On the upcoming French election and the need to actively oppose the far right

[Frank]

On the upcoming French election and the need to actively oppose the far right

The French presidential election is scheduled for April 18, with a potential second round on May 2 if no candidate secures a majority. The fascistic Marine Le Pen of Rassemblement National (National Rally, or RN) is way ahead in all the polls. Second in the polls is Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise (LFI). The bourgeois press often describes Mélenchon as far-left, but as we will see below, he really is not.

1. This is by John Mullen, a self-described Marxist who lives near Paris, writing on September 22, 2026:

The upcoming French presidential election next May carries weight far beyond France’s borders. A victory for fascist candidate Marine Le Pen—in a major world economy—would embolden far-right movements globally while dealing a terrible blow to French workers, particularly women, LGBT+ people, and Muslims. Conversely, a win for the radical left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the France Insoumise (“France in Revolt”) would offer an important boost to anti-capitalists everywhere.

In France itself, this election will be anything but business as usual. A recent poll revealed that 71% of French voters want the new president to bring about “real social and political change”. This Q and A article aims to explain the key dynamics at work, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of antifascist activity in France today.

**Will the French have a fascist president next May?**

Nobody can know the answer to this question right now, but the danger is very real. Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement national (National Rally) is the favourite in the polls, with around 33% of voting intentions for the first round. No other candidate polls above 20%. She has particularly gained ground in recent years among women voters and among public sector workers, traditionally populations where the left is strong. A quarter of those public sector workers who say they feel close to a political party cite the Rassemblement National as that party.

Worse, polls at present show her winning in the second-round run-off against any other candidate, whether right, centre-left or radical left.

The first round will take place on 18 April 2027, with the two leading candidates going on to the run-off on 2 May. In 2022, Macron won the second round by 18.8 million votes, to Marine Le Pen’s 13.3 million. Importantly, 13 million registered voters stayed home that day, 3 million spoiled their ballots, and another 4 million citizens were not even on the electoral roll. In the first round, radical left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the France Insoumise secured 7.7 million votes—just 400,000 short of beating Le Pen to the second round.

Unsurprisingly, fatalism is rife in France faced with this historic danger. But Le Pen’s high polling numbers are no reason to despair. The France Insoumise has already started a huge campaign to push back against the far right—and this has worked in the past. Ahead of the 2024 parliamentary elections, thirty consecutive opinion polls predicted the National Rally (RN) would become the largest party in the National Assembly, with several forecasting an absolute majority. Instead, the most dynamic campaign for fifty years, both by parties and by trade unions and associations of all kinds, along with the alliance of all left-wing parties into the Nouveau Front Populaire (“New Popular Front”), led to a real victory: the far right came in third in number of seats, behind the NFP in first place and Macron’s coalition in second.

**Who are the other candidates? How do the elections work?**

The political situation, and the list of candidates, is extremely fluid. For the moment, the rest of the left, outside the France Insoumise, is fractured. The Socialist Party, which received only 600 000 votes at the 2022 presidential elections, is a muddle of jockeying wannabes. Five of them will take part in a lacklustre primary mid-October.

The Communist Party has decided to stand their own candidate again, Fabien Roussel, with a “class struggle but anti-woke” profile. The Green leader Marine Tondelier has also announced she is standing. Left-wing loose canon, François Ruffin, is already campaigning too.

Some of these will give up and support a stronger candidate (sometimes after negotiations concerning the programme or support in subsequent legislative elections). Others will have to give up because they cannot clear the hurdle which the electoral system imposes before a hopeful can get onto the first-round ballot: each candidate must get 500 declarations of support from a pool of 42 000 elected officials (mayors, Members of Parliament and regional councillors mostly). This time round, given the large number of hopefuls, some may not get the 500 endorsements.

The constitution does not allow Macron to stand for a third term, so on the traditional right and in the Macronite neoliberal centre, a number of candidates have emerged - at least five of them. Most are polling quite weakly right now, and some will fold in the coming months.

**Where does the Rassemblement national come from and what does it defend today?**

The Rassemblement National was founded in 1972, under the name Front National, by a collection of figures from the far right: Nazi collaborators, former SS members, sympathisers of far-right terrorist groups, opponents of decolonisation, Holocaust deniers and Catholic traditionalists. They adopted as their emblem the tricolour flame used by Mussolini supporters in Italy. More than fifty years later, that flame remains the RN’s logo.

Marine Le Pen has worked hard to convince millions of voters that the old Front National has been transformed. She expelled her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who continued to make openly antisemitic remarks, and she sought to distance the party from the small neo-Nazi groups that once inhabited its orbit.

But beneath the makeover, central elements of fascist politics remain, including ethnic nationalism. The RN proposes banning Muslim headscarves in public spaces, restricting access to social housing and social benefits on the basis of French nationality, abolishing birthright citizenship, barring dual nationals from certain senior public positions, and denying medical treatment to undocumented migrants. It invokes France’s Christian heritage while presenting the radical left as somehow ‘anti-French’. The town councils controlled by the RN regularly slash social service budgets and try to hamper the activities of trade unions, human rights, women’s or LGBT groups. The new RN mayor of Carpentras, in the South of France, for example, cut all funding for family planning organizations.
And the fascist core cannot be hidden. RN members and candidates are regularly exposed making openly racist or extremist statements. Last year, a police officer and RN activist was filmed comparing Black people to monkeys and using racist slurs. RN vice-president David Rachline was sacked last year after being photographed with two well-known Nazi sympathizers. In 2024, an RN candidate was forced into the spotlight after posting a selfie wearing a cap bearing a swastika, supposedly ‘for a laugh’. There are several more recent examples.

In September, the RN announced that, if elected, it would fine Muslim women for wearing headscarves in the street, a measure plainly at odds with the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The reaction on the left was immediate and furious. And rightly so. But we must remember that Le Pen knows such an idea is unpopular. The aim of the announcement is to reassure the Nazi core of her organization, who are worried by the official moderate stances of the RN on other questions. Such an announcement also pushes those circles who openly support the RN but are not hardcore racists to take one more step towards becoming such.

If elected, Le Pen promises a “constitutional referendum”, aimed at putting racism at the heart of the constitution by abolishing birthright citizenship and imposing “national preference” in many areas of the welfare state.

However, one cannot really understand the RN simply by looking at its programme. Fascist leaders are not known for being honest about their project! Le Pen’s medium-term aim is to smash unions and all resistance organizations, once she can get more of the big capitalists to feel it is worth the risk, and once she has a violent street movement that will do the dirty work.

**What is the RN specifically promising the capitalists?**

Fascism always eventually depends on support from top capitalists. The RN is working hard to reassure the rich that their priority is cutting taxes for the wealthy and for businesses, and following neoliberal orthodoxy by strictly limiting budget deficits. They say they will drastically reduce the social security payments that employers must make. Party president Jordan Bardella was trumpeting late September the classic Thatcherite dogma “France is living beyond its means”, and he has often proclaimed himself “pro-business”.

The party also promises to take an axe to environmental regulations. Their response to the 2026 heatwave has been to loudly defend the “common sense” solution of encouraging the installation of air conditioning. And of course, they are known for their hard-line anti-union stance, which holds considerable appeal to capitalists in a difficult world market. The main bosses’ organization, the MEDEF, invited RN president Jordan Bardella to a lavish business lunch a few months back. Capitalists are preparing in case the RN comes to office, and in case, later, fascism might suit their interests better than liberal democracy.

**What factors are running in favour of a victory for Le Pen next May?**

The profound discrediting of all the governmental parties that have implemented austerity programmes over the past 25 years has produced a sharp political polarisation, with only the far right and the radical left significantly increasing their influence. The Macronist project of pursuing right-wing policies through ministers and MPs originating from both the traditional right and the Socialist Party has now definitively run out of steam. Le Pen can appear to many as a radical option not yet attempted, and she can apeal to very widespread islamophobic and other prejudices.

The constant adoption of far-right policies and talking points by Macron’s government is of course a huge boost to the National Rally. The kid gloves generally worn by mainstream journalists when interviewing RN figures help legitimize the far right: talk shows seem to be filled with fast-talking, sharply dressed, and well-educated fascist spokespeople—both men and women. And far-right influence and networks are getting stronger. Billionaire Vincent Bolloré has systematically built a far-right echo chamber in France, weaponizing outlets like the news channel CNews, newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche or top radio station Europe 1 to push hard-right narratives further into the national conversation. In September 2026 leading public radio station France Inter hired a prominent far right journalist, Charles Sapin, from a hard-right magazine, Valeurs Actuelles, (which has been convicted several times of inciting racial hatred), and gave him a regular political comment spot. The excuse was to reflect a diversity of opinion! A protest strike was organized by journalists, while Macron’s Minister of Culture publicly defended the extremist. The strike was solid, and successful, and Sapin was thrown out, a victory that sheds important light on what can be done against the far right.

**What Factors Could Derail Le Pen’s Project?**

One crucial factor is the antifascist mobilization which I will describe below. Otherwise, internal friction between rising RN star Jordan Bardella and party matriarch Marine Le Pen might trip them up occasionally.

A more significant challenge is the RN’s inability to address some of the political issues most vital to the public. Following a summer marked by historic wildfires—the worst in over 70 years—and unprecedented heatwaves, the RN has no real policies to deal with the problem. Marine Le Pen has vehemently opposed wind power, while party spokespeople have repeatedly downplayed the gravity of climate change.

Also tremendously important is what happens in the immediate class struggle between now and next May. Macron’s minority government will be trying to push through an austerity budget this autumn. Fifty billion euros in cuts are being demanded by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu. Last year he eventually managed to pass a budget, because Socialist Party MPs refused to vote for a motion of censure that would have toppled the government. With presidential elections looming, it is likely that this organization will be less keen to do a deal with Macron. Revolts by groups of workers under pressure in fishing and in farming have already begun, and mass strikes in the public sector are planned for October 2026. Macron may find himself with a mass revolt like the one to defend pensions three years back, which could have led to a full-scale general strike if national union leaders had not been so keen to put on the brakes.

When class struggle is on the rise, it is easier to persuade workers that the problem is not the immigrant, but the banker. And Le Pen’s liars stumble when there are militant social movements. The RN can never loudly oppose violent police repression, since their base in the police force is huge. The RN can never demand a sharp rise in the minimum wage, since it relies on the support of small employers and is assiduously courting big business.

**How has Emmanuel Macron’s presidency paved the way for the far right? **

As Jean-Luc Mélenchon rightly points out, Macron and Le Pen represent "more of a duet than a duel." Macron’s governments have adopted large chunks of RN ideas and policies, while appointing figures with openly reactionary views to ministerial positions. Current Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu even held a secret dinner with Marine Le Pen last year, and the administration subsequently pressured French banks—which had initially refused to lend money to the far right—into granting them major campaign loans.

Macron’s former interior minister and presidential wannabe, Bruno Retailleau has demanded, among other horrors, that the definition of France as “a Judaeo-Christian country” should be enshrined in the constitution. His higher education minister Frédérique Vidal launched a moral panic and official enquiry on the invented danger of “islamo-leftism” taking over French universities. In 2023, the government declared a ban on the wearing of North African tunics (“Abayas”) in high schools (despite the fact that they are not religious garments). And arch-Macronist Marlène Schiappa supported a campaign to ban Muslim women who wear full-body swimsuits from using municipal swimming pools, suggesting that Islamic fundamentalist infiltration was at work.

In 2024, Macron clamped down on immigration, introducing more citizenship testing and language requirements, and making it harder for workers to renew temporary permits. All these measures do not primarily have a practical aim, but simply want to point the finger at immigrants and Muslims, in order to please far-right voters.

Macron has vastly increased powers for the police (despite a series of murders by racist police). This year, he is pushing through a law that institutes a “presumption of self-defence” for police officers. This would mean victims of police shootings would need to prove that the officers were not acting in self-defence! No other country in Europe has such a law.

All this has been accompanied by other authoritarian clampdowns, of a type which had not been seen for a very long time. Antifascist organizations like the Young Guard and antiracist networks like the Collective Against Islamophobia in France have been banned. This authoritarian march can only smooth the road to fascism - already it has led to convert to RN politics, Eric Ciotti, saying the France Insoumise should be banned.

Finally, there have been concerted efforts from Retailleau and other ministers of Macron to portray the radical left, not the far right, as a threat to democracy. “LFI is a party of collaborators with the enemies of France” insisted Retailleau. Earlier he had declared “The Rassemblement National is part of the arc of republican organizations, which the France Insoumise is not”

**What are antifascists doing, and will it be enough?**

There are three pillars of antifascist activity needed in the present situation where the far right have very high electoral support, massive media presence and many rich supporters but have an extremely weak local party structure. Firstly, there is the building of a radical left alternative to respond to the anti-austerity anger of the population. Secondly, there is the mass education campaign, in order to pull apart the piles of lies told by the fascists, (since the established media tend to treat them so kindly). And finally, there is the need for mobilization on the streets and outside all far right events, which should aim at making it impossible for the RN to build a mass party with roots in every town. The first two pillars are encouragingly robust, the third is dangerously underdeveloped.

Campaigning for a genuine radical left alternative, through La France Insoumise, is already in full swing, giving people a clear, positive reason to vote against the far right. With 67% of French people reporting they are worse off than they used to be, both poverty and public anger are rapidly rising. For the next seven months it will be far from politics as usual. Over 100 000 people have joined local LFI Action Groups. Spectacular numbers of new activists, particularly under 30s, are already mobilizing and the campaign will be extremely exciting. The door to door campaigns in working class areas to encourage people to register to vote are in full swing (four million French citizens are not registered, mostly among the poorer population). In September, two of Mélenchon’s speeches, each over an hour long, got 250 000 views each on YouTube within a week.

LFI leaflets and meetings obviously highlight fascist lies. But many who are either not convinced of Mélenchon’s politics, or who belong to organizations which prefer not to endorse a particular political party, will nevertheless be running mass campaigns against the ideas of Le Pen and the fascists. The experience of trade unions under far-right governments in Hungary and Italy, and the attacks by RN town councils in France, are pushing French trade unions to take sides. In 2024, specific calls against the far-right were launched by university presidents, by researchers, by Catholic and protestant charities, by elite athletes and football players, by theatre managers and music venues, by artists and cinema directors, even by organizations of classical musicians. This mobilization is likely to be broader and deeper in 2027.

The third and (mostly) missing element is systematic mass mobilization to stop Le Pen from campaigning and from building her party. Most of the left is not convinced that this is the way forward. There are nevertheless frequently demonstrations and rallies against the RN. Here are a few recent examples: Last April in Brest several hundred people attended an antifascist mass meeting. In May in Avignon, a mobilization stopped a far-right demonstration, and in Macôn another rally opposed the RN’s regional conference. This year, antifascist rallies have also occurred in Nancy, Mont de Marsan, Dijon, Niort, Bayonne, Grenoble, Beziers and Saint-Nazaire. Far-right politicians have faced pickets and rallies when going to book-signings in various towns. And in September 2025, an antifascist demonstration in Paris protested against fascist attacks on left-wing bookshops.

These actions are, however, almost always of hundreds rather than thousands, and are local affairs. A far higher priority should be given to them. In late October 2026, the Rassemblement National will have its conference in Orléans. There will be a counter-demonstration, but the main left organizations have not (yet) called for a national mobilization. Pressure by systematic counterdemonstration helped lead to a split in the Front National in the late 1990s, and such things could happen again, given the political will.

**If the worst happened and Marine Le Pen was elected, what would this mean for France?**

Despite dozens of examples every year of physical attacks by small groups of Nazis, the RN still lacks the mass, violent street movement which characterized classic fascism and is necessary for a fascist regime. If Le Pen became president, French workers would not immediately be living under a fascist regime, even though this is Le Pen’s eventual aim. In Italy, fascist leader Giorgia Meloni has been Prime Minister at the head of a coalition government for four years. Although anti-union measures have been taken, opposition parties and trade unions remain highly active. In October 2025, in response to Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Italian workers went on strike, while demonstrations brought more than a million people onto the streets. In December 2025, similar numbers mobilized to oppose Meloni’s budget, which cut healthcare and pensions while directing far more money to the military.

Four years after Mussolini’s takeover in 1922, independent trade unionism was banned and the right to strike effectively abolished. Hitler did this within four months of becoming chancellor in 1933. So although Meloni aims, more or less secretly, at a fascist regime, this has not been established in Italy.

A Le Pen victory would be worse than Meloni’s. The French president possesses far more constitutional power than the Italian Prime Minister. She might well attempt, through referendums, to institute vicious racist reforms. In addition, one would expect—much like a more coherent version of Trump—that she would show little respect for the constitution or for political tradition. Anti-immigrant pogroms like those seen in Minneapolis would be on the agenda, as would dreadful anti-trans measures and much much more. Above all, Le Pen would be keen to show big capital that she can be trusted to fight in their interests against workers’ resistance of all kinds. She would also use state power to help build the street-fighting movement she needs to eventually transition to a fascist regime.
The election of Le Pen would certainly not mean the end of the struggle. But it would be a major, historic setback. We have seven months to stop this nightmare coming true.

[This version of the article has none of the 32 footnotes; I will make the full version available when I work out how to]

2. This is from Arguments Pour la Lutte Sociale (Arguments for Social Struggle), a small soft-Trotskyist group in France:

A look at the preparation for the presidential elections. Editorial of September 1, 2026.

While the conditions are coming together –in any case, we want to work towards it! – for a push towards social confrontation in this hot September of the thermo-capitalist catastrophe and the human will to live, the media have not spoken to us, well sure, these last few days, only the "political return" focused on the presidential elections of the V° Republic scheduled for April 18 and May 2.

Several Aplutsoc activists, before this "sequence", participated in the APRES summer school, a success given the situation on the left on the eve of the holidays, with well over 200 participants in Tours. Our comrades Olivier and Fabrice notably led a workshop-debate on "campism" and true internationalism.

But the media and official opening of the presidential campaign was, and this is highly significant, the MEDEF summer school. The open meetings of the APRES did not have as their theme the choice or support for this or that candidate, but the maintained struggle for unity on the left: we will return to this in conclusion.

The MEDEF summer school, a key location for launching the campaign.

The MEDEF, therefore, invited Le Pen, Retailleau, Philippe and Attal, who all affirmed the supreme goal of "less state" by overbidding like a barbaric chainsaw à la Musk/Milei, while the big bosses together live from the State, its aid and subsidies and its "public" debt. They also invited, as planned, Mélenchon, Glucksmann, as well as, finally, Tondelier. Let's be clear: being present was acceptance of the framework.

JL Mélenchon rightly pleaded for the increase in wages, arousing remarkable and noted hilarity from these gentlemen and ladies, the big bosses. But the main thing is not there: by inviting him at the same time as Glucksmann, the MEDEF intended not to promote one or the other as a possible president, but to validate and perpetuate the division on the left on which it counts.

Furthermore, a "controversy" over the so-called public debt took place in the preceding days, suggesting that Mélenchon and LFI were Bolsheviks-bad payers threatening to not to pay the debt. This is far from the truth: they actually propose selling the debt to the ECB, which has already been done, and which doesn't align with their image as anti-EU figures. However, let's focus on the "debt." The so-called "public debt" is a key mechanism for financing financial, rent-seeking, and stock market capital, maintained by the payment of interest while the principal, which is never repaid in normal circumstances, is transferred between investors. This system allows investors to profit from the interest paid on our taxes. Capitalist taxation and "public debt" are intrinsically linked. A truly democratic government would only repay this debt if it could establish a strong, internationalist relationship with other nations.

However, the primary function of the "MEDEF University" was to pre-legitimize the possibility of Marine Le Pen assuming the presidency of the Fifth Republic.

Sophie Binet rightly stated that "a segment of the business community is pushing for a normalization of far-right extremism." This "segment" refers to the financially powerful sector, represented by the MEDEF. Their aim is to ensure that any potential election of Marine Le Pen will serve their interests. Therefore, it is crucial to understand exactly what they are planning and the inherent contradictions within their strategy.

The RN's attempt to seize control of institutions and the contradictions within it.

The MEDEF acknowledges the need to legitimize the debate, but its president, Patrick Martin, who initiated the controversial "debate" by demanding that presidents of the MEDEF – those on the right and far-right – attack the pension system and introduce a "social tax" to fund "businesses" at the expense of the people, has not managed to dissuade him. Martin, who was reportedly briefed by Stérin and Bolloré, appears to have readily adopted this stance.

She promised to write extensively about "the state," which refers to public services and the population they serve, as well as immigrants. At the same moment, François Durvye, a "libertarian economist and investor" from Saint-Éry, who managed the Otium Capital fund, "special economic advisor to Jordan Bardella since April 2026," informed *Le Figaro* that he would not be participating in Le Pen's campaign. Following his presentation at the MEDEF, he announced his departure, but stated that he had wished it so. Durvye hastened to state that Bardella had, in fact, requested his departure.

Media pundits and politicians haven't the faintest clue what is actually going on; they endlessly carp and speculate about parliamentary seats and party-machine maneuvering, all while harping on the dismal 6% showing in the 2017 presidential election by Benoît Hamon—who had previously defeated Valls (President Hollande’s pick) in the 2017 Socialist Party primary.

Yet there are two key differences compared to 2017: whatever one thinks of Faure—or whatever he might be planning—his immediate political baggage is not the right-wing policies of the Hollande administrations, but rather the NFP. Furthermore, the Mélenchon of 2027 is not the Mélenchon of 2017: for the moment, he appears likely to suffer a crushing defeat against Le Pen in a runoff—especially given that, as things stand, he shares her stance on international issues (with the exception of Palestine).
Taken together, these objective factors are creating conditions that could transform the lackluster Socialist Party primary into a genuine primary (albeit one costing 15 euros!), turning a vote for Faure into part of the struggle for unity against Le Pen, Macron, and the Fifth Republic—a shift that is largely independent of Olivier Faure’s specific political orientation.

However, such a relative turnaround cannot occur in isolation from the class struggle; indeed, the latent pressure of that struggle—following a summer marked by thermo-capitalist catastrophe—is already indirectly driving this change in the very nature of the "Socialist Party primary."

Defeating the Macron-Lecornu budget is the way to defeat Le Pen!

The social movements of this September—particularly the convergence at month’s end of climate emergency protests, the firefighters’ march on Paris, and civil service mobilization—could shake up the situation. They will trigger a social and political confrontation over the Macron-Lecornu budget—a budget that requires at least the RN’s abstention to pass and that will attack pensions and public services, thereby paving the way for Le Pen.

It is by defeating this budget—by forcing the political crisis wide open *before* the presidential election—that unity can be imposed. This makes it entirely possible not merely to "win the presidential election," but to put an end to the very regime that the election exists to restore every five years.

September 1, 2026

3. Since part of the left is critical of Mélenchon (while supporting him against Le Pen), I wanted to look more into his politics. Below are a few things I found.

From Wikipedia:

“Mélenchon is a proponent of increased labour rights and the expansion of French welfare programmes. He has also called for the mass redistribution of wealth, to rectify existing socioeconomic inequalities. Domestic policies proposed by Mélenchon include a 100% income tax on earnings over €360,000 a year, 100% inheritance tax on sums beyond €12 million, full state reimbursement for health care costs, a reduction in presidential powers, in favour of the legislature, and the easing of immigration laws. Mélenchon supports same-sex marriage and women's right to abortion. He also favors the legalisation of cannabis, but opposes prostitution and supports the ban on the purchase of sex, which came into effect in 2016.”

So these are pretty typical progressive domestic reforms, not radical ones. But Mélenchon is also a French imperialist who stirs national chauvinism at home. Some examples: He denounced current president Macron for “capitulating” and betraying France when Australia canceled an order for submarines constructed in France, and opted to buy them elsewhere. He sees NATO as an affront to France's national sovereignty and he's repeatedly called for France to withdraw from it. He has voiced support for Rattachism. (Rattachism is a political movement which calls for the French-speaking part of Belgium, or Wallonia, to secede from Belgium and become part of France.)

Meanwhile, abroad:

Mélenchon did not support the Arab Spring democratic uprising of the Syrian masses. Instead, he found ways to smear it as being Daesh, and to support the murderous bombings conducted by Assad and Putin. And, according to Wikipedia, Mélenchon said many times that he believed Putin could not be left to solve the “problem” in Syria alone, saying: "The UN will solve the problem ... it's time for an international coalition".

In 2022, the day after Russia attacked Kyiv, Mélenchon was outraged that the French government wanted to deliver arms to Ukraine. And although he calls Russia an aggressor, in the past weeks he's been opposing Ukrainian “deep strikes” into Russia. In other words, the Ukrainians should resist with one hand tied behind their back. Further, he has accused the French government of being ready to continue the war "until the last Ukrainian."

Mélenchon argues that Taiwan is a part of China.

4. And Jean-Luc Mélenchon is in *agreement* with the ultra-reactionary Marine Le Pen on a number of key world issues. Thus, POLITICO reports the following about its first Playbook Paris Live summit held a couple weeks ago:

“Both Le Pen and Mélenchon argued that supplying any type of military equipment to Ukraine would likely put France in harm’s way. “I would like to remind you that Russia is a nuclear power,” Le Pen added. “I do not want France to go to war with any nuclear power.” Mélenchon said he wanted a ban on Ukrainian deep strikes into Russian territory.

“'Do you really think the Russians will just stand by and let Moscow be fired upon without doing anything?' he said. 'Do you realize that we’re firing with French and Ukrainian weapons? We’re becoming belligerents.'

“Le Pen reiterated her pledge to leave NATO’s integrated command, but only after the war in Ukraine ends. Mélenchon said he still wants to pull France out of the alliance altogether but that the country should remain committed to defending Europe’s eastern borders.” - see https://www.politico.eu/article/4-takea ... iel-attal/

5. Clearly, the progressive people of France should unite to build the movement to defeat the fascistic Le Pen and RN. This involves further building the anti-racist, pro-immigrant, environmental, strike and other progressive movements today, as well as the movements in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance, the struggles of the Iranian people against both the U.S.-Israeli aggressors and the oppressive Islamic Republic regime, and others. It involves counter-protesting RN wherever it shows itself. It also involves agitating for voting for Mélenchon because he really is the lesser evil, as well as opposing any left groups who would split the anti-RN vote by running their own candidates. The situation is too serious for that. Finally, left criticisms of Mélenchon should not be abandoned during the election campaign. They help insure that the post-election economic and political struggles will continue at a higher level no matter who wins.

[Frank]

Support the student protests!
https://www.france24.com/en/france/2026 ... rn-violent?

Hundreds of French schools remain closed as riot police clash with student protesters

Some 400 French schools were closed Friday as the student protests that began in high schools in the Paris region last week have spread across France and grown increasingly violent. The students are protesting against teacher shortages, dilapidated school buildings and overcrowding in classrooms. 
Riot police clashed with high school students across France on Friday and unions called for teachers to strike as President Emmanuel Macron's government battled to contain increasingly violent protests over classroom conditions and education funding.

Tear gas choked the streets in the eastern city of Strasbourg, ​fireworks were aimed at ‌police lines in Marseille in the south and rubbish bins set ablaze in Rennes in the west.

Rights groups have accused the police of using heavy-handed tactics against minors, including the use of batons, tear gas and non-lethal flash-ball guns. French authorities ⁠have opened four investigations to examine ​accusations of police violence.

One such probe will examine the case of a 16-year-old, who suffered an eye injury after police fired rubber bullets into a crowd of protesters, according to his friends.

In Rennes, the tension was already palpable outside the Jean-Mace high school with students dressed in black, wearing balaclavas and standing not far from a heavy police presence.

“As far as we’re concerned, we’ve won – our school is closed this morning,” said Lola, 16, who declined to give her last name.

She condemned what she said was police violence.

“It makes us even angrier – the police have no right to hit us or use tear gas on us.”

James, a high school student in the northern city of Lille, also denounced what he called "extremely violent police repression, which inevitably fuels students' anger."

"When we see fellow students being beaten, choked, blinded in one eye, and tear-gassed from all sides while we're simply trying to have a dialogue with the government, of course it makes people angry," he said.

'Outsiders'

Some 170 students have been wounded since the start of the movement, Education Minister Édouard Geffray said, while more than 100 high schools have suffered “severe damage”.

Speaking Friday evening, he said that some 735 high schools out of the country's 3,700 had been affected "in one way or another" – though he stressed that this was 30 percent fewer than Thursday. 

At least 65 staff members – including 40 high school principals – have also been injured as the protests have at times turned violent. Geffray said that three staff members had been injured on Friday, compared with 31 the day before.

In La Ciotat, near Marseille, a young person ⁠sprayed petrol at a teacher, said a spokesperson for that region's educational authority. In a social media clip broadcast by BFM TV, a man is seen wiping his face after a hooded person wearing a face-mask sprays a liquid from a bottle at him. ‌Reuters was not able to verify the circumstances.

Protesters in Pantin, on the outskirts of Paris, set items including fences on fire and threw firecrackers at ⁠riot police, before running away.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said images from the eastern city of Belfort showing a group of youths encircle a lone policeman and kick him to the ground were of a "rare violence and intolerable".

He said police had arrested 1,747 on Friday, adding there had been "projectiles thrown, attacks on law enforcement, teachers, journalists, passersby".

After a government crisis meeting on Thursday, a source close to the prime minister said the demonstrations had morphed from a protest movement to urban violence, and Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin has said it had been hijacked by "outsiders".

Several students in the Paris region whom Reuters spoke to earlier in the week said they were staying away from the protests on Friday due to escalating violence.

'A real state of anxiety'

Six months before next year's presidential election, opinion polls consistently show the ​deep unpopularity of Macron and his centre-right government. Planned budget cuts, which exacerbate the funding crisis in education, have fuelled the discontent.

Trade unions meanwhile called a teachers’ strike for Tuesday, a week after public-sector workers walked out.

"(The violence) is regrettable, but ... when demands go unheard for years, and given the ‌political and geopolitical context, there are several conditions that put ... students in a real state of anxiety," teacher Sandra Champain-Seller said.

The protests erupted in the Paris region last week but have turned increasingly violent as they spread nationwide.

[Picture with the captionFrench high school students gather outside the Lycée Voltaire high school as part of nationwide protests to demand the hiring of substitute teachers, increased resources and better learning conditions, in Paris, France, October 2, 2026. The slogans read "Support 93" and "The police are supposed to protect us, not beat us up". © Sarah Meyssonnier, Reuters]

Four hundred high schools – roughly one in 10 – were closed on Friday due to the unrest, while Geffray urged parents to keep their children from protesting.

Some parents supported the protests.

Vincent Martin joined his daughter ​outside Hélène Boucher high school, in Paris, saying students were "fundamentally right to demand ... better learning conditions".

Budget cuts

The students blockading the high schools have voiced anger over overcrowding ​in classrooms, regular shortages of teachers and rundown buildings, blaming years of under-investment.

"We are 35 per class, we don’t have enough ​chairs in classrooms, the one-hour lunch break (is too short) for everyone to get food," 15-year-old Kesia told Reuters in the Paris suburb of Pantin before running off as the police used tear gas.

Under the draft 2027 budget presented by the government on Thursday, the education ​budget is set to increase by a below-inflation 1.7 percent to €65.53 billion ($73.77 billion), excluding teacher pensions.
Education is traditionally the largest budget item, but that changes next year with debt servicing costs expected to reach €74.5 billion, according to the draft bill.

According to the OECD global policy forum, French spending on education is in the middle of the range among member countries and increased between 2015 and 2022, but its share of the budget has slightly decreased.

Intelligence agencies reportedly told the crisis meeting that the protest movement had been initiated by politicians from the left-wing France Unbowed party (LFI).

Senior ⁠LFI lawmakers dismissed the allegations, accusing the government of politicising the protests ahead of the election.

(FRANCE 24 with Reuters and AFP)

[Frank]

About Vincent Présumey, a leader of Arguments Pour la Lutte Sociale, speaking to protesters on Thursday:

"Vincent Présumey, a retired history and geography teacher at Banville High School and who also left his position as director of the FSU (Fédération Syndicale Unitaire) of the Allier in June, also spoke out. He said: "The next step must be massive and peaceful and if it is determined, it will be effective, the government has already started to tremble regarding the budget, and frankly, I say as a 64-year-old adult, the best thing that can happen in this country is a youth movement, a social movement before the presidential election, so bravo to you!"

Vincent adds: “Except that there are no directors at the FSU , this quote is accurate.”

[philwest44]

There is apparently a large-scale uprising of French students protesting the poor state of schools and cuts to the educational budget. See this story from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/ ... oss-france This could be a harbinger of increased left political activity in France.

[Frank]

Phil, your post is a few days old. This one is much more up to date: www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/tens- ... 17724.html

[Frank]

From John Mullen in France:

Tuesday, October 6, saw vibrant mass demonstrations in dozens of French towns, as five of the nation's six main trade union confederations mobilized in support of the escalating school student movement. Entering its third week, the historic uprising against years of cuts in school budgets continues to gain momentum in the face of brutal police violence and state panic.

The movement has involved far more high schools than the last comparable movement eight years back. Over a thousand high schools (for 15 to 18 year olds) and over a hundred middle schools (for 11 to 15 year olds) have been blockaded. Thirty universities have joined the movement in the last few days. In every establishment, daily mass meetings decide on the day’s actions. On the demonstrations you can see thousands of homemade placards with imaginative slogans which go from quoting the 1793 Declaration of the Rights of Man (on the duty of insurrection) to quoting popular rap artists, from “Generation X, generation Z, one struggle!” to “The six seven generation is aiming at 68”.
Desperate to extinguish the flames of revolt, authorities resorted to mass lockouts, preemptively closing hundreds of schools and several university campuses this week.

Macron’s minority government, eager to pass its austerity budget before the end of the year, has reacted in three ways.

Firstly, with violence and intimidation. In the hope of scaring away as many young protestors as possible, they ensured that the police repression was extreme. A couple of hundred teenagers have been injured by cops, and some of the examples are heartbreaking. In the Paris region, an officer fired a tear gas canister point-blank into the face of a 14-year-old boy, shattering his jaw in two places and knocking out all his teeth; his family is now suing for attempted murder. In Tours, a 16-year-old lost an eye to a rubber bullet fired directly at him—on video, police can be heard boasting about blinding protesters. Elsewhere, multiple students suffered severe eye injuries. A viral video captured an officer pinning a young girl in a violent chokehold, while in Lens, a bystander schoolchild lost a hand to an exploding crowd-dispersal grenade (he did not “pick it up” as the media have claimed)

In a further attempt to intimidate, over five thousand young people have been arrested - only 1800 were subsequently even charged with an offence. And even now, the government refuses to rein in the police thugs. The Interior minister Laurent Nuñez spoke on Tuesday of “supposed excesses” in police action, while former minister Bruno Retailleau demanded loudly that the age of criminal responsibility be lowered.

Secondly, the government has offered tiny concessions, which are only cosmetic. Proposals to hike some higher education tuition fees were abruptly shelved, and school student union leaders have been invited to talks with the Education Minister. The regime has also launched a token online portal for grievances and they have scheduled managed "consultation sessions" in all schools for the end of the week.

Finally, a propaganda offensive is trying to paint the young people as manipulated by the radical left organization la France Insoumise (France in Revolt). The old lie of “outside agitators” is being
mobilized, because the FI is playing an excellent role in the movement. Even previously sceptical far-left commentators have written that the young protestors consider the FI to be their party. Its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon insisted that FI Members of Parliament and local elected councillors should interpose themselves between the police and students to help protect them. All of them were present and vocal in denouncing police violence.

In parliament, the Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said one could not speak of “police violence” and complained that the France Insoumise “were implying that the police forces of the Republic … were racist”!

School student leaders are not fooled by the cosmetic concessions, and are showing their confidence by announcing a new day of action, only two days after the previous one. Trade union leaders could learn from the youngsters, but are preferring to drag their feet and suggest a strike in November.

The established media are working hard at slandering the movement and twisting the truth. The media watchdog Acrimed measured the time spent on peak-time national news of the main public TV channel France 2 early this week, speaking of different aspects of present events. 75% of the time was used to speak of damage or alleged damage caused by the protesters, 8% concerned the movement’s demands and 12% government accusations of manipulation by the France Insoumise!

This uprising is taking place against a backdrop of severe political polarization in France, ahead of next May’s presidential election. Polls show the fascist candidate leading the field, with radical-left La France Insoumise candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon running second. The prominent presence of antifascist placards and banners across student marches reflects the fact that young people recognize that their struggle against austerity and police violence is directly linked to the broader fight against the far right.

Opinion polls show clearly that a majority of the population (around 62% according to the latest measure) support the school students’ movement. The next week will show whether much needed escalation will come.

[pete]

There are some interesting, contradictory observations in John Mullen's report from France: polls show the general public supports the students and their demands. The students themselves support FI (France Insoumise) and regard it as their party. But the general public does not support FI, at least not as broadly as do the students. Marine Le Pen's neofascist party comes out ahead in party polling.

[Frank]

Just from the news. It says 550,000 people marched today in France, and that some people burned buildings and looted. www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/hundr ... 20187.html

[pete]

That article from Yahoo makes the protest movement sound like bad news, that it's being taken over by anarchists bent on burning everything down.
Widespread violence will result in the masses of working class people, who supported the issues of better schools, turning against the movement. It'll be interesting to see if the movement can get better organized.

[Frank]

I don't know who Charlie Kimber is, but he seems be connected with the SWP in Britain. At any rate, he's been posting things daily about the situation in France, and in this piece I think he gets a lot of general things right about what revolutionaries should do, but I question some of the particular tactics he suggests, as well as his assessment of 1968. https://www.facebook.com/wayne.heimbach ... %2CO%2CP-R

France between repression and revolutionary possibilities

17 Ocotber was a watershed, but those at the top are fighting back

France’s government is preparing for war on protesters, and it is also clearing the path for the fascist Rassemblement National (RN) of Marine Le Pen. But if the revolt, started by school students, deepens and broadens, then it can open the way towards revolutionary potential.

More than 800,000 people took to the streets last Saturday, terrifying those at the top. It was not just the huge numbers; it was also their energy, their defiance, their refusal to be intimidated and their militancy. It was a turning point, a transformative movement at every level of society.

The protesters tasted their power; the rulers glimpsed the abyss: the elimination of this political regime, and perhaps more. There was even an echo of the Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake” legend when Macron and his wife were seen the day before the 17 October revolts in a box at the Céline Dion concert with Hélène Arnault, the wife of billionaire Bernard Arnault.

Saturday’s uprising could not be fully contained; it could not be ignored. So it has to be bought off or smashed. For now it is 90 percent repression.

Following an emergency ministerial meeting on Monday, prime minister Sébastien Lecornu said local mayors were being given the power to implement curfews “where they need to”.

The authorities then imposed curfews in several areas including Place de la République and Les Halles in Paris, and parts of central Lyon. Lille, Toulouse, Marseille and Nice were among the cities to impose curfews for under-18s.

As so often, colonial possessions felt the whip first. On Sunday, the prefect of Guadeloupe (a French colony in the southern Caribbean Sea) had implemented a curfew for minors.

This is only the beginning.

French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez is asking prefects (official representatives of the national government in a department or region) to ban demonstrations planned for Saturday “when dialogue with the organisers has not made it possible to create the necessary security conditions”.

He previously told parliament the government would ⁠deploy the Sentinelle force — a domestic military body. Also thrown onto the battlefield are the National Gendarmerie’s GIGN elite anti-terror unit, the RAID special police unit, helicopters, armoured cars and water cannon.

And when the soldiers and cops go in, politicians are telling them they will be facing sub-humans. The racism and the hatred of workers ooze through, combined with fear.

Bruno Retailleau, the conservative Republicans (LR) presidential candidate, said that after 17 October, “The barbarians will return because they saw that the state was weak.” He said he was talking of “uncivilised” people.

Government spokesperson Maud Bregeon said about alleged looters, "We can clearly see on the footage what type of population it is. The primary culprits are the riffraff."

Jordan Bardella, RN president described rioters as “predators of the suburbs, uprooted hordes of savages” who had crossed “the ring road” of the major cities to plunder them. He went on to say that he saw in the "scenes of devastation" nothing less than an illustration of the "new France" championed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. In other words, the "convergence of far-left terrorism and delinquent suburban populations."

“This is a civilizational issue,” declared Gabriel Attal, head of the Macronite Renaissance party, criticising “a segment of the youth who believe there is no sense of community,” and adding that “if it is necessary to use armed forces [to protect public buildings], then it must be done.”

Bardella mocked this escalating rhetoric. “To gain traction, Attal wants to position himself to the right of the National Rally,” he boasted.

All of this is smoothing the path for a government headed by the fascists.

The repressive measures implemented by Macron and Lecornu serve as a template for a possible RN presidency. If there are strikes, mass demonstrations and riots against the fascist measures of president Le Pen in the summer of 2027, she can unleash the harsh crackdown used in October 2026. “You did it, don’t criticise now,” she will say. Asked on Monday whether he would declare a state of emergency, which would suspend democratic rights and allow police to carry out arrests without any reason, Lecornu replied, “If necessary, clearly we could. For now, curfews seem more suited to the situation.” That’s music to Le Pen’s ears.

This is also a prelude to a greater assault on the left. Nuñez said recently. “We have identified a large number of far-left activists throughout the country. There were anarcho-autonomists, anti-fascists, radical far-left movements, and student unions who sometimes don’t hesitate to resort to violence.”

The government rhetoric raises the stakes, but many bosses and better-off people think that he hasn’t, and won’t, deliver a crushing blow against workers’ and students’ resistance. So the fascists are needed.

Lecornu invited the RN to attend meetings on the government’s crisis response, and he said he had to protect the 2027 presidential election, in which the RN currently leads the polls, from left-wing opposition. “It is a proven fact that an ultra-left movement wants to organise deep disorder in the country until the presidential election,” he alleged, adding, “There is a nebulous network that can activate itself to call into question the date and even the holding of the presidential election.” He makes the fascists the democrats.

But for now, the revolt is still headed upward. High school and university student organisations have called for more demonstrations on Thursday and Saturday. The National High School Student Coordination group urged young people to “take to the streets” and backed continued blockades and demonstrations.

The mobilisations resumed this week with the blockade of Sciences Po and the Louvre Museum by students and the CGT union.

The crucial task is to involve more workers in the movement, and for workers to use their collective power. None of the technology of repression can overcome sustained mass strikes. The school and university students are magnificent, heroic and an inspiration. But they do not squeeze the source of profits so powerfully as a general strike.

Frustation magazine, never slow to point out the weaknesses of unions and the merits of autonomous mobilisation, nevertheless ran a major article this week saying, “On Saturday, October 17, the government was caught off guard by the scale and radical nature of the protests. But it will adapt: ​​insurrection cannot be the population's only strategy against the regime, lest it repeat the same attempts every Saturday and face increasingly organised repression. After disrupting the capitalist economy from the outside, it must now be disrupted from within, through strikes.”

Workers and students need to hold democratic assemblies to plan further action using their joint power and energy.

And they need to confront the fascists directly. That’s why Saturday’s demonstration at the RN congress in Orléans is crucial. It’s disturbing to hear from an activist in Paris that the CGT is urging trade unionists not to go to Orléans but instead to organise demonstrations with security teams to “prevent violence” on Saturday. That attitude needs to go.

The argument about violence

To mobilise mass strikes means taking on the arguments about violence and the state. For many union leaders, the issues from last Saturday are that the government underestimated the protests and did not mobilise sufficient cops to contain them. Furthermore, by sidelining union leaders, ministers created space for “wild” elements to dominate.

The solution? Allow the unions to police the protests this Saturday, with stewards who will deal with errant cops and also feral looters. This could be a prelude to talks where the movement achieves some gains and then leaves the streets, allowing business as usual to return.

This is a recipe for gutting the potential that the last four weeks have produced. It is preparing a political defeat which will strengthen the far right.

But will students and militant workers (particularly the young ones) allow this union leaders’ manoeuvre to triumph? It’s not inevitable, and instead of denouncing the riots, they need to be defended.

The riots are political—and looting is political. The riots’ targets are overwhelmingly the state and its repressive thugs. It would be excellent if a social explosion targeted solely the rich and their luxury lairs. That has never been a reality—even a strike doesn’t do that.

A nurses’ walkout doesn’t just hit millionaires—they have their private health services to rely on. It can mean pain and suffering for working class people. But it’s entirely right to strike for pay and to defend the NHS.

The same is true of school strikes. Class struggle very rarely solely affects the direct class enemies. That doesn’t make it wrong.

The 1965 Watts riots—or Watts Rebellion— in Los Angeles in the US are today remembered as a great movement of resistance. At the time they were widely condemned. Triggered by racist police brutality, they began on 11 August 1965.

In less than a week the riot covered 46 square miles and left 34 people dead, only one of them white. Another 1,032 were wounded. Police arrested 3,438 people, and property damage was put at $40 million—the equivalent of close to half a billion dollars today.

Rioters damaged or destroyed over 600 buildings. These riots were highly political. Watts was a statement that many black people had gone beyond begging the existing power structure for change and thinking that it could provide the answers.

“A riot,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “is the language of the unheard,” and he used the phrase repeatedly.

In September 1966, for example, King was questioned by CBS’ Mike Wallace about the “increasingly vocal minority” who disagreed with his devotion to non-violence as a tactic. In that interview, King said. “I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.”

King rooted his analysis in the insight that the fires and destruction sweeping America were not atavistic savageries but a rational attempt to overcome the contempt shown towards the oppressed.

This analysis is crucial now in France. Philippe Poutou, former presidential candidate for the NPA socialist organisation, was right to say on Sunday, “The government is asking us to ‘pick a side.’ Fine, then for us it will be the side of the protesters, the rioters, the rebellious youth, the oppressed, and disorder. Against the side of power, the dominators, the panicked privileged. Simple, basic.”

Charif Elalaoui, a political sociology researcher and specialist in the Yellow Vest movement, told left-wing website Mediapart that today there is a “deep” anger in France. People feel they are no longer being listened to, that their demands, their mobilisation, sometimes even their vote, are pointless.”

There is also “a non-white population, long rendered invisible,” who “are claiming their place within the political and social sphere”. And he noted the emergence of a “racialised youth, from working-class neighbourhoods”, who “are mobilising and making themselves heard”.

In July 2023, I interviewed young people in Lyon after the riots triggered by the police murder of Nahel Merzouk. They weren’t defensive about “violence”.

“I was there when we attacked the police station in the 4th district of Lyon. When it was blazing, it was glorious,” said Farid. “All that anger I feel, years of being held down and shutting my mouth. And then we could get them back.

“It’s the best thing I have ever done, it was a tiny bit of revenge for the insults to my mother and my father and my grandparents and my brother and sister.”

Farid had plenty of stories of why France went up in flames after the cops executed 17-year-old Nahel. “Of course that killing was terrible,” he says. “They gunned him down for perhaps not having a driving licence. A death sentence for that.

“But on its own, that would not be enough. The background is that every week I’m hassled by the police, every week there’s some cop who snarls at me, and every week I hear of someone like me who is told they are a ‘dirty Arab’.

“The French left Algeria, but many of them still have an invader’s thoughts. Many think they are better than us, that we are not from the same world.”

Riots are not the same as strikes. Strikes target the source of profits, the exploitation in the workplace that capitalism relies on. And strikes can have a democratic collective discipline and accountability.

That’s why mass and militant workers’ resistance—not carefully choreographed action that is wholly controlled by the union leaders—has the capacity to be stronger than riots.

But our criticism of riots is that they do not have the power to tear down the whole system of capitalism. Moving from riot to revolution does not mean becoming more “respectable” or diluting the fury against the system.

It requires an insurrectionary fusion of the power of the workplace and the power of the street. But the first step is to stand with the rioters now.

Analysis from the Autonomie de Classe revolutionary group

This confrontation on 17 October took place with a full range of methods of action, sometimes mixed and/or successive: demonstrations, spontaneous protests, humour and celebration, fireworks, but also mortar fire, barricades, attacks on places of power, police stations, prisons, prefectures, and town halls. And also looting and redistribution.

From a strategic perspective, all these forms are undoubtedly not equal. But their overall meaning is clear: class insurrection against this system.

This uprising has deep roots, stemming from the profound crisis of capitalism. Waves of revolt—Yellow Vests, pension reforms, police brutality, sexist and sexual violence, racism—have followed.

It also would not have occurred without the high school student movement, reinforced in recent days by university students, which has built, blockade after blockade, a class barricade: on one side, “The State, the cops, and the fascists,” and on the other, us, our class—high school students, university students, workers, the unemployed, retirees, and so on.

What made this possible was, in particular, the political stance expressed at each blockade, which championed the combination of “social” demands, such as resources for education and salaries for educational and administrative staff, with political demands, such as solidarity with Palestine and a commitment to blocking the path of fascists.

October 17th marked a turning point, a moment of unity. It’s no longer just a student movement that we need to support. It’s a movement of our entire class.

This situation is new, and the bourgeoisie is afraid. They’re right. On Saturday, October 17th, we ticked the insurrection box.

But the possibility of insurrection does not constitute a revolution. Overthrowing a power is not enough to assume that it is merely a matter of confrontation.

This requires another kind of power, that of the majority, active, debating, controlling.

Ah yes, the election

It’s 180 days to the presidential election and despite systematic efforts to slur Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his LFI party as violent and undemocratic, the Macronite and conservative candidates haven’t overtaken JLM. But Le Pen still has a huge lead.

When is the election?

On 18 April and 2 May 2027, French voters will go to the polls to elect a new president to replace the neoliberal “centrist” Emmanuel Macron. The outgoing president, who has been in office for two terms, cannot run again.

How does the election work?

The president is elected to a five-year term under a two-round system. Lots of candidates usually stand in the first round, but (as is almost certain) no candidate secures an absolute majority (50 percent + 1) of votes in the first round, a second round is held two weeks later. It is between the two candidates with the most votes. Nobody else can run in the second round.

Riot to revolution

The Russian revolutionary Lenin, writing at the start of the First World War, put forward some symptoms of a revolutionary crisis. It had, he said, to be “impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change”.

This is important because splits at the top act as “a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth”. We can see the divergence now between those sections of the ruling class who want to make concessions to the students (some of the Socialist party, some of the Macronites) and those who want to crack down ever harder (most of those at the top).

But, said Lenion, there also has to be a determination for “the lower classes not to want to live in the old way”.

Another feature is that “the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute”. And as a result “there is considerable increase in the activity of the masses”.

These are not a list that you can tick off against social reality. How much division at the top, how much pain, how much mobilisation? And as Leon Trotsky stressed, each of these factors interacts with the other.

“The more decisively and confidently the proletariat acts, the better will it succeed in bringing after it the intermediate layer, the more isolated will be the ruling class, and the more acute its demoralisation. And, on the other hand, a demoralisation of the rulers will pour water into the mill of the revolutionary class,” he wrote.

A revolutionary crisis is not simply the endpoint of a growing social movement. It’s a result of the intersecting relations between classes. And it’s also a moment when, the real divisions in society are revealed.

People learn lessons in struggle about the hostility of bosses, police, judges, media and, government—and the solidarity of allies. Trotsky also said that revolutions were not about reaching some point on a proletarian struggle thermometer. They were a moment of “the direct interference of the masses in historical events.”

A revolutionary crisis develops because of what the exploited and oppressed do in a situation where tensions have ripened to an extent where what they do matters profoundly. To say there is potential doesn’t mean that a revolutionary uprising is immediately on the cards today in France. It indicates that the sweep of resistance is great enough to set in train a process that points towards revolutionary conclusions.

Forcing out Macron, for example, would show it is possible to win change beyond elections and formal political mechanisms.

The key is for revolutionaries to be strong enough to advance demands that bring together economic and political struggle through the method of class organisation. They have to be independent of the trade union leaders and the reformist political parties. The aim is to make workers aware of their own potential power and to lead away from reliance on false hope in parliamentary manoeuvres.

The best demands are those that liberate workers from the straitjacket of “realism”. There need to be intensely practical and immediate fights, and those that reach further. Land, peace, bread and all power to the workers’ councils is an example from 1917 in Russia.

Bringing down Macron would direct attention toward abolishing the fiercely undemocratic constitution of the Fifth Republic which allowed the president to impose repression. This would set off a process of discussion throughout the working class about what will replace it.

As well as winning demands around education and defeating the budget, workers have to fight for a wholly different set of priorities. For example, war spending must go, money for wages and benefits and pensions and key services vastly increased.

Freeing themselves from the bureaucratic narrowness of agitating only about “supporting the students” (crucial though that is), workers have to call for pay rises for all, for taxing the rich, for price controls, rent freezes and so on.

This raises the question of leadership. This doesn’t mean that if only we had a revolutionary socialist at the top of the CGT union federation there would now be an insurrection in France. Leadership has to be implanted in substantial sections of the working class and the oppressed.

Lenin sees the party as what differentiates a revolutionary situation from a revolutionary crisis. It is the instrument that doesn’t just line up a collection of important issues but welds together the fight on all fronts around the spine of workers’ power.

At the same time as fighting over workplace issues, revolutionaries say workers have to confront the anti‑migrant “Welcome to France” rules, break France from its support for Israel, and eliminate all the measures that oppress and brutalise Muslim and black people.

At times of deep crisis, the state and its forces become the strategic target. The state is the intersection of political control and the economic dictatorship of big corporations. To undermine state power there should be demands such as the abolition of the ultra-repressive Brav-M (Motorised Brigades for the Repression of Violent Action) unit and the removal of the cops’ armoury of grenades and gas.

Crucially all of these demands are realisable only through the systematic growth of rank and file organisation both in individual workplaces and by coordinating between workplaces.

If all these possibilities were fulfilled today, it wouldn’t mean socialism would be achieved overnight. But workers would start to see alternative sources of power and decision-making that could destroy and replace the capitalist state. Everything that diverts and delays that process is fatal. It creates openings for the bureaucrats to squeeze life from the struggle.

Lenin wrote, “It is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution. Revolution arises only out of a situation in which objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, ‘falls’, if it is not toppled over.”

Without revolutionary leadership, the dead hand of union leaders and reformists can misdirect even the mightiest uprising. May 1968 saw an even bigger wave of revolt in France than today. Repression of student protesters triggered an immense movement of workers.

On 13 May, transcending the union leaders' confined vision, an extraordinary demonstration brought together school and university students and workers from across the country. One account describes the marchers embodying “the flesh and blood of modern capitalist society, an unending mass, a power that could sweep everything before it, if it but decided to do so”.

From that day, a three-week general strike began, mobilising 10 million workers throughout the country. It was the largest general strike in history up to that point. Factories didn’t just close, many strikers occupied them and turned them from places of production to sites of collective political organisation.

President Charles de Gaulle was unsure whether the army and police would follow his orders. But union leaders and MPs insisted the struggle was for wage rises, not a new sort of society. They lowered workers’ horizons to better pay, which the government and bosses granted only to launch bitter revenge when the struggle ebbed.

The reformists accepted De Gaulle’s move to elections and told workers this was the only way to change society.

Revolution wasn’t impossible. It failed because of the poisonous leadership of the union bureaucrats and the reformist Communist Party. For revolutionaries, the challenge is to prevent a similar process today. The actors may be different, the tasks are similar.