Presidential election in France

Are there any signs that voters for "socialist" Hollande could switch to Melenchon soon?

No, very few. It would be very difficult for Mélenchon to take 5 points over Hollande. People are idiots, they don't understand that Holland's programme means also austerity.

I'm curious about your opinion on this piece, which was translated and published on the website of the NCPN:

Quote:

Is the French Communist Party Back?

After years of retreat and opportunism and consequent loss of support and influence, the French Communist Party (PCF) is showing signs of life. Aligned with smaller parties in the Left Front (Front de Gauche, FG), the PCF has rallied around the presidential candidacy of Jean Melenchon for the forthcoming first round of French elections. The latest polls show Melenchon with over 14% of the prospective voters, ahead of all other candidates excepting Hollande (PS) and Sarkozy (UMP).

Rest: http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2012/04/is- ... -back.html

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This once dynamic party succumbed to the allure of reformism, anti-Sovietism, and compromise with its embrace of the so-called “Euro-Communist” stance in the seventies.

This isn't entirely true. The PCF was a very good friend of the USSR until the end. We never totally entered eurocommunism, and Georges Marchais even supported the invasion of Afghanistan, which was a big mistake.

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But as early as the 1960s, the PCF began a rightward tilt to curry electoral favor and seek a left coalition with the compromised Socialist Party of Francois Mitterand.

This is coarse. There was no socialist party in the 1960s. The socialist party was created in 1971. The PCF supported Mitterrand for the 1965 presidential election because they didn't understood the importance of this new election which didn't existed before De Gaulle changed the constitution. At that time, Mitterrand didn't represented anything. In the 1970's the Communist party organized the "Left union" with the Socialist Party. When Mitterrand was elected in 1981, his programme was mostly written by the French communist party.

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This trend escalated under the leadership of Georges Marchais, who constantly repositioned the CP ideologically to earn “respectability” and middle-strata appeal.

Any intelligent communist would have tried to earn respectability. Lenin did so with the peasantry. The problem is that Georges Marchais revised Marxism. In 1976 he abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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Locked in this concessionary cycle, the Party leadership distanced itself from the Soviet Union and its history while seeking an image of bourgeois civility and sobriety.

The French communist party wasn't a soviet party, this statement is ridiculous. We had our own history and we even defended Stalin much longer than the Soviet party did. So there are no lessons to give.

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Thus began a long period of further compromise and decline.

Decline is not due to compromise. Why do you think the French communist party is one of the last communist survivors in Europe ? The French CP had to do some compromises. Mitterrand, of course, was a mistake, because the communist party was already declining (not the contrary !). It meant that we didn't had the force to control Mitterand. So, when he was elected, he betrayed us. But we didn't had much choice. Had we broken the Left union, what would have happened? People would have criticized us for breaking the alliance and helping objectively Giscard d'Estaing.

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After the fall of the Soviet Union, the leadership – first under Robert Hue and then Marie-George Buffet – the PCF embarked on a process of discarding Leninism entirely and refashioning the organization as a social-democratic formation—the so called “la mutation.” Believing that the departure of the Soviet Union reflected a failure and rejection of Leninism and revolutionary Marxism, Hue and Buffet sought to establish a moderate party of the left suitable to the new moment. Instead, the PCF membership and electoral strength sank dramatically, culminating in Buffet’s failure to attract even 2% of the votes in the 2007 Presidential first round election, a nadir unprecedented since the Second World War. The Party’s courtship with opportunism proved disastrous.

Indeed.

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Pierre Laurent, National Secretary of the PCF, sees the campaign as more than another call for electoral support; rather, he views the movement as an invitation to “prenez le pouvoir”—to take the power.

We must be very cautious with Pierre Laurent and Marie-George Buffet. They are not marxists, they never opposed openly to Robert Hue. Robert Hue thought that the PCF should disappear, and after Buffet's failure, there was a vote. We protected our party against the right wing, and Robert Hue left it. But it must not be forgotten that Pierre Laurent defended the dissolution. Many members of the party, especially from the left wing, feared that Laurent and Buffet would try to dissolve the party through the Left Front, like in Germany. What will happen after the presidential election? I don't know, some comrades believe that the different parties in the Left Front will unite in a new party.

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Christian Piquet, spokesperson for the Gauche Unitaire, a component of the Left Front, reminds us that with the campaign "We are building a force indispensable for the defeat of the right, and also for the redistribution of the cards on the Left." This resolve to unite the objective of defeating the right with strengthening the left is a mission lost on much of the left in Europe and the US, and a welcome reminder of the dialectics of Marxist politics.

I totally agree.

Tomorrow.

There is already some very positive news coming from our islands.

Do you mean the French overseas territories in the Pacific etc?
BTW how did they vote?

In what way, even French Guiana can't have results yet, surely?

They vote one day before we do.

Damn, the Exit Poll has Le Pen on 20% and Mélenchon on only 11.5%.

I know intention polls tend to underestimate the far-right vote (due to people not wanting to admit to being a fascist sympathiser) but what the hell happened?

I don't know. Wait and see. This is a very good film.

In 2007, the fascist vote was over-estimated.

Whitten wrote:

Damn, the Exit Poll has Le Pen on 20% and Mélenchon on only 11.5%.

I know intention polls tend to underestimate the far-right vote (due to people not wanting to admit to being a fascist sympathiser) but what the hell happened?

Immigration is a much bigger issue in France and Sarkozy's race-baiting strategy backfired. I had a feeling that Mélenchon's high popularity was hype. The FN tend to perform poorly in the National Assembly elections and it would be alarming if they made gains there.

The far-right tends to perform poorly five years after relative success but if they manage to repeat this success in 2017, it would be alarming indeed.

This is a rather sad development in my opinion.
In the times of horrible attacks on the working masses, Melenchon got less votes than the far-Right, and was beaten by neoliberal "Socialists".
Makes you wonder about the future of our movement...

Loz wrote:

This is a rather sad development in my opinion.
In the times of horrible attacks on the working masses, Melenchon got less votes than the far-Right, and was beaten by neoliberal "Socialists".
Makes you wonder about the future of our movement...

I already expect that .
The best candidates for France lost : Melenchon
Melenchon never had the chance to win since the system doens't want that.
It's sad to see if all people from FN vote in Sarkozy he will win :S

There are too many left-to-Hollande candidates and only one right-to-Sarkozy candidate. Besides, when the difference between the two center candidates is too narrow the so called "useful vote" tends to damage all the other candidates of the same wing. This "useful vote" was specifically harmful for the left in this election because the french left-wing electorate wants to make sure that Sarkozy doesn't get the second term.

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This is a rather sad development in my opinion.
In the times of horrible attacks on the working masses, Melenchon got less votes than the far-Right, and was beaten by neoliberal "Socialists".
Makes you wonder about the future of our movement...

Not really, since in 2007 the French communist party received less than 2%. If you add the left-wing and trotskyists candidates, you had about 9%... So we are increasing our forces. This is a great victory for fascism, but a victory for us also. Even if we expected more than that.

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There are too many left-to-Hollande candidates and only one right-to-Sarkozy candidate.

In this election Mélenchon gathered most of the left-to-Hollande voices.

The communist vote almost doubled since the 2010 local elections, I'd call that a victory.