By Viriato Lusitania   

Élisabeth Borne is France’s first woman prime minister in more than 30 years.

Macron’s appointment of the new Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, reflects not only the fear that has taken hold of the employers, their political staff and the warmongers with the candidacy of Mélenchon for Prime Minister. This is a possibility if NUPES wins, but also if Marcon continues of the same anti-social policy of the previous government.

Indeed, while making demagogic borrowings from the program of the Popular Union and the NUPES, Macron chose the one who has been successively, since 2017, Minister of Transport, Ecological Transition, and Labor and has been characterized by having led a series of measures against workers, pensioners, and the poor in general and for having done nothing for the ecological transition.

The right wing, which is divided, welcomes a choice that is squarely to the right, some speak of a new Margaret Thatcher…or are concerned with their own shop and make some soft criticisms. The far right is struggling to get its head above water, sunk by the “Mélenchon Prime Minister” campaign and by the NUPES.

The nomination of Mme. Borne is also a purely electoral choice, presenting a woman to counter the image of the electoral unity of the left. As we know, Macron ‘governs’ through Kingsley Consulting and others.  This means that the same policy that we have had for the last 5 years will continue to reassure all the finance capitalists and the whole capitalist system.

Nevertheless, given the social and international context we are living in, the war and stagflation that are already a reality, both the nomination of the Prime Minister and the legislative elections will only be moments of a class struggle that will become acute.

Because even if Mélenchon wins, the barrage of a bourgeoisie already very much engaged in a policy of war and transferring the crisis and stagflation onto the backs of the workers, will become deafening and even subversive and will only be able to be resolved by radical measures and by the active presence of the workers in the streets.

For it must be opposing the policies of Macron and NATO or supporting a radical, breakaway people’s government, no question of repeating the policies of Jospin or Hollande, the formers “socialist” Prime Minister and President. The questions on the table are too important, the stakes are too high, and the distrust is also very acute in the working classes, as we saw from all those abstentions. A new soft government, conciliatory with capitalism, would mean the death of the left and the descent into hell of the extreme right. Let us remember the experience in Greece and learn from it.

This alternative therefore requires clarification and deputies who are completely at the service of the workers’ struggles that will inevitably develop in the face of a policy that involves war and its financing on the backs of the workers. A policy of war, moreover, which is not decided in France but on the other side of the Atlantic. Faced with these emergencies, there is more than just voting. Of course, getting a left-wing radical Prime Minister elected is an absolute necessity, but what can a Prime Minister do if the war between the US-led NATO and Russia goes beyond Ukraine?

Everything shows that the US would be happy to eliminate both Russian and Europe as rivals. Thus, they are working to prevent any peace negotiations in order to “weaken Russia” and, at the same time, to weaken Germany and Europe. A broad Peace Movement can not only be a solid binding force to strengthen the NUPES, which, let’s admit it, is still an electoral machine where everyone dreams of making an electoral profit, but also to join other peace movements that are developing in Europe and thus tie the hands of those who do not hide their desire to set the continent on fire for the sole benefit of the US or through sinister plans that would have their continuation in Asia, especially in China.

Thus, this electoral campaign has multiple characteristics that are part of a context that goes far beyond what is being debated before the voters. The Parliament will be that of a country which today is participating in an indirect war by sending instructors, legionnaires, and large calibre weapons, and a country which finds itself immersed in the maelstrom of a major economic crisis, the latest development of which, stagflation and the forthcoming rise in the price of money, and the ensuing recession, is not a purely national or electoral issue but a societal issue and of the future of the planet.

The economic crisis takes various forms but each time it is more acute than the before. War is one of the forms of “solution” for this dead end capitalist system; crises leading to wars are a solution used by the capitalists to get out of their crises.

The human and ecological consequences of this system resemble the passage of the juggernaut that crushed the faithful in British-ruled India. These wars that have resulted in millions of deaths already and “experts” calculate up to 750 million deaths in the event of a third world war. These wars are nothing but processes intended to redistribute the world markets and a fight for the supremacy of one or another leader of the capitalist trusts.

The capitalist system is rotting on the its feet and showing all its wounds, weaknesses, and senility. It is high time to replace it with a society where the needs of the people are in the first place and where the future of the planet and of humans is taken care of. The struggle to overthrow it has already cost enormous sacrifices and is more than a century long, but there is no alternative. Either it will be the defence of a system that increasingly requires war and the transfer of its crisis to the vast majority of the world’s population, or it will be democratic and ecological socialism, the power of the proletarians and of all wage earners and peoples.

We shall demand a program of class struggle to end capitalism and for a better world as the Yellow Vests sang; they made some advances. Let’s strengthen the campaign so that NUPES triumphs in the electoral joust, for a breakaway prime minister well to the left and thus prepare the struggles to come!  ▲