It came as little surprise that Emmanuel Macron was elected with 20 million votes over Marine Le Pen with 11 million. The turnout was as its lowest since 1969 with 25% abstention (12 million registers voters), together with 4 million more blank and spoilt ballots, not to mention unregistered voters and our migrant comrades who weren’t entitled to vote, going to show just how many people refused tactical voting in favour of Macron in order to ‘hold keep the National Front at bay’, in spite of the constant scare-mongering on the part of the media and the same bourgeois politicians who relentlessly peddle reactionary ideas.
This response was truly political in nature, something that even the bourgeois media couldn’t ignore ! Far from being an act of ‘irresponsibility’ as they would have us believe, it is the expression of a burgeoning consciousness especially on the part of the proletariat and the working-class neighbourhoods in response to the dead-end that bourgeois democracy leads to for our future, as we saw for ourselves by all of the people who came to discuss with us and join our campaign to boycott the elections.
With Macron in power, everything will go on worse than before : exploitation, repression, racism, militarism, etc. because each successive government, left, right or centre, always does worse than the previous one. Capitalism means economic war. Economic war means exploitation in the workplace, drudgery, job instability, unemployment, pitting the workers against each other, etc.
We immediately took to the streets on the 8 May to show that any empty hope of ‘renewal’ was short-lived. Macron is nothing more than an opportunistic President, a simple ‘by-product’ of Capitalism, a brand with many faces in order to get elected at the presidential elections as well as the forthcoming parliamentary elections. He is the perfect representative of the bourgeoisie, staunchly backed by the establishment, from the Employers’ Federation to the French Communist Party and the media, the class of exploiters who run the system, bent on guaranteeing the veiled perpetuation and the continuity of the decrepit sharks of bourgeois politics, from the Sociality Part to the Republicans alike.
Many people feel relieved that Le Pen has been defeated at the polls because no one really knew what her election would have meant, apart from her ultra-reactionary, islamophobic and regressive electoral promises. Fear also that just like after the election of Trump the Fascists would feel invulnerable, unleashing an upsurge of racist, sexist and homophobic violence just like the aggressions which have already taken place against migrants in National Front strongholds in the north and the southeast of the country. But whether she was elected or not, the fight against all forms of racism must go on in our neighbourhoods and in the workplace.
The upcoming parliamentary election will just be more of the same : debates between bourgeois politicians, jingoistic flag waving, rivalry and competition, including Mélenchon. We made it clear since the outset of our campaign : the sole aim of the elections is for the bourgeoisie to sap our collective strength, tricking us into believing that we are condemned to vote and then suffer in silence. The system will never be transformed by reforming the institutions from within. We refuse to tail along behind a ‘patriotic’ imperialistic no matter what its colour.
Today we must refuse to let everything go on as before, refusing once again to become ensnared by the parliamentary system. We must organise and stand up for ourselves !
OCML-VP, 9 May 2017
SOURCE: http://www.vp-partisan.org/article1769.html
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