The French National Assembly yesterday approved Prime Minister François Bayrou’s invocation of the anti-democratic Article 49.3 of the constitution to impose a budget without a parliamentary vote. It contains €53 billion in austerity cuts and tax increases to protect military spending increases while cutting the budget deficit from 7 to 5.3 percent of GDP.
The Bayrou government, neo-fascist National Rally (RN) and big-business Socialist Party (PS) all opposed two censure motions presented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI) party, which also received Stalinist deputies’ votes. Bayrou said yesterday he will invoke Article 49.3 powers to ram through the Social Security budget without a vote on Friday. This will validate Macron’s massively unpopular 2023 pension cuts and further cut pensions and health care.
The budget tramples the will of the people underfoot. Macron’s pension cuts, imposed despite mass strikes ultimately called off by the union bureaucracies, are rejected by 91 percent of the population. The military budget hikes, which more than double spending from €31 billion in 2017 to €69 billion in 2030, aim to prepare the French army for great-power wars, like Macron’s call to send troops to Ukraine to fight Russia. This is opposed by an overwhelming majority of French people.
If Bayrou and Macron can nevertheless impose the budget, this is above all due to the bankruptcy of Mélenchon. He worked to ressuscitate the PS and incorporate it into the New Popular Front (NFP) alliance LFI leads. By withdrawing LFI candidates and supporting candidates from the PS and Macron’s Renaissance party in last year’s snap legislative elections, Mélenchon played a central role in the formation of the government his party has now tried and failed to censure.
The budget levels huge attacks on the working class to keep diverting funds to the army and paying off the financial aristocracy by servicing France’s unsustainable state debt of over €3 trillion. It has €32 billion in austerity measures and €21 billion in tax increases, including an €8 billion one-year corporate tax increase. But with France running a massive deficit, and Trump demanding European countries again more than double military spending to 5 percent of GDP, the bourgeoisie intends to further massively escalate austerity.
Cuts include a €1.85 billion cut to job services, €1.19 billion in education, €630 million in research and €781 million in development spending. Ecological programs are cut 14 percent, and a €2.2 billion cut hits state subsidies to regional authorities, which has led the Hérault department to eliminate all cultural spending outright. Among the tax hikes that will hit broader masses of people, there is a large rise the self-employed and an increase in airline ticket taxes.
After Trump’s re-election, moreover, the financial aristocracy is declaring that a €8 billion corporate tax increase is intolerable. Bernard Arnault (net worth $189 billion), freshly back from Trump’s inauguration in Washington, brazenly denounced the budget, indicating that his LVMH holding company is considering leaving France.
“I’m coming back from the United States and I can see the enormous optimism that prevails in that country. And we come back to France, it’s a cold shower,” Arnault said. “To encourage outsourcing it’s ideal… I do not know if that’s the government’s objective, but anyway, that objective will be reached,” he added. “We are being encouraged by US authorities to keep installing factories in the United States… In the current environment, it is something we are seriously considering.”
Such comments underscore that there is nothing to be negotiated with the ruling class. Bayrou runs a dictatorship of the financial oligarchy, waging war on the workers even as the NATO powers prepare to intensify wars of conquest overseas—with Trump calling to annex Canada, Panama, Greenland, and Gaza. The rational use of social resources and the defense of social and democratic rights requires the mobilization of the working class in struggle to take control of economic resources out of the hands of the ruling class.
But Mélenchon has called on workers to limit the class struggle, channel social conflict through parliament, and respect capitalist “democracy” even as it rots on its feet. This was the content of his meeting last night in Angers. He began, “It’s always the same: some endlessly accumulate wealth, while others are similarly plundered in an exact parallel. Everything that goes to the billionaires was taken from those who produce. That is the truth.”
But he then argued workers should adopt a non-revolutionary policy, citing the NFP’s successful censure vote with the RN to bring down the Barnier government last fall, bringing Bayrou to power. He said, “The citizens revolution to which we aspire is carried out by the ballot box and through votes at the National Assembly. It is without a single meter of barricades or a single gunshot that we brought down this government. It is on this path that we will will, and by this democratic citizens’ path that we will change everything from top to bottom.”
In reality, the Bayrou budget vote exposes the dead end of the NFP’s policy of censuring Barnier. As it did not mobilize the workers in struggle, and was led by forces hostile to socialist revolution, it only gave time for the bourgeoisie to recalibrate its anti-worker policies.
Responsibility for this lies above all with Mélenchon. He won 20 percent of the vote in the 2022 presidential elections, in which the PS and the Stalinist PCF collapsed, and the capitalist media portrayed—that is, usually denounced—him as France’s leading “left” politician. But he responded by forming an alliance with the PS, PCF and Greens, backing their candidates in 2022 and 2024 legislative elections. He also acquiesced to the union bureaucracies’ calling off of the 2023 struggle against pension cuts.
Mélenchon thus worked to demobilize the working class, while strengthening Macron and his allies in parliament. Bayrou’s imposition of his budget is the predictable outcome.
LFI is debating whether to expel the PS from the NFP, but this is a cynical dodge. Many forces in the NFP—which includes LFI, the PS, the PCF, the Greens and the Pabloite New Anticapitalist Party as well as the union bureaucracies—support Bayrou’s budget. Indeed, French Democratic Labor Confederation (CFDT) union secretary Marylise Léon said the budget was “socially unjust” but demanded that it be adopted.
“A certain stability is a good thing, and so is a budget, even if it certainly does not respond to many expectations and ambitions,” she told FranceInfo on Tuesday, warning of the “enormous expectations” that workers have. “Socially, it is a budget that is unjust, that has no ecological ambition and that’s a problem,” she continued, adding that nevertheless, “It is urgent to adopt it.”
Last night, PS official Jérôme Guedj attacked LFI as intolerant for criticizing the PS vote with Macron and the RN for the budget. This, he said, “makes one thing clear: there will never again be an alliance between the PS and LFI.” LFI, Guedj added, “cannot in political coherence associate itself to a PS that it claims is an ally of the RN,” while the PS “does not accept permanent insults and accusations of betrayal.”
Whatever occurs in NFP’s factional struggles, this experience contains far-reaching political lessons. Stopping the imperialist war abroad and class war at home that are being waged on both sides of the Atlantic requires the unification and mobilization of the working class in struggle. This requires the building of an international movement among rank-and-file workers for socialism, against not only big-business parties like the PS, Macron and the RN, but also forces like Mélenchon who seek to block a class struggle against them.