What is behind the growing influence of the National Front in France?

[Hannah Bell]

In France, the neo-fascist National Front (FN) has for the first time ever taken first place in a poll on voting in a presidential election. The election is scheduled for next year. An Internet survey by the Harris polling institute, conducted on behalf of the newspaper Le Parisien, questioned 1,618 people about their voting intentions in the next French presidential election. Twenty-three percent declared their support for FN chairperson Marine Le Pen. Current French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the leader of the Socialist Party (PS), Martine Aubry, received just 21 percent each.

The global economic crisis has had a devastating impact in France, with layoffs and waves of plant closures in auto, textiles and other industrial sectors. The official unemployment rate is close to 10 percent and up to one quarter of young people are out of work. Rising prices, workplace stress and cuts in social and pension benefits take a mounting toll.

The working class has protested repeatedly against this state of affairs. For the past 15 years there has hardly been a year in which workers and youth have not demonstrated en masse. Just last autumn, millions participated in several one-day general strikes against an increase in the retirement age. On every occasion, however, the unions and the “left” parties insisted that there could be no political opposition to attacks on the working class, which had to limit itself to allowing the unions to negotiate deals with anti-worker governments. Last autumn, the unions limited the opposition to harmless one-day protests and isolated powerful strikes by dock and refinery workers. Even when the police used force against the strikers, the unions refused to lift a finger in the workers’ defence.

The bourgeois social character of the PS (Socialist Party) is most clearly expressed in the identity of the man considered to be its most likely presidential candidate in 2012: Dominique Strauss-Kahn. As head of the International Monetary Fund, he is responsible for introducing devastating austerity programs in European countries like Greece and Hungary and in other countries around the world... The “left” organisations that operate in the orbit of the PS do not represent the working class, but rather an affluent section of the middle class, whose social interests are divorced from those of the workers...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/mar2011/pers-m09.shtml