In a display of naked contempt for the French people, President Emmanuel Macron announced late Friday night that he was renaming as prime minister Sébastien Lecornu, who resigned on Monday as his government coalition collapsed. Macron’s week of consultations with France’s parliamentary parties proved to be a lengthy delaying exercise to prolong a fallen government.
Last week, French media were dominated by plans that Macron would make a deal with forces from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front (NFP). While Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI) party kept demanding Macron’s resignation, almost all the other parties in the NFP rushed to negotiate with France’s hated president of the rich. The bourgeois Socialist Party (PS), the Greens and the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) all rushed to the Elysée presidential palace to beg Macron for access to power.
Friday afternoon, however, they were stunned when Macron rejected their advances and denied them the prime ministership, even though the NFP came in first in the last legislative elections in July 2024. “We emerged stunned from the meeting,” Green Party leader Marine Tondelier said as she left the Elysée. “We have had no answer, except that the prime minister named in the coming hours will not be from our political camp.”
At 10 p.m., with no further explanations, the Elysée presidential palace issued a two-line communiqué, stating: “The president of the Republic has named Mr Sebastien Lecornu prime minister and tasked him with forming a government.”
Macron and the capitalist oligarchy are exploiting the NFP’s political bankrutpcy to place it before a poisoned choice. Mélenchon insists that opposition cannot take the form of class struggle, but rather a “people’s revolution” in the parliament. Macron is therefore placing the NFP in a parliamentary dead end. Either it discredits itself by supporting a hated Lecornu government as it carries out a policy of austerity, war and dictatorship, or it joins the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) in voting to bring down Lecornu and trigger elections that the RN could very well win.
RN officials have reacted by threatening to censure a new Lecornu government, which RN party president Jordan Bardella denounced as a “contraption with no future” and “a bad joke, a democratic shame and a humiliation of the French people.” The PS, the Greens, the PCF and LFI are also threatening to censure Lecornu, who cannot escape falling if these parties act upon their threats. The holding of new elections is a very distinct possibility.
Currently, polls indicate that the RN and the right-wing The Republicans (LR) could together win a narrow majority in the Assembly. Moreover, factions of Macron’s party, notably figures such as his former prime minister Edourd Philippe—who is now calling for Macron’s resignation—are also engaged in back-channel discussions on forming a government with the RN. In the French ruling class, plans to impose a fascistic dictatorship led by the RN are far advanced.
NFP leaders have reacted with demoralized predictions that a neo-fascist victory is inevitably. Late Friday night, Green Party national secretary Marine Tondelier appeared on LCI news, declaring:
“The electoral fuel of the RN is social despair, seeing that voting does no good, Macron is no good. The people who voted for us when we came in first in the elections, they are telling themselves: ‘Well, they did not even take office.’ You see what that does to public opinion. Emmanuel Macron is taking us all to a very dangerous place, he is taking the country into a dangerous place. I will never forgive him. We will wake up one day with the far right having the prime ministership, maybe the presidency.”
A neofascist victory is not at all inevitable, but it is impossible to prevent it without mobilizing the working class and breaking the NFP’s diktat over the class struggle. There is explosive working class anger against Macron, workers unanimously reject his policy of social austerity, and calls are circulating to block everything with a general strike. But the union leaderships have not even fixed a next protest day of action against Macron and his attempts to rule against the people.
By demobilizing opposition, as when they called off strikes in 2023 against Macron’s vastly unpopular pension cuts, it is the NFP itself that fuels social despair and the rise of the RN.
A revolutionary strategy, organizing and mobilizing rank and file workers independently of the bureaucracies in committees of action, is necessary to rally the working class against austerity, imperialist war and dictatorship. The only viable perspective for such a movement is the expropriation of the capitalist oligarchy, which is driving far-right forces internationally, by the socialist revolution.
The French bourgeoisie, for its part, aims to defend its wealth and world position via a vast social retrogression in workers’ living conditions. Its policy follows the basic lines laid out by Trump in Washington. As Trump fires government workers and threatens basic social entitlements, he is sending troops to occupy US cities from Los Angeles to Chicago and Washington with authorization to fire on the people, including on mass anti-Trump “No Kings” protests on the 18th.
Class relations are not fundamentally different in Europe and in the United States. The marching orders from financial markets to the French state were laid out in a recent article in the Washington Post, titled “Europe’s high quality of life is getting hard to afford. Just ask France.” Blaming Russia and China, it demanded deep cuts to European quality of life.
Europe, it wrote, “is sandwiched between an aggressive Russian threat and a mercurial US president who is squeezing traditional allies on tariffs and who seems to shift security commitments from one day to the next. … At the same time, France and Germany both face a rising economic challenge from China, which is competing with European manufacturing on big-ticket goods such as German-made electric vehicles and French-made nuclear power plants.”
It concluded, “The cost of Europe’s way of life—health care, affordable education, and an dignified retirement for all through high social spending—is becoming unbearably high.”
The conclusions drawn by the ruling class are not hard to see. If social rights to health care, affordable education and dignified retirement pose a threat to their obscene wealth, then workers should forgo health care, go massively into debt to finance their education, and should not have dignified retirements. From this flows the necessity for a fascistic dictatorship to repress mass opposition to social retrogression and plans for total war against Russia.
The only viable perspective is the international mobilization of the working class against the accelerating attempts by the capitalist oligarchy to impose a dictatorship. The Parti de l’égalité socialiste explained in its statement, “Which way forward for the working class after the fall of the French government?”:
Two stark alternatives are presented. Either the capitalist oligarchy builds a fascistic dictatorship to crush the working class, or the working class wages a revolutionary struggle on a socialist program to expropriate the oligarchs. This requires breaking through the straitjacket of the union bureaucracies and building genuine, rank-and-file organizations dedicated to prosecuting the class struggle.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls for the transfer of power from the trade union bureaucracies to the workers in all factories and workplaces. Such new forms of class organization, uniting workers in France and throughout Europe, are necessary to organize resistance to and defeat the corporate-financial oligarchy’s program of fascism, genocide and war.