NO! - from the Left
By Murray Smith
At ten o’clock on Sunday night, as the last polling stations closed, the result came down like the blade of a guillotine. France’s electors had voted “No” to the projected European Constitution. All the polls in the last few days before the vote were predicting a victory for the “No”. But the size of the majority, nearly 55 per cent, was absolutely unequivocal.
What was also clear, and finally recognised by a media that had been almost uniformly partisan of the “Yes” vote, was that the battle had been won by the “No from the left”.
Of course far-right leaders like Jean-Marie Le Pen and Philippe de Villiers were on television claiming victory. But the sociological and political composition of the vote showed that the bulk of the “No” votes didn’t come from their supporters.
Among social categories, 81 per cent of manual workers, 79 per cent of the unemployed, 60 per cent of white-collar workers and 56 per cent of “intermediary professions” voted “No”. The only categories where the “Yes” was in a majority were executives and intellectual professions (62 per cent), those with a university education (57 per cent) and pensioners (56 per cent).
An analysis of the vote by age group shows that the “No” won by 59 per cent among 18-34 year-olds and 65 per cent among 35-49 year-olds. The “Yes” was only in a majority among those over 65. Politically, 67 per cent of left-wing voters opted for the “No” - almost unanimously among supporters of the Communist Party and the revolutionary Left, but also 59 per cent of Socialist supporters and 64 per cent pf Green supporters. And 61 per cent of non-aligned voters voted “No”. Only supporters of the two mainstream right-wing parties, the UMP and the UDF, voted massively (76 per cent) in favour of the Constitution.
If we put the far Right at 15 per cent of the electorate, that means that the other 40 per cent for the “No” came from supporters of the Left and the non-aligned. Questioned on the reasons for their vote, those who voted “No” cited the economic and social situation in France, especially the issue of unemployment, and the “too liberal” character of the treaty.
And 35 per cent of them expressed the hope that the constitutional treaty could be renegotiated. So as the campaigners for a ”No from the left” have been saying for months, most people who voted “No” didn’t do so because they were chauvinist, anti-European or whatever. They voted against neo-liberalism and its devastating effects in France and in Europe.
The political effects of the vote will be multiple. “Chirac disavowed, Europe destabilised”, said the headline in the Monday edition of Le Monde. Chirac is likely to sack Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a convenient scapegoat. Raffarin may be replaced by Nicolas Sarkozy, who on television on Sunday night produced the somewhat original analysis that the French people had voted “No” because they wanted even more neo-liberal policies… Which is what they will get if he is nominated. Or Chirac may feel that nominating Sarkozy would be too much of a provocation.
The President himself is now indeed disavowed and seriously weakened, and it is difficult to see how he can still envisage standing again in the 2007 presidential election. On the left, only the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) called clearly and unequivocally for Chirac to resign and for the dissolution of Parliament.
But of course not all the losers were on the right. The majority leaderships of the Socialist Party and the Greens were also disavowed by their own supporters, and post-referendum battles in both parties look set to be fierce. Socialist leaders like François Hollande, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Lionel Jospin who led the “Yes” campaign are unlikely to meekly hand the party over to those like Laurent Fabius, Henri Emmanuelli and Jean-Luc Mélenchon who defended the “No”.
On a European level it is not of course “Europe” that has been destabilised but the neo-liberal EU project. And listening to a succession of European leaders of left and right on Sunday night, they gave no signs of drawing any lessons from the defeat. One after the other they came on the screen to reprimand the unruly French and announce that business would go on as usual.
Of course most of them won’t have anything as messy as a referendum to contend with, having chosen parliamentary ratification of the treaty. Whatever the defenders of the Constitution say, the French “No” can open up the debate on Europe that hasn’t yet taken place in most countries of the EU. The opponents of neo-liberal Europe have a chance to go on the offensive, not only for the rejection of this Constitution but also for a break with the undemocratic way it was drawn up, and to demand that the peoples of Europe elect constituent assemblies to draw up new proposals. The LCR has called for a European Social Forum to discus the way forward
In France, on the left, the victory of the “No” opens up new possibilities for building a radical anti-capitalist force. The months of cooperation between militants of different parties and of none, of collaboration with trade unionists and activists of social movements, have created a real dynamic and raised expectations. Discussions have already begun on how to build a force on the left that can break with what in France is called “alternance” - the pattern whereby governments of left and right alternate regularly, with a high degree of continuity in their neo-liberal policies.
These discussions will certainly continue, no doubt against a background of continuing social resistance to the neo-liberal offensive of Chirac and whoever he names as Prime Minister. What is needed is to build a credible alternative to the social-liberalism that is incarnated by the Socialist Party leadership. In a declaration the day after the referendum, the LCR proposed that the 1,000 committees for a “No from the left” that have mushroomed over the last months continue and work towards a national meeting.
It has also proposed a meeting of the political organisations that helped last autumn to launch the “Appeal of the 200” that was the basis for the committees. Some of the forces involved in the “No” campaign will be tempted to be drawn into a new union of the Left under SP hegemony, to prepare a new “alternance” for 2007.
But that perspective will be combated not only by the LCR but by many other activists, including in the Communist Party, and even by some Socialist Party members. Prospects have never looked better for building a radical anti-capitalist force in France. The coming weeks and months will be decisive.
Murray Smith, formerly international organiser for the Scottish Socialist Party, is an active member of the LCR. This article first appeared in International Viewpoint
AFTER THE NO VOTE TO THE EU CONSTITUTION IN FRANCE: THE CHALLENGES OF THE ALTERNATIVE LEFT
An interview with Socialist Worker (US)
G. Buster
The far left and far right both campaigned for “no.” Who can claim victory in this “no” vote?
Everybody in the No camp will claim victory. It is not possible to know exactly what has been the contribution to the NO from each of the forces who campaigned for it. We have the opinions polls, which tell us that the far right vote in France gets about an 18% rate of support, which is quite close to the vote they obtained in the regional elections in 2004 with a 16,6%.
But that is nor the right question. The important thing is why people have voted massively, against the two mainstream parties, for the NO. And the answer is that they have do it to protest the neo-liberal and conservative policies of the Raffarin government that they identified, correctly, as the French version of the EU neoliberal agenda which the EU Constitutional Treaty tries to convert into law.
The No vote is a vote against neoliberalism. The alternative to the crises of neoliberal policies from the far right is an utopian return to the imaginary days of French “petit-gloire”, before the Euro and the emigration of workers from North Africa, of protectionism and Catholic petit-bourgeois morality.
In the left, which is the main component of the French No vote, at least two thirds of it, there is a strong debate going on about what should be the alternative: a return to the days of the “plural left” and the Jospin Government of the PS-PCF and Greens, which also applied the neo-liberal UE policies and can proudly boast the greatest rate of privatisation of any French government, or a true progressive and social alternative that will start a break with the neo-liberal logic.
The kernel of this debate is the split, in practical terms of the Socialist Party around the question of the Constitutional Treaty. To go back to the “plural left” will mean that the social-liberal leadership of the Socialist Party is able to recover from this defeat an regain control over all those voters that have now said NO.
But many things are against the social-liberals in the SP. To start with, the strong cycle of workers resistance since the general strike of 1995, which has grown especially in the last two years and extended from the public to the private sector of the economy. This struggle needs a true new political alternative, on the basis of unity forged in this popular movement of resistance that encompasses the left of the Socialist Party, the Communist, and the revolutionary Left. It is essential to apply now, in France and in all Europe, a United Front strategy against the neoliberal policies and to base on it a new political alternative. That’s the challenge of the victory of the NO.
What is the overall political context for this – election defeats for Schroeder and Berlusconi, setback for Blair, etc?
There is a global and a European context for this NO. The neocon unilateral hegemonic project of the Bush Administration is entangled in the sands of Iraq for the moment. That gave a window opportunity to the “old Europe” of Chirac and Shroeder to try to sell their neoliberal project of Europe disguise as a counter-hegemonic, multilateral, more “human” form of capitalism.
The strong protest movement in all Europe against the Iraq war was to be used by the Chiracs and Shroeders as the justification for there own European brand of neoliberalism. But the social consequences of the neoliberal policies applied under instructions from the Brussels European Commission had found a very strong resistance in all the countries that joined the Euro.
We have seen general strikes in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Holland and strong sectoral strikes in Germany, Belgium and Denmark. The myth of a “European social model”, more progressive socially that the ones in place in the USA or Japan, that counted with the legitimacy and understanding of the big trade unions leadership, is melting.
The 1995 social shock and resistance changed the political character of 12 of the 15 EU governments of the day. It was the springtime of social democracy allied with the Green parties and some CP. This change was frustrated by the social-liberal policies they applied under the aegis of the European Commission, transformed into the bulwark of the neoliberal European project (presented as law in the Constitutional Treaty). And the right returned in all Europe, with big rates of left abstentionism in the elections. The 2002-2005 wave, combining social anti-neoliberal resistance and the anti-war movement, has meant already the defeat of Aznar in Spain, of the right in Portugal and very strong setbacks for Schroeder (and the first real split to the left in the SPD since the 1920´s, even if small), Blair and Chirac. Berlusconi has become the clown of Europe and even his allies in Europe are waiting with pleasure his fall.
So, there are big changes that reflect the popular change of mood. But this change of political conscience is slow because there is no clear alternative -I mean a real and practical alternative here and now, not a propagandistic one. The changes start inside and around the big traditional organisations.
That is why are so important the division of the French Socialist Party and the small split of the German SPD. The revolutionary organisations are small and gain influence when they can apply a united front tactics. But they have grown in the best of cases by the hundreds and have been able for the first time to obtain MPs in Britain, Portugal, the European Parliament.
With more social weight, but under all the strains of this political dilemma you can find the political coalitions that the crisis of the CPs have produced in Italy (Rifondazione), Spain (Izquierda Unida), Greece (Synaspismos), in all of which there are important revolutionary currents. That’s the “alternative left” of the 5-7%, which, with the French CP and the German PDS, have built the European Party of the Left.
We are at a transitional moment. The resistance has accumulated enough anger to become a political “veto” factor. But it has not yet its own positive alternative. It will not fall from the heavens, chanting a propagandist mantra. It has to be built through collective, united social experience and political cunning from the left, one step after another.
If we are not able to produce in each European state and at the EU level a concrete and realistic alternative through a programme for action against neo-liberalism, this left turn will be reabsorbed through new socio-liberal experiences of the “plural left” and will be defeated. We may have to go through more than one of these cycles before there is enough collective social experience as to overcome this political weakness. But our task is to “shorten” these painful cycles and start a way through that could accumulate from an organisational and political point of view, in the left parties and the trade unions, a socialist alternative.
You have written about how the EU constitution is aimed at consolidating and advancing neoliberalism. How will the employers/states react to the “no” in France?
Happily I can say that this NO is a big defeat for them. This Constitutional Treaty was the Treaty of the French employers association, MEDEF, and their European partners UNICE. The big objective of the EU Constitution was to legitimise through a pseudo-democratic ratification process their neoliberal policies. Once they had become law, Giscard the putative father of the text had promised them that it could not be changed legally in 50 years!
All that is over. Nobody can pretend now that the EU neoliberal policies, which have been contested from the streets since 1995, have behind them any popular, democratic, consensus. Of course, the EU will continue to operate. The Euro has become a strong reality; the Commission issues all kind of regulations daily. But the neoliberal project for building a unified Europe has suffered a terrible blow. A window opportunity opens now for a left, progressive project for building a unified Europe.
The EU governments - the European Council - are already plotting a Plan B. Poor Giscard has proposed to put the Treaty back into vote in France and in Holland if it’s also rejected there, probably, the 1 of June. That’s the so call “Irish solution”, because when the Irish said No to the Nice Treaty, they were both mobbed and promised all kind of subsidies until there was enough abstentionism to pass a second time the Treaty.
There is no political space for those kinds of tricks now. Another proposal is to “reform” the Nice Treaty by adding to it the most important chapters, of course from the point of view of the European oligarchy, of the Constitutional Treaty and get it ratified not by referenda in the member states, but by the European and national parliaments.
The problem is that that will open the Pandora’s box of very long negotiations in which the national interest - now not only of the Euro group, or the 15, but also of the 25, including the central European member-states - will come to the fore. And to the split between the “old” and the “new” Europe of the Iraq war debate you will have to add the “not any longer so rich” and the “poor” Europe one. All this happens in the worst of all possible moments, with the European economy going into recession and discussing the European budget 2007-2013, when all the subsidies have to be redistributed!
Well, there are 35.000 Euro-bureaucrats to imagine a solution for the Plan B. and they are very imaginative. We will keep an eye on them, but the important thing is to produce our own Plan B. I think we should propose that the European Party of the Left calls for a European Left Convention, as soon as possible, with the participation of all parties, movements and trade unions that are against the EU Constitution and the neoliberal policies, including the left of the French Socialist Party and the split of the SPD, and of course the members of the European Anticapitalist Left.
We have to discuss an adopt a common programme of action against the so called neoliberal “Lisbon Agenda”, for a social progressive European budget 2007-2013, and demand the immediate resignation of the already corrupt new Barroso Commission. Only in that way we can start building a social and progressive Europe.
We have to call for a real European constitutional process, based on new elections to the European parliament. The new European Parliament will produce a new EU Constitution, after an open and democratic debate, and will put it to ratification in one single European referendum. Only in that way we will have a Europe of the citizens, not the Europe of the oligarchs.
May 30 2005
G. Buster is a member of the editorial board of the Madrid review Viento Sur, and a member of Espacio alternativo and the Fourth International. This article was originally posted on marxsite