Fifth Republic and form a constituent assembly. As early as 6 May, Francois Hollande, the First Secretary of the Party, replied to them, via an interview in the newspaper Le Monde, that there could be no question of that. This current is weak, with little social anchorage, but it expresses a democratic demand that is at the heart of France's current problems.

While there is scarcely any doubt that the SP will remain a key party in the coming months, the blow that the Communist Party has received may be decisive. The collapse of this party has not yet produced any currents proposing new perspectives, but it has created a vacuum. In the unions, where it has the bulk of its networks of support and its activists, who still lead decisive organizations (the CGT and, among teachers, the FSU), those trade unionists are being led either to shift to the left, or to become direct partners of the SP, which seems to be the attitude of the leaders of the CGT.

The other organization recruiting heavily today, besides the SP, the unions, and the high school and university student associations, is the LCR (Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire), deluged by such large numbers of applications to join or to make contact that it has difficulty dealing with them all. This is a result of the score, heavily concentrated among youth (almost 14 percent of the votes cast by 18-24-year-olds), of its candidate Oliver Besancenot, an unexpected success for the LCR. But the more that the LCR is able to fit itself to the immediate situation and the mood of the youth at a given moment (for example, in its half-said appeal to vote Chirac on May 5, garnished with a call to demonstrate that same evening), the more it fails to pose in its totality the question of the political way out from the present situation, and seems rather indifferent to the problems of the institutions of the Fifth Republic and of how to win a real victory for the left in the Legislative elections.

Yet the LCR has, among the three Trotskyist parties present in the election, the least sectarian attitude. If, despite their own reluctance, we add up the votes of those three parties, they come to 10.5 percent, a high score. For the present, they do not seem to take account of it and look toward a unification or at least a coalition in the manner of the British Socialist Alliances, something that would demand that each faction goes beyond its own limits.

LO (Lutte Ouvrière), despite Arlette Laguiller's score of over 5 percent, in fact suffered a relative political setback on April 21, ceasing to have the quasi-monopoly of the "far left" vote in national polls. The very denunciatory manner in which it attacked the Chirac vote, declaring that "the Left is prostituting itself," helped its enemies, notably the CP, to isolate it. Refusing to make an agreement with the LCR, LO is preparing to present candidates in every electorate at the Legislative elections. That is regrettable, but this organization, already very isolated, risks turning in on itself even more: its leadership feared a score of 10 percent and the responsibilities it would have brought with it!

The PT (Parti des Travailleurs) should not be dismissed as a political force, even if it holds itself apart and is held apart by almost all the others. Its weak score should not obscure its trade union influence and its activist base which, paradoxically, is numerically superior to those of the LCR and LO. The very separate place occupied by this organization is explained by the fact that historically this current has a central place in France, in relation to the Trotskyist currents in general and, more widely, in relation to the whole labor movement -- the former prime minister Lionel Jospin comes from, for example. Its current marginalization, in part deserved by its haughty disdain for workers' unity (in the FO unions the PT fought where it could to stop people going to the May Day rallies!), cannot last forever.

Beyond the organizations, there is today in France an extraordinary readiness for activity and debate, among the youth and among workers in general, especially in the unions. This effervescence runs up against the dead weight of the parties in place, who are preoccupied above all with their separate electoral existences. At the peak of the state, the events of April 21 to May 5 have, however, not been positive for democracy and for the social movement. The re-elected Chirac has new room to maneuver, and the NF, even if reckoned at its true strength, has also been "relaunched." The coming Legislative elections and the social confrontations which are bound to take place will doubtless decide the course of events for some years at least: a lasting victory for Chirac, and the reinforcement of a renovated Fifth Republic, or a new destabilization of the regime and its president and an aggressive upsurge of strikes, demonstrations, and new political regroupments, based on the rank and file and uniting, in a democratic break with the old politics, all that emerges from the crisis of the existing organizations. France is, more and more, at the crossroads, and the way things go here will also have major international significance.

SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER the French presidential elections, the Right makes off with a two-thirds majority of the National Assembly and President Chirac seems to have triumphed. The journalists call this the "blue wave" (according to French tradition, among the colors of the national flag blue, originally the color of Paris, is supposed to symbolize the Republic: but if blue at first opposed white, the color of the monarchy, for a long time it has also opposed the red of the people and of the working class; thus, "blue wave" means a very strong push towards the Right).

Is it possible that in the space of a few weeks, a very strong push towards the Left, with "Trotskyists" winning 10.5 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential elections on April 21, and then with two million demonstrators on May Day, was reabsorbed, and that it is the Right, Big Business and their newly constituted political party, the UMP -- Union pour la Majorité Présidentielle, Union for the Presidential Majority -- that now actually represents the majority of the country?

Things are evidently more complicated!

IN THE FIRST PART OF THIS ARTICLE, I wrote, just after the presidential election, that the rallying of the majority of the Left and the labor movement in favor of a vote for Chirac could result in putting "the Fifth Republic and its re-elected president Jacques Chirac -- up until then the weakest, the most illegitimate, the most despised that it had had -- back in the saddle."

This is indeed what we have witnessed, but it is necessary to go back a little further still in order to better understand the elements of the problem.

Central to this reestablishing of the Fifth Republic, at the current stage, is the fact that the newly elected National Assembly presents itself explicitly, as in 1958, as being the Assembly of the President, holding his mandate and placing itself in his service, like a chamber of peers in a monarchical regime. The government arranges everything to its satisfaction, from top to bottom. First, thanks to the leaders of the Left and the unions, Chirac obtains 82 percent of the votes cast on May 5, while knowing full well that, since the majority of those who voted for him are in reality against him and did so with "death in their hearts," it remains for him to "convert a free kick into a goal," as they say in soccer. Chirac then forms a government that is efficient, well conceived and devoted to him: now he has the Assembly at his feet. The rest of the program is to "descend" step by step, through "social dialogue," the "territorialization" and organization of France "from below" -- to recall the slogans of the regime -- with the goal of reorganizing social relations in the direction desired by finance and the corporate bosses: abolishing employment security, undermining public services and the Social Security system.

This reordering depends fundamentally, therefore, on the fact that the legislative elections followed the presidential election. But it would not have been the result of the electoral calendar had the latter not been modified. Today, several Socialist leaders -- Henri Emmanuelli, Arnaud Montebourg -- deplore this inversion of the calendar. But who was responsible for it? Everyone knows it was Lionel Jospin. It was at the end of 2000, several weeks after the referendum, organized jointly by Chirac and Jospin, on the reduction of the president's term from seven to five years. As Socialist militants, some of us refused at the time to vote in this referendum, because we said that after the five year term was put in place the electoral calendar would be inverted, so that the legislative would always follow the presidential elections and be dependent on them, thus reinforcing the Fifth Republic and its presidency. The announcement of this decision, moreover, was made by Jospin in a perfectly presidential, "Bonapartist" fashion: he revealed his sovereign decision before an already adjourned congress of the Socialist Party, leaving the delegates with no choice other than to applaud or leave (the author of these lines then left to catch his train!).

For five years, Lionel Jospin was the pillar of the Fifth Republic and saved Chirac. Chirac owes him everything. The logic of his role pushed Jospin to run for the presidency, although he had no enthusiasm for it, with the results we now know . . .

Thus, the National Assembly elected under the conditions of June 9 and 16, 2002, is not, properly speaking, a "national assembly." It is a "rump" assembly, beholden to the executive and without a popular mandate, as only one important politician -- Le Pen, alas! -- has said -- but he must not be allowed a monopoly on this truth.

THERE WAS NO ELECTORAL "BLUE WAVE." Four factors combine to explain the results of the legislative elections, four factors that are linked to the events of the period between the two rounds of the presidential voting. Three concern the Left and one the Right.

In that which concerns the Left, the major fact is the enormous electoral abstention. The majority of workers, youth and "people of the Left" did not vote. It should be noted that the youth who came out in the aftermath of April 21st, many of whom voted for Chirac on May 5th, did not go to the polls this time, despite all the speeches about a "civic" or "republican" "jump-start," etc. Why did abstentionism on the Left attain its historical zenith precisely in these elections?

Its deep causes are known: the disappointment of those who expected, in good conscience, that the Left in power would govern in favor of the workers, not the bosses like the Right. To this fundamental cause was added the fact that after the appeal of the Left to vote for Chirac and the formation of the Raffarin government, the feeling predominated that results favorable to the Right were a foregone conclusion and that voting would not be worth the trouble. The Right waged a campaign against "cohabitation," and the Left said, in effect, that what it wanted was a new cohabitation -- instead of saying that it rejected this arrangement, that it would not pursue the same policies and that this time its victory would condemn Chirac. The prospect of a François Hollande as Jacques Chirac's prime minister offered nothing to inspire the enthusiasm of either the young people who had risen up against Le Pen or their parents who had had the experience of the Left in power! The electorate of the Left, on the whole, had no desire to begin again with the same old thing that had been going on for the past five years, and this is understandable.

The second major fact might seem to contradict the first, but it was foreseeable that the two would combine: if around half of the Left and working class electorate and of the youth abstained, then the other half voted for the Socialists (and locally for the Communists where the PS supported the PC or where an incumbent PC candidate was solidly implanted) a little more often in the second round than in the first. The fact that the PC depends on the PS for electoral support, the crushing of the Greens and the liquidation of Jean-Pierre Chevènement's "Republican Pole," and the setback of the Far Left, makes the PS, in a certain manner, the "only party of the Left," at least on the electoral level.

Besides, there is no opposition between abstentionists and PS voters in the same neighborhoods, even the same families (setting aside the very particular case of the city of Paris, where the Greens and the PS seem to have stabilized a well-off petty bourgeois, even bourgeois, electorate). Those who voted Socialist, in their immense majority, have no more illusions than the abstentionists about what the PS would have done had it won; for them, voting was the first act of resistance to the Chirac- Raffarin government, and it is clear that the only vote that seemed to them useful for this was, once again, a vote for the PS.

There was a consensus among the leaders of the PS that they must not attack each other in the aftermath of the elections. This consensus has not endured because profound forces are at work: in French social relations, whether the PS becomes the only party of the Left or a hegemonic party, it cannot do so as an American-style Democratic Party, a bourgeois party, because that would require it to go after the support of those who did not want to vote for it. Brutally, François Hollande, in seeking to impose a "Blairist," Laurent Fabius, as party spokesman, has shown that the leadership of the PS is not neutral and wants to keep on course toward the right at any cost. And to refuse at the same time to be the "only party of the Left," because the liquefaction of the PC has thrown an awful fright into the leaders of the PS. Hollande has thus opened up a crisis among the party's leadership.

The third striking fact of this election is that the vote for the Far Left fell to 2.7 percent (with the LCR in the lead, followed by the LO, the PT and movements of communist and ecologist origins). Certainly this was not the same sort of election, but the results showed that voting for the Far Left this time did not seem either useful or significant to the majority of those who had done so on April 21st. This is hardly surprising, since the organizations concerned had not grasped the responsibility that flowed from their April 21st voting scores: they remained on the ground of ideological generalities, did not pose the question of power and did not present themselves as a force wishing to drive out Chirac and impose democracy -- and thus failed to call, from their own standpoint, for beating the Right in the legislative elections; to them, concentrating on beating the Right means imitating the politics of the PS . . .

Unquestionably, the results are weakening the wave of recruitment that has been directed above all toward the LCR, and are producing a certain demoralization among the militants, especially those who had been saying for weeks, sometimes after voting for Chirac, that the legislative elections had no importance because everything will be decided in the streets this coming fall!

As far as the Right is concerned, there was no mass popular rallying in its direction, but there was a certain dynamic, born on May 5th, that, notably, carried more than half of Le Pen's (and Mégret's) voters in both rounds of the presidential elections, toward a vote for the UMP. It is this alone, added to the effects of Left abstentionism, that explains the crushing number of seats won by the Right. The Right, which had been billed as the "last defense of the Republic" against the fascist danger of Le Pen, thus received its votes, massively, and the UMP has tapped its strength. It is all the more striking to see former advocates of voting for Chirac on May 5th, from François Hollande to Olivier Besancenot, say that this time there is at least one good thing in the results: the decline of the FN and the fact that it didn't get a single deputy! In fact, the FN (and the MNR) has its place in the political apparatus of Chirac and Raffarin. To treat it as an absolute evil that justifies anything and everything prevents an understanding of its actual role and thus handicaps the struggle against it. Useful to those who seek the restoration and reinforcement of the Fifth Republic, it also acts on this government as a rightwing goad and helps assure it a rump assembly.

THE WHOLE FRENCH SITUATION has been dominated for months by the perspective of a major social confrontation, a May '68 doubled by a December '95. That has not changed. But there is now an offensive dynamic from the Right and Big Business and a process, well underway, of reorganizing the state apparatus (for example, the police and the gendarmerie). If Jospin had been elected, the social confrontation would have occurred under much better conditions, not because Jospin would be an ally, but because this rightward dynamic would not be operating, and because a confrontation with a government of the Left would accelerate the reorganization of the workers movement.

The problem does not reside in social combativeness. Workers are firmly decided to resist layoffs and the extension of the workweek, civil servants are prepared to block the threats to their retirement, the youth will be back on the streets as soon as they sense a propitious moment, democratic opinion is outraged at the impunity of the President while the peasant trade unionist José Bové is thrown in prison.

The problem, that the probable confrontation will occur in a complicated manner, is political. The social movement has not kept pace with the reorganization of the state and of the Right, which will attempt to dislocate and defeat it by preventing a movement of the whole, whose meaning can only be political. But the social movement has no political representation (the Far Left, such as it is today, is certainly not this new representation, but rather a means of protest and investigation). How to reconstitute a political representation of the world of labor? -- such is the question underlying the whole situation, the solution to which is to be found neither in the Far Left alone nor exclusively in the developments within the PS or elsewhere; it must emerge from all these sources, or it will never be.

Contents of No. 33

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