French president Emmanuel Macron wants to proscribe – ban as terrorists – French left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI). The deeply unpopular Macron sees the move as a lifeline, blaming the left for the mass protests against his own failures, while removing the likelihood of a left win in next spring’s presidential election.
That this would almost guarantee a win for Le Pen’s fascists seems not to trouble him at all compared to the left ‘threat’ of a more just and equal France.
Macron’s prime minister Sébastien Lecornu is laying the groundwork for the ban, blaming LFI for the protests and accusing LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his MPs of:
instrumentalising the high school movement for their electoral advantage.
The Macron government has also held ‘security’ meetings claiming “LFI and its proxies” ‘organised’ the school protests. The French and EU right is collaborating in this push. ‘Conservatives’ in the EU parliament are trying to drive through a ban on the parliamentary left grouping that includes LFI. Les Républicains party leader Bruno Retailleau slandered LFI as “seditious” and “fascinated by violence”, before demanding proscription.
Meanwhile, French police and state agents have been repeatedly accused of staging ‘false flag’ incidents to smear protesters and excuse police brutality.
Criminalisation
The French moves come as part of a wider ‘lawfare’ assault on the left. Macron’s government is trying to criminalise LFI MP and former Gaza flotilla member Rima Hassan of support for terrorism and ban her from public office because she quoted a Japanese Palestine activist on the topic of the duty to resist:
I gave my youth to the Palestinian cause. As long as there is oppression, resistance is not only a right, it is a duty.
In the narrative of Macron, Lecornu and their right-wing collaborators, Macron’s austerity and the collapse of the education system in deprived areas are not to blame for the wildfire-spread of the protests. Nor is the brutal response of Macron’s police, who have killed at least one medic trying to help the wounded and have maimed a number of young people.
Instead, we’re meant to believe it’s LFI’s fault. And, just as in the UK, the misnamed ‘centrists’ in France have no qualms about lying, demonising resistance and collaborating with the right to serve the interests of billionaires and corporations.
The journalist Patrick Lawrence has a good alternative definition of “centrism”. He correctly calls it “Liberal Authoritarianism”.