Emmanuel Macron, the new president of France, received only 43 percent of the registered voters. Voter turnout has been at an all-time low since 1969: % 74.7 Le Pen’s fascist party Front National (FN) attained the greatest electoral success of its history and received 11 million votes. %61 of the voters do not want Macron to have an absolute majority in the National Assembly of France.
Macron, who became the minister of economy in the cabinet under the government of the Presidency of Françoise Holland and Prime-Ministry of Manuel Valls in August 2014, has often been at France’s agenda due to the discussions over his pro-market economy "the Law on Economic Growth, Activity and Equal Opportunities" (also referred to 'Macron' law), and his certain expressions during his term of office. Macron set his own political movement 'En Marche!' (Progress) in April 2016, and resigned from the cabinet in August 2016.
Macron, who has always been at the top of the agenda because of media and the figures from the politics of order’s support since his resignation, is a politician appealed to self-employed persons who are on the verge of proletarianisation, university students and new graduates who are imposed the phantasies of founding their 'start-ups' or companies to strike it rich, and a substantial part of immigrant workers suffering from both unemployment/hard working conditions and racism/social exclusion.
Macron, instilling the hope of being a billionaire to a particular part of France’s working class, which is increasingly disorganized and having unsecured, vulnerable working conditions, promises European and French capital to complete unfinished business of the Holland government while putting the American dream across to the old continent from the one side of the Atlantic in collaboration with the Chancellor Merkel and Mr. Obama.
'PEARLS OF WISDOM' FROM MACRON
Here are certain words of Macron who unavoidably discloses his labour enemy and pro-market character:
September 1, 2014: 'Illiterate female workers… You have no future.'
Macron speaks to the workers working at a facility called Gad, affected by the long-running crisis in the agricultural sector, especially pig farming:
"There is also a file related to the Gad among the files conveyed me. Do you know that majority of this facility is women? Most of these women are illiterate. We make such a statement to the most of them: You have no future in or around Gad. You have to go 50-60 kilometres away to work if you are illiterate. These people do not have driver’s license. What should we say them? Can we say them 'ok, we’ll pay you 1500 euros and we’ll wait for a year’? (No)."
Macron then had to apologise to the female workers after the reactions came due to his insulting words.
January 6, 2015: ‘The youth should think of being a billionaire.'
In his statement to the financial newspaper Les Echos, Macron had suggested that 'the French youth should think of being billionaire'. Macron’s statements had been even criticised by his own cabinet at that time.
July 8, 2015: 'France has lacked a king figure.'
Fascist and pro-monarchy movement ‘Action Française’ had ironically congratulated Macron, who said that ‘French politics has lacked a king figure’ and ‘the French people do not want the king’s death’ in an interview with weekly magazine Le 1. Socialist politician Gerard Filoche had accused Macron of being a ‘Thatcher-style royalist’.
We can say that Macron’s discourse on ‘the lack of a king figure in France’ is a continuation of revisionist approaches based on pro-market economic models to the 1789 Revolution in France. As a matter of fact, although the histories of France and Turkey are very different from each other, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that this discourse used by Macron in France is actually correlated with Turkish President Erdoğan’s sultanate fantasies in Turkey in contemporary capitalism where the characteristics peculiar to the Middle Ages have been resurrected.
August 2015: '35-hour working week should be increased'
Macron, appeared in an annual activity organized by the club of big capitalists, MEDEF, had criticized 35-hour weekly working limit in France where the unemployment rate is around 10 percent, and 5,5 million workers are registered to the employment office, while he said that "The left wing thought that France is going to get better working less hours for a long time. This was a fallacy."
January 20, 2016: ‘It is nonsense to forbid the dismissals’
During a debate on a live broadcast with a Goodyear insurgent worker Mickael Wamen, who was sentenced to 24 months in prison, Macron had stated that ‘it is a simple approach to ban the unemployment. It sounds nice to say this on the stage, but you become an obstruction for new recruitments. There is such thing as forbidding the dismissals; in this case, it means you live in a closed, planned economy. In response to Macron’s statements, the worker Wamen said that ‘I voted for a leftist politician to protect my rights, but now he only protects the bosses.’
January 21, 2016: 'The life of an entrepreneur is mostly harder than the employee.'
Speaking to the television channel on economic and financial issues, BFM TV, Macron had said that ‘the life of an entrepreneur is mostly harder than the employee’. After his statements, Macron had been also criticised by his party at that time.
As Macron set his political movement with the encouragement and support of big capital, and stand as a candidate in the presidency, this support turned into a more explicit electoral campaign with the statements and letters after the first round of elections. We have to say that such a kind of open support is rarely seen in the history of France.
'MACRON AGAINST FASCISM' AND INTERPRETATIONS FROM TURKEY’S MEDIA
As Emmanuel Macron increased his potential towards the French presidency, he began to have an extensive coverage in Turkish media. We are witnessing that certain fractions having expectations from the European Union imperialism, which the governments of its member states suffer from the uncertainties and traumas regarding the role of the European Union, gradually begin to glorify Macron.
The greatest mistake about Macron is the claim that he is a resistance or barricade against the Front National, the representative of France among the rising fascist movements in Europe. Fascism got off the ground by the dynamics of struggles between national capitals at the heart of 20th Century’s capitalism, or ‘democracies’. In this way, it came to power alone in many countries of Europe and dragged the continent and the whole world into the Second World War.
There is no way to understand the emergence of fascism and to fight against it by ignoring the functioning of capitalism and capital’s everlasting seeking desire for expansion.
We have to underline that the Front National and other similar fascist movements in contemporary France have risen above the political helplessness and lack of an alternative option of the French labourers who are in chains of violent, unsecured and harsh working conditions of global capitalism. Besides, it should not also be forgotten that the French Communist Party (PCF), which had already left the class politics, has played a significant role in this factual situation.
Within this context, it would be a greatest illusion to seek for a ‘savior’ from the components of bourgeoisie politics such as considering the liberal Macron as "a candidate to barricade the rising fascism in Europe" or bringing the fascist character of the party due to the presence of homosexual individuals within the administration of Front National as well as the presence of the Arabs and Jews among the party members as columnists from daily Cumhuriyet, one of the ‘oppositional’ newspapers in Turkey, had previously done.
One of the former ministers of Turkey and former IMF representative, who was a deputy to the Turkey’s opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), says that ‘Macron is a barricade against today’s populist politicians’ in concerned about populist politics rather than fascism [4]. While the former diplomat, who was also a candidate deputy from the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), describes Macron- an obvious representative of big capital- as ‘the center-left’, It is noteworthy that he suggest Turkey to take lessons from the Macron case and to seek for a ‘Turkish-style Macron.
Today, it is incontrovertible that the capitalist class, which dominated the French working class through consent mechanisms in the absence of a well-coordinated political agent attaching credence to the actuality of the revolution and socialism, has achieved a considerable success. Although the French bourgeoisie consolidated its interests through an ‘anti-Le Pen stance’ in the French presidential elections, the ongoing crisis of capitalism has been resolved over the short run neither at the economic and political level nor at the international and local scale in France, where general elections will take place in June 2017.
It would not be surprising if the capitalist class set off on different quests in the near future due to the breakdown of its consent mechanisms. Yet, the fundamental question to be asked and responded is that: ‘How will a revolutionary pursuit revive in France, and how will the working class be a part of this revolutionary pursuit?’ Maybe the answer is not only in France.
