Alex Lantier
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s unpopular minority government fell after the National Assembly censured its 2025 budget. This is a major political blow to President Emmanuel Macron, who assembled Barnier’s government following snap elections in July. Public discontent is surging, with two-thirds of the French population now calling for Macron’s resignation.
Macron is deeply despised. His brutal pension cuts, violent repression of mass strikes, calls to send French troops to Ukraine to fight Russia, and open support for the Israeli regime’s genocide in Gaza have provoked overwhelming opposition. However, the political forces strengthened by Barnier’s fall are not on the left, but on the right.
Barnier’s government collapsed after Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) withdrew its support and backed a censure motion introduced by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front (NFP). French media are now lavishing attention on the RN, the foremost French allies of Israel’s genocidal regime and America’s fascist president-elect, Donald Trump. Le Pen’s party is positioning itself as the decisive force in French politics, biding its time while signaling its readiness to topple Macron.
The strengthening of the far right amid Barnier’s fall is a direct consequence of the bankruptcy of the NFP, which is seeking to paralyze workers. As he campaigns for Macron to resign, Mélenchon limits himself to calling on the National Assembly to support an NFP-led government, headed by Finance Ministry bureaucrat Lucie Castets.
Mélenchon won 8 million votes in the 2022 presidential elections, dominating working class neighborhoods in nearly all of France’s largest cities. A strike movement mobilizing these voters could bring France’s economy to a standstill. Yet not once in the last two years has Mélenchon called for, let alone organized, a mass mobilization to challenge Macron’s repeated violations of popular will.
During last year’s mass strikes against Macron’s pension cuts, the NFP limited its intervention to attending trade union rallies and writing a pathetic letter politely asking him to reconsider. Millions marched against Macron, and polls showed two-thirds of the French people wanted to halt the cuts with a general strike to block the economy. But the NFP was silent as the union bureaucracies halted protests once Macron’s cuts were promulgated as law.
This year, following Macron’s snap election call, Mélenchon formed the NFP—a coalition between his France Unbowed (LFI) party, the big-business Socialist Party (PS), the Stalinist French Communist Party, the Greens and the middle-class Pabloite New Anti-Capitalist Party. This opportunistic alliance, with discredited figures like ex-President François Hollande of the PS, was based on a thoroughly right-wing program, including pledges to send troops to Ukraine and bolster riot police and spy agencies.
In the election, LFI withdrew hundreds of its own candidates to support PS and pro-Macron candidates, claiming this alliance would block the far right. Mélenchon thus helped get hundreds of pro-Macron or PS legislators elected. When the elections resulted in a hung parliament, Macron promptly discarded his alliance with the NFP and turned to the far-right RN, which initially agreed to support Barnier’s government without formally joining it.
By blocking working class opposition to Macron and the bourgeoisie, the NFP strengthened Le Pen. It let her denounce the “left” as a tool of the banks and consolidate support among millions of workers who vote for the RN out of bitterness with the social attacks carried out by successive governments headed by the PS.
Last week, the RN abruptly withdrew support for Barnier, reflecting a broader global restructuring of bourgeois politics following Trump’s election. In recent days, Ukraine has launched NATO-backed missile strikes on Russia, South Korea’s president issued an abortive declaration of martial law, and both the German and French governments have collapsed. Trump’s reelection, marked by plans for military escalation, mass deportations, and $2 trillion in austerity measures, signals a coordinated global intensification of the bourgeoisie’s class war on the working class.
In this context, pseudo-left parties like LFI serve to block and disorient working class opposition, strengthening the far right. Indeed, during the 2022 elections, Mélenchon pledged to serve as prime minister under either Macron or Le Pen. His view of neo-fascism had shifted since the 1970s, he said: “At the very beginning of the struggle against the National Front [the predecessor of the National Rally], I took a very harsh position. Inspired by the past, I said we should not accept them ... Now the question is not posed that way for me.”
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