"France: United Radical Left Campaign Gathers Momentum"

Murray Smith, Paris, Green Left Weekly, March 3, 2004

The united campaign being waged by France's two largest revolutionary
socialist parties — the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) and Workers
Struggle (LO) — for the March 21 regional elections is getting a good
reception.On February 6, 3000 people attended the meeting that launched the campaign
in Ile-de-France (the region around Paris). The packed meeting was addressed
by Arlette Laguiller of LO and Olivier Besancenot of the LCR, the parties'
candidates in the last French presidential election.

Every week there have been LCR-LO campaign meetings in the main provincial
centres and in many smaller towns. Some of the meetings in medium-sized
cities have been filled to overflowing.

On February 16, for example, 1100 people came to hear Laguiller and
Besancenot in Tours. There have also been meetings of 600 in Amiens and
Besancon, 500 in Poitiers, 450 in Strasbourg and 400 in Limoges.

An opinion poll conducted on February 10-11 by the TNS-Sofres institute for
the newspaper Le Monde and other media outlets, puts the LCR-LO list on
7.5%. This is a national figure and indicates that the list could break
through the 10% barrier needed to get regional councillors elected in at
least one or two regions.

The same poll shows a combined total of 37.5% for reformist Plural Left
alliance made up of the Socialist, Communist and Green parties. These
parties running joint lists in most regions.

The main government party , the centre-right Union for a Presidential
Majority (UMP), is on 17% and its ally cum-rival, the Union for the French
Democracy (UDF), on 9%.

The far-right National Front (FN) of Jean-Marie Le Pen is currently credited
with 15.5%, which is roughly what the FN received in the last regional
elections in 1998.

The LCR and LO have been taking maximum advantage of the (too rare)
invitations to take part in TV debates. On February 23, Besancenot
confronted Marine Le Pen, who is being groomed as her father's successor and
presented as the “human face” of the FN, on prime-time TV and radio.

Besancenot's aim in accepting to debate Le Pen was to cut across her party's
attempts to appeal to working-class voters on social issues and show that
its economic and social program is the same as the program of the employers'
organisation MEDEF. He succeeded in putting Le Pen so much on the defensive
that she was reduced to regurgitating the usual stale old anti-communist
jibes.

While taking advantage of every opportunity to gain mass media coverage,
with no rich backers or powerful allies in the media, the LCR-LO campaign
will be relying on hard work on the ground, in the workplaces and
neighbourhoods, to get its arguments across.