 Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch and today we're going to be talking about a very important election that is set to take place in France on the 10th of April. Now this is a presidential election, of course, to determine the future of France in the coming years. A lot of candidates from the left, centre and right, one of the most hotly contested elections in recent times and a lot of political and social issues are at stake as well. So to talk more about this, we have with us Aurelie Dinara, who is a feminist researcher, a student of history as well as a political activist based in Paris. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Could you first talk a bit about the current political situation right now? We know that the first round is scheduled for April 10th. There's a lot of campaigning happening, polls show that there are a lot of changes happening in terms of preferences in recent times. So could you maybe first give us an outline of the current situation? Sure. Well, so as you said, there will be two rounds. So the French people will be called to vote on the presidential election on the 10th of April and then on the second round on the 24th of April, I think. And they will be called to decide whether to reappoint the current president Emmanuel Macron, who's a centre-right president, or to choose an alternative between the 11 other candidates that are present in this election. And this election is taking place obviously in a context marked by the Ukrainian war, as you can imagine, but also in a context that is still marked by the Covid crisis and also by a very deep social and ecological crisis in France. I think it's important to understand basically what are the issues before the voters in this presidential election to mention that the past five years, so the years of Macron's presidential term, have been really characterised by an important impoverishment of the lower classes and the working classes in France and by increasing inequalities. The French government has been accelerating a process of neoliberalisation of French policies that already started something like 40 years ago. They have been sort of implementing a project of bottom-up redistribution of sort of social and fiscal counterrevolution, if you want, basically cuts in the public budget, cuts in public services, and dismantling of the social state while at the same time giving money to flow to big firms and the richest people in France. And there's another point to mention about the current issues and the current landscape, which is the inaction of the French state during the five previous years regarding the ecological crisis. In fact, the French state has been convicted several times in the past few years by French courts for climate inaction. And so this is basically what's the landscape that French people have to deal with right now. The results of these policies of the French government are, as I said, growing inequalities and an impoverishment of the population, and a very important climate emergency. So we have basically more and more reports and surveys of different NGOs and associations that keep telling us every year how the richest people in France are getting richer and richer. To give you just a few examples, the five richest billionaires in France now own as much as 27 million of the poorest people in France. This is, I think, very significant. It has been growing worse in the past years. We have a situation now where 12 million people in France are unable to heat their homes properly. Eight million people depend on food assistance. Four million people are poorly housed in France. There are 300,000 people who are ruthless and something like six million people registered to the unemployment, to the job center in France, and probably even more than that is the number of people who are actually jobless. The billions or the hundreds of billions of euros that have been spent since the COVID crisis by the French government went mostly to big firms and the richest people in France. And aside from this economic and social sort of emergency, there is also this very bad climate emergency in France. The summers have been getting more hot every year. We have been having more floods and fires every year. And the last, you know, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the report of this IPCC shows that the consequences of global warming are going to be devastating for human populations among the world, including in France. And yet what's going on now in these weeks just before the election, as in the past few years actually, is that these ecological and social issues are almost completely eclipsed from the public and political debate, the media debate, which are very much centered on questions like immigration, Islam, and supposed insecurity in France. So, yes, basically I would say that the French voters will have to decide basically in April when they go voting between another five years of neoliberal and authoritarian policies with one of the candidates of the right, or a different road towards welfare distribution and climate action if they choose to go with the left. Absolutely. Right. You gave a very comprehensive outline of the kind of crisis France is facing. So, in this context, I just wanted to come to Emmanuel Macron himself, who's faced, of course, a lot of crisis. We know the Yellow West protests that took place. There have been climate protests. There's been widespread dissatisfaction among the working class with the way his policies, COVID-19 policies were. And we know that throughout the past few years, there were massive protests by trade unions on the issue of pension reforms, for instance. Despite all this, how has it been sort of, what is his current support base in terms of what are the kind of voters who are still gravitating towards them despite the various extent of social crisis that we have? Well, unfortunately, for the people, the working classes and the lower classes, Emmanuel Macron is actually polling. He's very probably going to be reelected. At least he's the favorite candidate for the election in April. He's polling around 28% right now. I think it's important to mention that actually in France at the moment, the different right-wing candidates, if you sum them up, amount to something like 75% of the polling, which is pretty bad. And Macron is getting 28% of these voting intentions. And I think this is due to the fact that Macron, basically, his popularity rate was pretty bad after he got elected. When he got elected, his popularity rate was already not amazing. And then it decreased a lot, especially during the movement of the Yellow Vests, which started in late 2018, and which went on actually for two or three years. It was very intense in the first year, and then people kind of forgot it was still going on. But actually, people were still mobilizing despite very intense repression. And so his popularity was exceptionally bad, probably the only other president who had the worst popularity than him in the past. In France was Francois Hollande, the socialist party candidate who was president just before Macron. And so unfortunately, during the COVID crisis, and especially lately with the Ukrainian war, Macron has been able to go up again a little bit in his popularity rates. He has been playing a lot on this Ukrainian war, playing the role of the sort of war leader, wearing sort of hoodies like Zelensky. It was quite ridiculous, but these communication sort of skills work to some extent. So yeah, he still has some quite good popularity. And I think in terms of his chances to win this election, he is very much advantaged by the reshaping of the political landscape in France in the past five years. Because as you may know, in France, the political landscape, which used to be historically dominated by a center left and a center right party, the Socialist Party and the Republican sort of ex-goalist party, they have been decreasing very much in the voting, in the votes and in the polls. And we have some new political parties that have emerged, especially Emmanuel Macron's Parti la République En Marche, that he launched in 2017, just before being elected five years ago, and which basically managed to capture votes from the center right and from the center left, sort of focusing his campaign in 2017 on a slogan saying, I am neither left wing nor right wing, but I'm both. And basically, this strategy has been very efficient. And he is still, even though it was obviously after he got elected that he was neither left nor left, and that he was very much a center right neoliberal extremist, he managed to stabilize his power and influence and networks. And he's still getting a lot of political staff and votes from the Socialist Party, which is polling very, very low right now. And just the last point on this, Macron is also obviously favored by the collapse of popularity of the left. We may get back to this issue later. And the increasing fragmentation of the right, even though the right and the far right has been increasing, has had increasing popularity in France, they are more fragmented than they used to be. And this is sort of favoring him for this election. Absolutely. And so in this context, of course, a lot of the media attention has been focusing on the right. That's where all the stories, all the media reports basically come from about Eric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen facing a challenge from Eric Zemmour, who's further to her right, and the kind of discourse that has been going by these candidates, which is there's racism, there's xenophobia, there's a hatred of outsiders. So could you also maybe take us to some of the social contexts which have actually led to such support for these kind of candidates and this kind of new point? Yes. So the social context is basically what I already mentioned about the increasing inequalities and the impoverishment of working classes and lower classes. Basically, the far right in France has been sort of taking advantage of what they call sort of trying to attract what they call the losers of globalization, but also the populations who live in rural, the peripheries of France and the rural regions of France, which have been objectively more and more isolated from the big urban centers of power in France. They have been sort of isolated, cut off from access to public services, hospitals, transports and so on. And this has fueled together with rising unemployment in some areas of the French population. This has fueled a growing resentment and a growing popularity of this far right. The historic party of the far right in France, sorry, is the Front National, the Nationalist National Front, which was rebranded a few years ago as Rassemblement Nationale, which started growing I think in the 80s and managed to get to the second round of the presidential election for the first time in 2002. And then again, at the last election in 2017, Marine Le Pen, the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was the historic leader of that party, she qualified for the second round of the election. And for the past years, basically the media have been telling us that this was going to happen again now in 2022. Now, the only difference between now and 2017 is that there is a new far right party in the run to the election party launched just a few months ago by Eric Zemmour, who is a former journalist, chronicler, and polemicist who got famous in the past years for participating in public television shows. He is particularly supported by Vincent Bolloré, who is one of the billionaires, the French billionaires who own a lot of media in France. He is the candidate of racist, sort of security obsessed proposals. He is obsessed with Islam. He's an extreme misogynist. And he has launched in a few months ago his party called Reconquête, which attracted some small far right and even neo-Nazi groups at his meetings. You can see people who basically raise their arms in a fascist fascist gesture. And he's now polling around 10 to 12 percent in the polls. So if you sum up these two parties, the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour's Reconquête, you get around 30 percent of the voting intentions right now in France, which is quite worrying. Right. And of course, finally, the question of the left, we do know that this time the left is a bit more divided than the previous time. On the other hand, we do also see that Jean-Luc Melancourt has been polling, his polling numbers have significantly improved in recent times as well. So could you maybe also take us through some of the policy frameworks that the left is pitching to the voters and how it appears and how it is different from the general consensus that the right brings? So as you said, there has been a collapse in popularity of left-wing parties, a very significant collapse in the past five years, I would say. There are several reasons for this. One of the reasons is the very disastrous five-year presidential term of Francois Hollande prior to Macron's term, who implemented neoliberal policies against labor laws and so on. It's also due in part to Macron launching his own party and capturing votes and political staff from the center left. It's due to also increasing increasingly high abstentionism in the lower working classes in France and it's undeniably due to the discourse of the media. The media in France, there is a big democratic problem regarding the media because there is an increasing concentration of the media between the hands of a few billionaires and these billionaires obviously favor right-wing and extreme right-wing discourses and candidates. But as you said, it may not be completely lost for the left and Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been spectacularly rising in the polls, in the voting intentions in the past few weeks. His party movement is La France en Soumise which was rebranded actually for this election l'Union populaire and which is trying to propose a radically different sort of set of proposals than these right-wing parties and trying to advance proposals for radical welfare distribution and ecological planning. So if you want, I can give you a few examples of what Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Union populaire are proposing. They are promising to raise the SMIC which is the minimum working income in France to 1,400 euros. They are proposing to bring back the retirement age to 60 years old whereas Macron and other candidates on the right are proposing to push it to 64-65 years old. They are also proposing to tax very much to implement an important tax on the religious to basically seize anything above 12 million euros in inheritances and to use this money to fund a sort of autonomy, a youth income of above 1,000 euros for the youngest who are studying. They also obviously propose to make massive investments in renewable energies and on renovating houses. And they also, one of their important proposals is a reform of the French constitution. So basically going to the Sixth Republic by basically organizing a constituent assembly which will be charged to write a new constitution, a more democratic constitution than the one we currently have. So right now Mélenchon and the Union populaire are polling around 14 to 15 percent. Five years ago Mélenchon almost qualified to the second round of the elections with above 19 percent of the votes. They really are clearly in a dynamic of improving their chances in this campaign. In the past months they've been attracting an increasing number of personalities from different associations, NGOs, intellectuals, intellectuals and activists from different horizons basically. Last Sunday they organized a big demonstration in Paris for the Sixth Republic and for a redistribution of wealth which attracted a very high number of people. There were around 100,000 people who took to the streets and who gathered in Place de la République in Paris. The feeling is that there is something going on. There is a possibility that Mélenchon could be passing to the second round of this election and this obviously would matter very much even if Mélenchon then doesn't get elected against Macron. The fact of just being at the second round would mean that we have two weeks of debates that instead of being centered on immigration and racial issues will be centered on social and ecological issues and it means that the next parliamentary elections that are going to take place in a few months, it will be more likely for the left to gain a higher scores in these elections and then to be able to build an opposition in the parliament and I think it also means that Mélenchon, France Insoumise, Union populaire will be in a better position to finally start building a real important opposition in France to make these social and ecological struggles alive in the public debate in France and I think this would be very important. Absolutely. Thank you so much for speaking to us on the various social contexts that are currently in France right now, the processes that are taking place. We will hopefully come back to you in a few weeks as well after the election for an analysis of what happens there. Thank you very much. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.