Macron, ‘the democracy’ made of war and repression

Just recently, French President Emmanuel Macron, the former investment banker, made what the Western press hailed as an impassioned plea for democracy before the European Parliament.

Macron warned of a Europe where “the illiberal fascination grows daily” and said, “our national egoisms sometimes feel more important than what unites us against the rest of the world.” The French President declared that, “We are seeing authoritarianism all around us”. “The response is not authoritarian democracy but the authority of democracy.” For Macron, the embodiment of this democracy is the European Union, which represents as he put forth “a unique democratic model in the world,” and “democracy conceived of as freedom.”

The speech elicited an enraptured response from the US, British, and French political establishment, with the New York Times, Washington Post and Financial Times running lead editorials lionizing Macron. The New York Times compared Macron to a “biblical prophet” manning the barricades to defend the so-called “European democracy.”

But, author of the article Andre Damon, National Secretary of the US-based International Youth and Students for Equality, believes that “if Macron be a biblical prophet, he is clothed in filthy garments”. Here’s more.

Just four days before his speech, Macron ordered air strikes against the Syrian cities of Damascus and Homs, on false pretenses, without a parliamentary vote, and over the opposition of most of the French population. The French president carried out his military adventure in the Levant in alliance with Donald Trump, a right-wing and fascistic demagogue, and British Prime Minister Theresa May, whose government is consumed with the effort to split Britain from the European Union. Sarcastically the “prophet” Macron, who received less than a quarter of the vote in the first round of the 2017 French election, has, in his first year of office, inscribed France’s authoritarian state of emergency measures into the country's constitution, worked to gut social services and launched a frontal attack on France’s public-sector workers and students. In the week before his speech, Macron oversaw a massive assault by over 3,000 riot police on demonstrators at an environmentalist camp.

And yet it is Macron that the Western press is heralding as the last best hope for democracy! As the Washington Post put it, “French President Emmanuel Macron articulated truths that resonate for the entire globe.” Absent from both Macron’s speech and its rapturous reception in the press is any attempt to explain why the far right is gaining strength throughout Europe, or, just as importantly, why the so-called “liberal” governments of Europe are pursuing policies that are increasingly indistinguishable from those of fascist regimes.

After all, Macron’s key partner in the European Union, Germany, is headed by a grand coalition government that has largely adopted the anti-immigrant platform of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), has called for resurrecting the militarist and, frankly, fascistic traditions of the German army, and imposed one of the most draconian Internet censorship regimes anywhere in Europe. Neither Macron nor those in his camp make any effort to relate the rise of the far-right to the growth of inequality and the dismantling of the welfare state or the rise of militarism.

In reality, the greatest responsibility for the rise of the extreme right in Europe lies with the anti-working class policies pursued by the European Union on behalf of Europe’s banks and corporations. The EU’s austerity dictates, which Macron supported as an investment banker and was directly implicated in as French finance minister, have resulted in far-right parties winning growing support. The public does not see the EU as the embodiment of freedom and democracy, but as the ruthless executor of the interests of the super-rich and the banks.

The extreme right can cast themselves as critics of a corrupt establishment and channel social anger in a nationalist direction only because the social democrats, trade unions and pseudo-left parties like Syriza in Greece, the NPA in France and Die Linke in Germany do everything in their power to block the emergence of genuine movements of the masses. They unconditionally support and implement austerity programs to the detriment of those in need.

As a result, the author indicated that, the National Front has risen to become the second-largest party in France, the AfD became the first far-right party to enter federal parliament in Germany since World War II, the right-wing extremist Freedom Party assumed government responsibility in Austria, the xenophobic Lega and Five Star Movement hold a parliamentary majority in Italy, and far-right parties are in power in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. The so-called “reform” of the European Union being sought by Macron under these conditions has nothing to do with democracy, freedom or equality. It aims to transform Europe into a police state and a military great power dominated by France and Germany, able to compete with the United States in the imperialist re-division of the world.

In the run-up to the Second World War, the apologists for Anglo-American capitalism claimed that the fundamental division in the world—and the source of global conflict—was the conflict between “democracy” and “fascism.” But in the 1930s, as now, both the “democratic” and “authoritarian” governments were pressured to pursue essentially the same militarist and authoritarian policies by the global crisis. Some at the time argued that the public should have no illusions in the “democratic” pretenses of those who pretend but act totally in contrary.  

Those activists at that time put forth that all attempts to represent the impending war as a clash between the ideas of democracy and fascism belong to the realm either of charlatanism or stupidity. Political forms change, but the unappeasable appetites remain; the furious and hopeless struggle for a new division of the world follows irresistibly from the mortal crisis of the dominant system. That perfectly describes the combination of military rearmament and social austerity that Macron represents. Any other explanation of the manifest process of democracy’s dislodgement by fascism is an idealistic falsification of things as they are, either deception of self-deception.

In a way, the Western press is correct in lionizing Macron as a spokesman of such a “democracy.” He is in fact the spokesman for bourgeois democracy in the epoch of its disintegration—that is, the unrestricted domination of the banks and the corporations. The world is confronted with two forms of dictatorship, either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. 

In such circumstances, the public is expected to step forward and show resolve to fight against the current drive by a few in Europe toward austerity and war. This is demonstrated by the struggles of rail workers and students in France, the scale of the strikes in Germany’s industrial sector and public services, the repeated eruption of general strikes in Greece, the reemergence of workers' struggles in Eastern Europe and many other strikes and protests.

The coming period will be characterized by bitter battles and mounting opposition to war and state repression. But these struggles require a political perspective. They can be successful only if they break with the so-called social democrats, trade unions and pseudo-left parties, and resist against war and austerity measures by a few so-called elites who sought once again to transform the world into a “wicked prison.”

EA/ME