French President Elect: Unveiling The Golden Boy Emmanuel Macron
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Sharmini Peries: And also, given that this new party has no real political base in the National Assembly and there is National Assembly election scheduled for June 11th, how will the political landscape in France respond to this, particularly given the fragmentation that we were just talking about.
Serge Halimi: Well, it’s really difficult to tell at this time. It’s quite clear that elements of the right are going to split from the right and rejoin with Macron. Elements of the socialist party are going to split from the socialist party and rejoin Macron. But I think that one thing that is more important than this is the social element that was disclosed by the vote. Because Macron’s golden boy image and actions account for the fact that despite of his landslide victory, 56 percent of the workers voted for Marine Le Pen. Of course, Paris, which is the most bourgeois of major French cities gave a landslide to Macron; received 90 percent of the vote there.
In other words, you saw in this vote a prosperous and educated France that voted for Macron and won. And the richer city is in terms of how much income it taxes its residents, the more likely the city is to vote for Macron, who incidentally promised to eliminate much of the wealth tax. So this is, I think, one thing we must emphasize, the fact that Macron is really the elected president of the prosperous France and of the middle class, and that Marine Le Pen got a lot of support from the working class, and this is something that will stay during Macron’s term, and I think the policies he has in mind, especially the deregulation of the labor market will insist on the features of his program, which is a program meant for the wealthy.
Sharmini Peries: And so then let’s talk about where the French left is. Its main candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, won nearly 20 percent of the vote during the first round of the elections. The highest they’ve ever had in terms of a left socialist party perspective. What are his chances of winning the National Assembly and more seats there so he can actually challenge Macron as he seeks to implement more neoliberal measures in France?
Serge Halimi: Well, the result Mélenchon got was not the highest the left had in France, you had, of course, several decades ago, the communist party that got more than 20 percent of the vote. But it’s still a very good result he got in the first round. Now the question is the extent to which this result will translate in parliamentary seats, and the parliamentary system is such that its very unlikely that Mélenchon will get that many seats. We have 577 seats in the National Assembly and most of the projections say that Mélenchon will be able to get 40 or 50 seats at most. So maybe we will be surprised by what happens in the next few weeks, but the most likely outcome will be Macron getting almost a majority of the seats in the National Assembly. The right, getting 200 seats more or less. And then Mélenchon and the extreme right getting very few seats because the system is rigged against parties such as the National Front and the left international assembly.