[Peace-discuss] French vote

Tue May 31 02:24:02 CDT 2005

Very exciting times indeed for the Left in France. There is no coherent way 
to label this but as a massive victory for grassroots elements of the Left: 
despite the fact that you'll never see Le Figaro or LeMonde making such 
proclamations.

Nor any Europhiles running "Political Science" schools through Paris: be it 
at the Sorbonne, Science Po, or Sceaux. They have all been shoveling the 
same BS down our throats as Chirac, TV5 and co.....

Here is my final take...
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/May05/Reichel0530.htm

-
matt

>From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu>
>To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>Subject: [Peace-discuss] French vote
>Date: Sun, 29 May 2005 22:56:02 -0500
>
>[Best account I've seen of the important vote in France today:
><http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/05/
>the_massive_def.html>. --CGE]
>
>    May 29, 2005
>    A POLITICAL REVOLT IN FRANCE
>    What Rejection of the European Constitution Means
>    Doug Ireland
>
>The massive defeat of the new European Constitution by the
>French in today's referendum means a virtual political
>revolution in France -- a rebellion by the people against the
>political elites of both left and right. The No vote won by a
>wide margin of nearly ten points -- the latest figures show
>54.87% for the No, 45.13% for the Yes. Despite an overwhelming
>campaign for a Yes vote by the mainstream French media
>(including a major pro-Yes bias in TV coverage), and by nearly
>all the major political leaders of left, right, and center --
>  a scare campaign that tried to (falsely) tell the French that
>they would be responsible for destroying construction of a
>united Europe  if they voted against this Constitution -- the
>French electorate's working and middle classes, by their No
>vote, Referendum_non rejected the unregulated free-market
>policies, aimed at destroying the welfare state and the social
>safety net, embodied in the Constitution. (see my earlier
>analysis, "The New European Constitution: Should Americans Care?")
>
>Today's vote confirms the enormous gap between what the French
>call "La France d'en haut et la France d'en bas" -- the France
>of above and the France of below. And this rejection of
>France's political elites will bring extraordinary changes to
>the country's political landscape:
>
>1. President Jacques Chirac, who called for this referendum
>(rather than letting parliament alone ratify it), has taken a
>slap in the face from which he cannot recover before the
>presidential elections of 2007. It will now be impossible for
>Chirac Jacquechirac_2to seek a third presidential term -- and
>he won't run again, as my friend Claude Angeli (editor of the
>investigative-satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine, dean of
>French investigative journalists, and author of numerous
>authoritative insider books on Chirac) just told me on the
>phone as the results of the referendum became known. (Angeli
>also has the view-- as I do -- that, had it not been for the
>extraordinary establishment media's beating of the drums for
>the Yes, the No vote would have been even larger.)
>
>2. Today's vote means that the presidential candidate of the
>right in two years will be, not Chirac, but Nicolas Sarkozy,
>the ambitious chairman of the conservative UMP party. In a
>televised declaration broadcast just after the exit poll
>results were announced that had the accents of a presidential
>campaign speech, Sarkozy said that there must now be a
>"rupture" with the French economic and social model -- which
>means a break with the mixed economy and more
>ultra-conservative economic and social policies than Chirac
>has been willing to adopt. Just a few days before the vote,
>Sarkozy was called "an American" by the head of the
>center-right UDF party in Chirac's conservative coalition for
>his support of Bush's war in Iraq and hard-right economic
>policies that also resemble Bush's. But Sarkozy, who has led
>every public opinion poll as the presidential choice of the
>French for the last two years, is being weakened by the
>marital scandal which is engulfing him (see my earlier
>article, "Is France's 'Future President' In Trouble? Nicolas
>Sarkozy Faces a Crisis."
>
>3. Chirac will immediately change his prime minister, fire the
>highly unpopular incumbent Jean-Pierre Raffarin (whose
>popularity in the polls is only in the low 20s) -- and, my
>friend Angeli just told me, the new prime minister will be
>ex-Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin (the voice of France
>at the UN against the Iraq war), who is currently Interior
>Minister -- despite a lot of pressue from the ranks of
>Chirac's parliamentary party to name Sarkozy. (Tomorrow's Le
>Monde is also now reporting that De Villepin "appears to be"
>the next p.m.) De Villepin, an aristocrat who is Chirac's
>former chief of staff, is seen by Chirac as the best  hope of
>defeating Sarkozy as the right's candidate in the coming
>presidential elections. But de Villepin has never been elected
>to anything and has never faced the voters -- and his less
>than lustrous performance as Interior Minister, where Chirac
>placed him to give him a public profile on domestic policy as
>a law-and order champion (in the ministry where previously
>Sarkozy had cemented his reputation with repressive
>law-and-order, anti-immigrant policies) has not exactly done
>de Villepin much good with the electorate (especially by
>comparison with his predecessor, Sarkozy).
>
>4. The political revolution flowing from today's vote
>encompasses the French left. The Socialist Party's top leaders
>-- including its chief, Francois Hollande (see photo at
>left)Images , and former Mitterand Culture Minister Jacques
>Lang (the most popular left pol in the opinion polls, thanks
>to his incessant TV appearances--Jacques_lang see photo at
>right) both campaigned for a Yes vote. But the Socialist
>electorate, the exit polls showed, voted hugely for the No by
>56-44%. Even though the uncharismatic Hollande has control of
>the Socialist Party apparatus (at least for the moment), it
>will now be very difficult for him to be his party's
>standard-bearer, and Le Canard Enchaine's Angeli told me this
>afternoon he thinks Hollande's presidential ambitions cannot
>recover from today's revolt-from-the-bottom of the left
>electorate.
>
>The Socialist Party's left wing, led by member of parliament
>Henri Emmanuelli (a former party chief-- see photo at right)
>Henri_emmanuelli_1 and Senator Jean-Luc Melanchon -- who
>campaigned hard for the No against the wishes of their party's
>executive committee -- finds itself reinforced by today's
>vote. But neither Emmanueli nor Melanchon have the "heft" of a
>serious presidential candidate.
>
>Their ally in the campaign for the No vote -- a former
>Socialist Prime Minister under Francois Mitterand, Laurent
>Fabius, who was the target of constant barbs from Hollande and
>the Socialist leadership during the referendum campaign for
>breaking party "unity" -- is also reinforced. But Fabius is
>best remembered in France as the prime minister who carried
>out Mitterand's break with socialist economics to embrace a
>free-market program of austerity and privatization in 1982  -
>and it is precisely that sort of economics which, the exit
>polls show, French voters (and particularly the left
>electorate) have rejected today. Fabius' campaign for the No
>was widely perceived as political opportunism designed to
>enhance his presidential ambitions -- and, while he has the
>"stature" of a possible president, it's hard to see him
>eliciting much enthusiasm from "La France d'en bas" and the
>traditional left electorate.
>
>5. Today's vote also is a victory for what is known as "the
>left of the left" -- Pouvoirmed_1 there was a united and
>coordinated campaign for the No vote by the Trotskyist LCR
>(Revolutionary Communist League), and its popular,
>media-charismatic spokesman Olivier Besancenot, a young
>postman who was the party's presidential candidate in 2002
>(see photo at right)Olivier_besancenot_1 ;  by the French
>Communist Party, led by its general secretary, Marie-Georges
>Buffet, a former Minister of Sports and Youth in a coalition
>government with the Socialists; and by the large "associative
>left" of extra-party social movements and groups, like the
>anti-globalization ATTAC, and the leader of the Confederation
>paysanne, the popular Jose Bove (photo left)Jose_bove , who is
>appreciated by left militants of all stripes. Even a
>significant segment of gay and lesbian leadership issued a gay
>manifesto for the No, arguing the Constitution would be bad
>for LGBT people. The smaller, hardline, ultra-sectarian
>Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvriere (Workers' Struggle), led by
>its perennial presidential candidate Arlette Laguiller, also
>urged a No vote--but did not join the coordinated campaign by
>the "left of the left."
>
>There have been discussions and proposals about uniting the
>"left of the left" in a single electoral formation ever since
>the presidential elections of 2002, when the surprisingly
>large protest vote for the two Trotskyist candidates by
>defecting Socialist and Communist voters caused the defeat of
>Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's presidential
>candidacy for a place in the runoff, in which he was displaced
>by neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Now, with the momentum from
>their successful campaign for the No, the "left of the left"
>may well finally achieve that organizational unity for the
>2007 presidential campaign that has long been talked about --
>with the addition of the decimated Communists, who used to be
>part of the "governing left" coalition led by the Socialists,
>and which included the Greens. The faction-ridden Greens, by
>the way, were sharply divided over the European Constitution
>-- and today's vote will likely provoke a new internal debate
>that could lead to a rejection of the current Green leadership
>over the issue of whether or not the Greens should join an
>electoral coalition of the "left of the left." And it is not
>entirely out of the question that elements of the Socialist
>Party's left wing -- particularly Melanchon's faction -- could
>split from the Socialists and join that coalition. There will
>certainly be an emergency Socialist Party Congress called in
>the wake of today's vote --the party's left wing includes the
>moderate-left, process-oriented Nouveau Parti Socialiste
>tendency Arnaud_montebourg_1led by the hyperambitious deputy
>Arnaud Montebourg (photo right), which favors a new French
>Constitution for a VIth Republic, and was also for the No but
>much less active in campaigning -- and Montebourg will
>undoubtedly join the Emmanuelli-Melanchon group in challenging
>the current leadership of the party's "elephants," as the old
>guard in power are known.
>
>Finally, today's vote in France is a good thing for those who
>oppose the American imperium. Under the Constitution -- which
>sets in concrete a united Europe's subordination in military
>and security policy to NATO -- it would take a unanimous vote
>by every single one of the European Union's 25 countries to
>adopt a foreign policy position similar to the Franco-German
>opposition to Bush's war in Iraq. Moreover, any EU country
>that is a member of the UN Security Council (like France --
>or, as in a proposed future enlargement of the Security
>Council, Germany) would be hobbled in its ability to take an
>anti-Washington position without consensus approval by all the
>EU countries as represented in the (un-elected) EU Commission
>headquartered in Brussels.
>
>So, I couldn't be happier with today's rejection of the
>European Constitution -- and in the Netherlands, where polls
>are also showing the No winning in a referendum to be held
>there in three days, the Dutch will probably join the popular
>movement of refusal. Get out the champagne!
>
>Posted by Doug Ireland at 06:44 PM |
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