Last week’s election was a stinging repudiation of the class-collaborationist popular-front coalition—led by the Socialist Party (PS) and including the Communist Party (PCF) and the bourgeois Greens—which currently administers the French capitalist state. The government’s anti-working-class and anti-immigrant attacks paved the way for Le Pen’s second-place finish in the elections. Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin fell to one percentage point behind Le Pen’s 17 percent and was eliminated from the second round of elections, while PCF candidate Robert Hue garnered a scant 3.9 percent. Significantly, the self-avowed revolutionaries of Lutte Ouvrière (LO) and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) totaled a combined 10 percent of the vote.

Now, these same parties have cobbled together a reactionary national front, stretching from the right wing to the “far left,” to wrap Chirac in the French tricolor as the supposed “savior of Republican values.” The anti-Le Pen demonstrations are replete with nauseating chauvinism. Whitewashing the France of “Vigipirate”—the campaign of cop terror in minority communities—and embellishing the France of Vichy (the government of collaboration with the Nazis) and the Algerian War, the demonstrations are filled with signs and banners proclaiming that “la belle France” is not Austria or Italy, where ultraright or fascist-infested governments hold power.

Notably, the PS, PCF, Greens and LCR all issued leaflets proclaiming the same slogan: “Block Le Pen!” This means: Vote Chirac on May 5. Support to this right-wing politician can only strengthen his bonapartist appetites and lead to even more severe state repression against workers and the oppressed. At the April 27 demonstration of 50,000 people in Paris, the climate of “national unity” was so strong that the refusal by our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France to call for a vote to Chirac provoked a storm of indignation. LTF signs at the demonstration proclaimed: “The PS/PCF/Green Popular Front Opened the Road to Le Pen’s Fascists!” and “Break with Class Collaboration! For a Genuine Revolutionary Multiethnic Workers Party!”

Chirac 81.86 % - Le Pen 18.14 %. In the second round of the French presidential elections, on 5 May, fascist leader Jean-Marie Le
Pen has won a smaller percentage than his first round total added to that of rival fascist Bruno Mégret, who called on his supporters
to vote Le Pen in the run-off.
The right-wing sitting president, Jacques Chirac, will now, however, be able to appoint a new government with the authority of a
larger majority than any previous president of France's Fifth Republic.

Arlette Laguiller of Lutte Ouvrière, the front-running revolutionary left candidate in the first round with 5.8%, has commented:
"As was absolutely predictable, Le Pen has got no more votes than he got, with his colleague Mégret, on the first round.
That means, in the first place, as we have often said, that Le Pen would very easily have been beaten with the votes of the mainstream right alone, who
scored twice as many on the first round as Le Pen.
It also means that the leaders of the left have prostituted themselves for nothing and have given Chirac by far the biggest majority of any president of the
Fifth Republic. Even De Gaulle never got as many.
Thus the leaders of the left have just told us, in the worst of ways, that the governmental left and the governmental right have much more in common than
sets them apart.
The leaders of the left blew up the Le Pen bladder. They knew that Le Pen had no chance at all of winning on the second round, but they raised a Le Pen
scare as if he could be elected. They raised a scare about the spectre of fascism, which in the current situation was no more than a theatrical fiction,
though Le Pen's ideas do represent fascist survivals.
For the last 15 days the leaders of the left have succeeded in avoiding any explanation to the working people on the causes of the left electorate's
disillusion with them and on the fall of the Socialist Party's vote and the collapse of the Communist Party's.
The campaign which they led in favour of Chirac was as shameful as it was pointless and artificial, as they full well knew.
We for our part refused to align ourselves with that campaign and refused to abase ourselves to calling for a vote for Chirac. We are often accused of
defending an out-of-date programme, but we are proud of standing firm for our ideas and not turning our coats on the first opportunity.
Chirac, whatever hypocrisy may be used to explain voting for him, and regardless of whether one talks of taking his ballot paper with gloves or with a peg
on one's nose, is an enemy of the working class.
It should be known that in the workplaces many workers, CP activists or voters, refused to vote for Chirac. Even if their numbers were insufficient to appear in
the statistics, they will surely count in the struggles to come".

Laguiller called for blank ballots in the second round. About 6% of the electorate did cast blank or spoiled ballots, although opinion polls indicate that
72% of Laguiller's first-round voters backed Chirac on 5 May. Abstentions were 19.2% on the second round, down on 28.4% in the first round.

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