00:05 François Duval: The first point is that to understand what is going on in the French left — and I suppose you are mainly interested in that — you have to look at the background, the broader situation in France. So I will make the first point about that; then I will speak about the debate inside the French radical left; then about our campaign; and at the end, what's going on exactly.
00:38 The political background is rather complex. Four months ago, for instance, everybody would have said that the second round of the presidential election, which will happen next May, will oppose Nicolas Sarkozy — who is the leader of the main right-wing party, [and] is the home secretary. He's a very right-oriented leader; in a certain way he's running after the neo-fascist Le Pen, taking some of his ideas, mainly on immigration, with that formula directly borrowed from Le Pen, [addressed] to immigrants: either you love France or you leave it. Which shows how right[-wing] it is.
01:38 So everybody was saying it will be one of the two final candidates, and for everybody the other would have been Ségolène Royal, who is the candidate of the Socialist Party. By the way, I now understand that the words have not exactly the same meaning in France: "socialist" [here is] only related to the Socialist Party, which is a party which is not socialist at all.
02:18 The main strategy is to promote a national union, which means a new majority and a new government with moderate and clever politicians from the right-wing and from the left-wing parties. And now it's not absolutely certain that Ségolène Royal will be [there] for the second round of the election. So it is very difficult to understand.
02:49 But my explanation is that the success of François Bayrou and the centre right is mainly due to the political weakness of the Socialist Party and the difficulties of Ségolène Royal in looking different from right-wing parties. Actually, between Ségolène Royal, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Bayrou on social issues there are very few differences. On issues related to [social] problems there is not much difference — because, for instance, one of the main points in the first phase of the Royal campaign was not about social issues at all: it was about what she called "the fair order", which for everybody means something like law and order. It's more repression on young people in the suburbs; it's borstal, it's things like that.
03:51 And the fact is that she was not the favourite candidate of the Socialist Party apparatus, but she was chosen by activists and by members of the Socialist Party because she looked like the one who could win the election — she was supposed to be the best in order to beat Nicolas Sarkozy. The problem is [that] now there is a big doubt about it; and as there is not much difference in the programme, now Bayrou is considered by a part of [public] opinion as the best [placed] to beat Sarkozy. That's the main reason for his success. People are not discovering that [he] is a particular leader; [they are] just seeing [that] perhaps — and even people with left ideas, such as teachers for instance, [find] he has a big audience in that kind of [milieu]. So we don't know what will really happen at the end of the story.
04:54 In order to understand the global situation, but also especially the left, there are some events to be remembered from the last years.
05:26 As you know, in 2002 there was a big trauma in French politics: Lionel Jospin, who was the prime minister between 1997 and 2002, was eliminated from the [first] round of the presidential election. In spring 2003 there was a long-lasting strike of teachers, [a] huge strike and demonstrations against the reform of the pension system, especially for civil servants — almost a general strike, but at the end it was a defeat.
05:57 In spring 2004 the left-wing parties, mainly the Socialist Party, won the elections for the regional councils as well as the elections for the European Parliament, because people wanted to send a message to the right-wing party and government.
06:27 In 2005, as you know, there was the campaign [on] the European constitution, and against all the centres of power, all the political and economic elite. The No was a success, as you know, and the campaign was led by a broad anti-liberal coalition.
06:59 In November 2005 you had rebellions and riots in the French suburbs, in big towns. And in March–April 2006 you had huge demonstrations of young people and also workers against what was called the CPE, which is a kind of first job contract with no guarantee — and it was also a success, because in fact the draft was abandoned.
07:29 So this is one side of the French political situation and landscape: a situation of deep crisis, and every day crisis, with a huge level of resistance against neoliberal policy. But frankly speaking, it's only one face of the situation, and from abroad many people think only about that face.
08:00 When you live in France you are faced with the other part of the situation, and the other part is not so fantastic. For instance, you have a very low level of days lost because of strikes [?]. You have a succession of neoliberal reforms that have in fact been implemented through workers' defeat, or sometimes even without any struggle against them. You have a very restricted membership in unions [and] in political parties. You have in fact an uninterrupted shift to the right of the traditional leaders and the social democratic leadership.
08:30 So in fact the situation in France is more complex and contradictory than you can see. On one side you have a long period where everything is quiet — no strike, no movement, and hard attacks from right-wing parties and bosses; and on the other side you have very short periods of social explosion. But because it's very short, it means that the lessons of these explosions are not automatically learned by a large number of people, activists or sections of the working class. That means that it is not so easy to change that moment of resistance and rebellion into a long-lasting political alternative.
09:32 And that is the point I want to underline, because it explains in a certain way what has happened with the anti-liberal left and its division today. To say it simply: it was not so easy to change the coalition against the European constitution into an electoral coalition for the presidential and general elections next spring.
10:03 In fact, in 2005 the campaign against the European constitution was led by the revolutionary left, mainly our party; the Communist Party; a minority platform inside the Green Party; a minority platform inside the Socialist Party; many activists from the trade union movement, from associations, from the feminist movement, from the global justice movement; and also thousands, perhaps dozens of thousands, of ordinary people with left-wing ideas who agreed to campaign against the EU constitution and more broadly against neoliberal policy.
11:07 And of course that is [a] basis we have to build on. But it is not so easy, because all [that] I described doesn't mean that all these people, all these currents or organisations, could automatically or even easily agree on a common approach for the general election — because it's not only being *against* something, against the constitution, against neoliberal policy. It's about political power: the issue of government, parliamentary majority, state power. And it's a bit more complicated to agree on such a thing.
11:39 And that's what in fact has happened. As you know, we have a very [odd] situation, especially if you look at it from abroad: for this election we will have five candidates to the left of the Socialist Party. Three candidates more or less related to the far left; José Bové, who is [from] the global justice movement; and the Communist Party candidate. So it's a lot of candidates for more or less the same audience.
12:43 You have three candidates [on the far left]. You have Olivier [Besancenot], who is the candidate of the LCR. [You have] Arlette Laguiller, who is the candidate of the other big far left organisation. You have Gérard Schivardi, who is the candidate of a small Trotskyist — let us say frankly, sect — which is from the Lambertist tradition. Then you have José Bové, and then you have the Communist Party candidate. So the far left and the radical left is very rich in France, but of course it's something not very reasonable, frankly speaking.
13:15 So [the question is] why we have that situation, and that scattering of the radical left that was more or less united during the campaign against the EU constitution.
13:47 The most shared explanation [of] why the process for a common candidate of the anti-liberal left has failed is because of the sectarianism of the LCR, and because of the hegemonic behaviour of the Communist Party, who want to keep control of the movement. This explanation is widely shared because it is simple, easy and in a certain way comfortable. And I'm not sharing that explanation, mainly because it is too simple, too easy and too comfortable.
14:18 If the only problem had been the sectarianism of the LCR, what would have happened? A united coalition and a common candidate of everybody from the anti-liberal left except the LCR. But that did not happen. If the only problem was the hegemonic behaviour of the Communist Party leadership, what would have happened? A united coalition and a common candidate of everybody from the anti-liberal left except the Communist Party. But that neither happened.
14:49 So I think the more political explanation is that if the process for a united coalition and a common candidate has failed, it's for political — and substantial political — reasons. And it failed, in our point of view, because there was and there still is a central political disagreement. The central political issue [is]: what kind of relationship can the anti-liberal movement have with the leadership of the Socialist Party, related to the question of government, parliamentary majority and state power?
15:53 To explain what happened, and what has been our fight — it's not a surprise, we think our organisation has a good programme, a programme built on social and democratic emergency measures. But at the beginning of the process we were perfectly aware that a united anti-liberal coalition cannot just endorse our programme, and we were ready to accept compromise, as long as this compromise [was] not opposed to our own proposals. And there were some differences between the different forces about [the] proposals; but to be very frank, we think that did not lead to an impossibility of having a united coalition. It [left] unsolved questions we can deal with — not an absolute obstacle to a united coalition.
16:56 We also think that we have a good candidate, Olivier Besancenot, who is very popular among workers and young people; but he's also obviously our best-known spokesperson, and for that reason we were aware that he cannot be the candidate of the united anti-liberal coalition. So we were ready to compromise for another candidate. Even after we announced his candidature we said clearly that we were ready to withdraw [it] at any moment if a political agreement was found.
18:01 But there was an issue about which we were not ready [to] compromise. Just one question — not a long list of problems, just one. And that one, as you will have understood, is about the relationship with the Socialist Party and the question of government and the parliamentary majority.
18:01 We raised that question from the start and we wished to have a clear answer about it. And the answer we wanted to hear was: no, an anti-liberal candidate will not be a member of a government led by the Socialist Party; and no, anti-liberal candidates for the general election, if they were elected as MPs, will neither belong to the same parliamentary majority nor support a government led by the Socialist Party.
18:31 And the problem [is that] the answer on such [a] problem — we have never heard such an answer. What we have heard from the anti-liberal national committee was a very ambiguous formula about rejection of the hegemony of social liberalism; and much more worrying, [what we heard] from the Communist Party leadership, which was the main political current of the coalition, [was] an attempt to unify all the left — which means unifying the party who have supported the European constitution and the parties who have defeated it, like the PCF or us.
19:34 Of course the Communist Party speaks about unifying the left on an anti-liberal orientation. But if you read the programme of the Socialist Party, and worse than that the programme of Ségolène [Royal] — Ségolène, by the way, is the only French socialist leader who said frankly that she supports Tony Blair. In the French socialist tradition, when they are in office the socialist leaders do exactly the same as your Labour leadership, but they have a more radical speech, and most of them say: well, yes, we are reformists, yes, [we are] social democrats, yes, we want to adapt ourselves to the real world, but [Tony Blair] is too much [inaudible].
20:37 So all that demonstrates that it's not possible to have at the same time a clearly anti-liberal — I'm not speaking about revolutionary, but just anti-liberal — orientation, and to dream about a compromise with the Socialist Party, which is a neoliberal party.
21:08 And that's the reason why, at the end of the process, the Communist Party de facto tried to impose its own candidate, Marie-George Buffet, who is the general secretary of the PCF, in order to control the movement and to be in a good position to negotiate with the Socialist Party. So that [is] the real reason why there was no united coalition: because the main problem we will be faced with, perhaps, if a left-wing party wins, is what relationship [to have] with the Socialist Party — which also means what relationship with the government and its politics.
22:11 Well, this question has not been solved, and for that reason we have decided to stand for the election on our own, with our own candidate and our own party.
22:46 A few words about our campaign. Our campaign is mainly focused on two issues. The first one is a social issue and the second one is the fight against discrimination — against all discrimination.
22:46 On the social issue, our main proposals are about unemployment, with the demand for a law to ban layoffs and redundancies. The other one is about the defence and development of public services. These ideas are very well known inside the global justice movement: we consider that some goods and services are not just commodities, and [that] things like health and care, education, culture, housing, pure water and a lot of things like that are common goods, and everybody must have free access to them whatever their financial resources are — and only public services can do that.
24:20 And for instance in France that means the renationalisation of all the public services that have been privatised in the past years. Privatisation has been done by right-wing governments, but also by left-wing governments: between 1997 and 2002 the plural left, as it was called, government privatised more public services than the right-wing government before. So one of our demands is about social reappropriation, renationalisation of public services.
24:50 And the third point in our social programme is about a substantial increase of the minimum wage — we demand 1,500 euros — and a general increase of all wages and pensions of 300 euros each month. And that makes some difference with the programme of the Socialist Party.
25:53 The other big issue we want to be identified with is the struggle against discrimination. It means discrimination against women, it means discrimination against gay [people], and it means also — and that's a big problem in France now — discrimination against the coloured minorities, such as black people, Muslim people and so on, especially young people, those who live in the suburbs, those who rebelled in November 2005. And there are not many candidates [prepared] to make that speech about young people in this campaign.
26:26 And the main message we want to present to people is: we are a radical party, we are an anti-capitalist party, and we are [inaudible] party. And we think it's very important [to be] independent from the moderate left, from the Socialist Party. We think it's very important, because if the right-wing parties win the election, what will be needed for workers [and] for young [people] will be a radical party to organise resistance; but if the left-wing party, the Socialist Party, wins, what will be needed will be a [inaudible] type party — because the Socialist Party in office will not implement politics in favour of young people and workers.
27:28 So it's very important — from the start until now that has been our main issue, [the one] we want to insist on — and we think we can do it with our candidate, because our candidate is rather different from the other candidates, just like he was in 2002. Of course he has five years more [than] in 2002; under our slogan we put everything [on] "twenty-seven-year-old postman", and that was the difference with all the other candidates.
28:30 He is the only candidate who really works. I mean, he's not a professional politician. [Arlette Laguiller] has been [a worker], but now she's retired. So he's really the only candidate who [works] now. José Bové is also a kind of worker, he's a [farmer] [?]; but with this exception, compared to all the others, he is a worker. And, although he has five years more, he is of course the youngest of all the candidates — for instance [compared with] the other serious revolutionary candidate, who is now sixty-six, which, if you think that communism is the youth of the world, is not the best demonstration of that.
29:02 In fact it was a real challenge for the LCR to decide, five years ago, to present a very young and absolutely unknown person. We think it was a good choice. So we think in that campaign people, workers, young people can identify with our campaign — some of them, not [all], we don't know. Not just [because of] our proposals, but because our proposals are directly linked to what our candidate is. When he speaks about low wages, he knows what he's speaking about, because he himself is paid 1,200 euros. So our proposals would be good also for him.
30:05 More seriously speaking, I think also [that] more young people can identify themselves with him than with the other candidates.
30:35 Just to end: in fact the situation of all the left, and [of] the radical left, is not very good. Because I started the speech speaking about the fact that we are not certain that [Ségolène Royal] will be elected — but we are not even sure that she will be in the second round. And one of the reasons for that is that in the opinion polls all the left — I mean the radical left with its five candidates, the Greens and the Socialist Party, all that together — is under forty per cent of the vote. So you see the problem: it's very difficult to win the election without forty per cent of votes. That's the first point.
31:37 The second point is that the situation of the radical left is of course not a good one. You can understand: you have several candidates [on the] radical left. Everybody knows, for instance, that Lutte Ouvrière will never accept a united coalition, except sometimes only with the League. So a part of the scattering on the left was written before the process began. But having several candidates, or having five candidates, is not exactly the same thing. Of course it's a big weakness. I have tried to explain the reasons why, and the political reasons why; but nevertheless it's not a very good result.
32:40 I know there's a debate in France, there's a debate among the ranks of the League, [and] there's a debate in the European left about that. So I will not say we have done everything the best way; I'm not saying we made no mistake. We have been partially isolated, and genuine activists of the anti-liberal movement are now angry — they are angry against the PCF, but also angry against us. So obviously it's not a very good result.
33:41 But one of the reasons why we have been isolated, and why some people are angry with us, is because we have raised questions that people want to avoid, and we have shown the difficulties of the process, while other members of the coalition have avoided speaking about the issues people don't agree on. Some of them have even cultivated illusions — for instance about the fact that a united common candidate or united coalition can have more votes than the Socialist Party, which is a joke; or even more than ten per cent, which is not the real situation in France. And we were the people who raised complex questions, and the people who pronounced bad news; and it's not the best way to be popular.
34:43 Anyhow, we think we have to do that, for two main reasons. The first reason is that we think the fantastic and victorious campaign that was led against the EU constitution needs a political translation — but a real political translation, that preserves the sharp division between those who have supported the constitution and those who have defeated it. And that means no political coalition with the leadership of the Socialist Party, even with the illusion of gaining seats in parliament or [in] institutions.
35:45 And the other reason why we have that orientation is that the question we raise is not a French question. It's not just something like a French exception, or an obsession born in the bad brains of the LCR leadership. In fact the problem of the relationship with social democracy, with the social-liberal Socialist Party, is a challenge for the left not [only] in France but also in Europe and at the international level.
36:15 This question has been raised in Brazil, this question has been raised in Italy. And the situation the revolutionary left was faced with in Brazil, [and] in Italy, is precisely the kind of situation we don't want to be faced with in France. That means that we think — not just for the LCR but for the radical left — it's better to debate and solve the problem before it happens, because when you solve it only when it has happened, it's almost every time a disaster.
36:47 So the debate we had in France, which was a hard debate, was not about reform and revolution. It was not about party and movement. It was not [inaudible]. It was not about the false opposition between opportunism and revolutionary purism — by the way, revolutionary purism is a reproach that has rarely been addressed to our party. But anyhow, it was not about that. No: it was just about subordination or political independence.
37:47 And I think, for the future of the left in France and perhaps the future of the left elsewhere, it's very important to have an organisation [that is] not sectarian, open, committed to building a broad anti-capitalist party — but which says there is a limit. That limit is not revolution; that limit is not all our programme; that limit is just independence in relation to the Socialist Party and so on. Thank you very much.
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