[R-G] Another Left is Possible

[Anthony Fenton]

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 198 .... March 25, 2009
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Another Left is Possible: The Protests in France and
the New Anti-Capitalist Party

Nathan Rao

It would be wrong to see last Thursday's massively successful protest  
actions in France as distant and exotic, of no particular relevance to  
us here in Canada. With the economic meltdown heralding a new  
political era, and with most of the country's Left and social  
movements still stunned and disoriented following their embrace of the  
misguided and failed Liberal-led coalition plan, the French experience  
is instructive and inspiring.

France has just gone through another day of mass strikes and protests  
against the hard-Right government of president Nicolas Sarkozy. The  
protest action is hugely popular in opinion polls and comes on the  
heels of another successful but smaller day of action on January 29, a  
victorious six-week general strike on the Caribbean island of  
Guadeloupe that spread to other overseas colonial territories and the  
proliferation of radical protest actions among students and in a  
number of workplaces - all in the context of growing job losses and a  
deepening financial and economic crisis.

‘France's Thatcher’ on the defensive

Not long ago, Sarkozy was widely hailed in Anglo-American circles,  
from the Blairite “centre-Left” across to the Bushite and Harperite  
neo-conservative Right, as the French Thatcher – the man that would  
usher in the “normalization” of French society by at long last  
breaking resistance to growing inequality, job insecurity,  
privatization and cutbacks. And yet, a mere 18 months into his mandate  
the swaggering and obnoxious Sarkozy is now stumbling in the face of  
the resilience and scale of popular resistance.

Though still very far from being defeated, Sarkozy and the neoliberal  
project more generally are on the defensive in France, a country at  
the heart of the global capitalist and imperial order. This has not  
failed to raise a few eyebrows in other European and western capitals,  
where the fear is that developments in France will serve as an example  
for workers and young people in their own countries.

Further stoking these fears is the fact that Olivier Besancenot – the  
34 year-old postal worker and spokesperson of the newly created New  
Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) – has consolidated his position as by far  
the most popular opposition figure in the country. For several months  
now, polls have ranked him well ahead of the leader of the nominally  
social-democratic Socialist Party (PS) Martine Aubry – and even  
further ahead of the PS candidate in the 2007 presidential elections  
Ségolène Royal and centre-Right leader François Bayrou. Besancenot  
recently even earned the unusual distinction of being the only left- 
wing and working-class figure to be named to the Financial Times list  
of 50 people “who will frame the debate on the future of capitalism.”

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