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Emeutes et pillages: la facture de quarante ans de néolibéralisme
An English summary of this podcast follows below.
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Riots and Looting: The Hefty Bill for Forty Years of Neoliberalism
Last weekend, France saw its largest organized street mobilization since the strikes of 1995: over 600,000 demonstrators, peaceful marches, trade unions, and largely legitimate grievances. Yet what will be remembered are the smashed shop windows and the looting. That is precisely where the trouble lies.
Behind this “bad political theater,” as it has been called, a disturbing fact emerges: the violence was no accident but a maneuver. The looting, far from being the work of politicized rioters, was mostly ordinary street crime, with ultra-left militants accounting for less than 20%, according to intelligence sources. Those same domestic intelligence services, pressed by the government to pin the blame on La France Insoumise (LFI, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party), refused to play along, even speaking to the press about it.
Mrs Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, has confirmed she holds no evidence implicating LFI or any other left-wing political party. Here is a state apparatus that no longer follows the government’s lead. It is one sign among others, along with the appeals court ruling that restored Marine Le Pen’s eligibility, that the judiciary, long compliant when it came to the “dirty political work,” is reclaiming a measure of impartiality. It is joined now by domestic intelligence and law enforcement.
The electoral backdrop explains the manipulation. Facing a three-way split in the political landscape and a president barred from re-election, the “central bloc” is panicking. Its strategy comes down to two moves to secure a place in the run-off: kneecapping Mélenchon, guilty of absorbing the urban petty-bourgeois vote once held by the Socialists and the Greens, and brandishing the specter of chaos to frighten a reshaped electorate.
Enter a candidate pulled out of a hat: David Lisnard, mayor of Cannes, launched Macron-style as in 2017, complete with a party that claims to have gathered 50,000 members in a matter of months, and made-to-measure polls. But times have changed. The 2017 “coup” required a lot of money and the press, the upper civil service and the judiciary all pulling in the same direction. Those conditions no longer hold.
Underlying it all is a merciless demographic reality: six to seven million Macron voters lost in ten years to natural attrition, with no replacement from a youth vote that goes primarily to Mélenchon (40% of the 18-24). The result: Le Pen approaching 40% in the first round and topping over 60% in the second, whoever her opponent. Hence the desperate attempts to engineer, right now, a cohabitation in reverse, with some already calling for the next presidency to be stripped of its political substance at the following general election.
What remains is a strikingly ironic prospect: the election of Marine Le Pen, the first woman ever to lead the French Republic, would be “the bill” presented for forty years of excluding the working classes from the public sphere. A bill that, it seems, nothing can prevent from coming due.
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