Europe and its old, declining Capitalism has become a focus for all the pressures emanating from the world capitalist crisis, from the competition of America, the theater of the renewed conflict between America and post Soviet, restorationist Russia, the direct recipient of the impact from the Middle East explosions - and the arena for a new stage of mass class confrontations. The rejection of the EU Treaty in the referendums in France and Netherlands in 2005 and the mass youth movements in France and Greece in 2006-2007 are the lightning before the storm.
The crisis of the entire EU is clearly shown in France. The bourgeoisie supported the right wing populist Sarkozy to lead to electoral victory a hard line Right, incorporating the electoral base of the far right of Le Pen, with a program of class war against the French working class and youth as well as a rallying call for a class war all over Europe to finish with all the social resistances to neo-liberal policies manifested so far.
The driving force behind Sarkozy's ascent to power and for his anti-working class, anti-youth, anti-immigrant, anti-"May '68" program is the decline and crisis of European Capitalism and particularly of French Capitalism, which faces a rapid deterioration in every aspect and an enormous public debt over-shadowing that of Italy's.
Sarkozy pretends that he is a new Thatcher marking a decisive turning point for a capitalist offensive against all workers' rights in France and Europe. He wants to achieve his goals by precipitating a series of anti-popular counter-reforms in the first 6 months to defeat the social resistances of the masses. He wants to hit many aims with just one shot in his gun. If he fails the result will be disastrous for the bourgeoisie in France and in Europe. The hubris of his arrogant position has provoked reactions even during the electoral battle. When its was announced between the two rounds of the parliamentary elections that an increase of the VAT from 19% to 25% will be implemented, the right wing ruling Party of Sarkozy lost " about 60 seats in Parliament" according to the former French right wing PM Raffarin, preventing a landslide electoral victory. In any case, the ascent of Sarkozy's populist Right to power marks a new phase of escalation of class confrontations not solely in France but on the entire European Continent.
To be a new Thatcher, Sarkozy has to clash and defeat the working class and the youth and overcome the new financial and economic crisis that are building up in the main centers of the world economy. Sarkozy cannot be a new Thatcher. Thatcherism was the starting point of the international neo-liberal offensive of capital, the initial stage of the finance globalization at the end of the 20th century to defeat the trade unions and the strength of the working class, to stop the revolutionary wave world wide that followed the collapse of the post war Bretton Woods settlement. Sarkozy comes after the exhaustion of that period of offensives initiated by Thatcher and Reagan; an exhaustion manifested by a series of financial shocks, failure of the neo-liberal policies to give a solution to the systemic crisis, the generalized instability of today's world capitalist economy as well as by political crisis, mass rebellions and wars.
Sarkozy's strength is filling the vacuum left by the disintegrating center left Socialist Party and even of the far Left. While a social radicalization of the masses and a left turn was expressed in the victory of the "No" in the referendum on the EU Treaty, in the rebellions in the ghettos around Paris and other metropolitan centers, in the movement against the CPE, the entire political system of the country turned to the right: Sarkozy's UMP incorporated the far right racist program and constituency of Le Pen; Segolène Royal's Socialist Party called for class peace, promoted a liberal program indistinguishable form the Right's, and came closer to a section of the Right around Bayrou pretending to be the "Center"; the majority of the far left tail-ended the Socialist Party and Royal and called (including Besancenot's LCR and Laguiller's Lutte Ouvrière) to vote for her in the second round.
The electoral collapse of most of the left, from the Communist Party to Lutte Ouvrière (LO), was not the consequence, as the claim goes, solely of the of its fragmentation, the lack of a unitary Presidential candidate etc., of their adaptation to the Socialist Party as the "lesser evil" and as "line of resistance" to Sarkozy's offensive. LO, particularly, after its previous electoral triumphs in 1995 and even 2002 with more than a million and a half votes, manifested a growing political conservativism, rejecting its own project for a new workers' party as "premature", expelling all those supporting such a project, rejecting any fight for the Fourth International, remaining in a short sighted day to day syndicalist routine adapted to the national environment, tail-ending most of the time the French Communist Party and later Segolène Royal's candidacy in the second round.
The relative success of the independent candidacy of Olivier Besançenot of the LCR, surpassing by far in votes the Communist Party and LO, was achieved because it refused the open capitulation to a strong tendency within the LCR itself to support the perspective for a future new "plural left" Center Left government of the SP supported by the CP and most of the anti-globalization movement. A strong minority of the French Section of the USFI (41% in the last Congress of the LCR in June 2006 when a 59% majority voted for Besancenot's independent candidacy) openly fought against the independent candidate of their own organization, some of them (such as the Cliffites supporters of the IS Tendency and other movementists within the League) fanatically advocating the candidacy of Jose Bové, the agrarian syndicalist, anti-globalization hero for the movementists, who defended the "national sovereignty of French food" and called from the beginning for a vote to Royal in the second round.
Despite his success, Besancenot himself made the same call in the evening of the first round, while his electoral campaign never superseded programmatically the framework of a militant, democratizing reformism.
The so-called "radical left" in France, as previously in Italy or in Brazil is becoming or tends to become a force sustaining bourgeois Center Left governments of class collaboration. In Italy, Bertinotti, previously hailed as the leader not only of Rifondazione Comunista but of the "no-global" "movement of the movements" has joined together with his Party and most of the internal factions, including the supporters of the USFI, the Center Left Prodi government and gave it repetitively a vote of confidence, even when this government renewed the presence or sent imperialist troops in Afghanistan and Lebanon. "Sinistra Critica", which incorporates the USFI Italian Section in Rifondazione Comunista, after voting many times its "confidence" to this imperialist government, only lately took its distance, while still refusing to orientate itself into the building of a new independent workers' Party. Our comrades of the Italian Section of the CRFI, on the contrary, became the target of a vicious witch hunt after their leader Marco Ferrando's courageous anti-imperialist position on Iraq and Palestine, breaking from the Rifondazione Comunista when it joined the bourgeois government, and launching the movement to constitute an independent Communist Workers Party, the Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori (PCL).
The CRFI had warned last year: "There is a right wing drift of the Parties of the so-called "European Anticapitalist Left" merging with the "European left party" that unites the social reformists and re-cycled Stalinist parties in the European Union. These so-called "mass anti-capitalist parties" from the start had a political orientation to unite in a common "intermediary" organization forces of a reformist political origin with those coming from a revolutionary tradition. Now, in the new conditions of class polarization in Europe, there is not much space for an "intermediary" space and this orientation leads into abandonment of a relatively autonomous position, accommodation with reformism and integration to the bourgeois political system, including in some cases such as in Italy, integration to bourgeois governments." (CRFI Executive Council Statement, August 29-September 3, 2006).
The CRFI calls all the class struggle organizations and fighters of the Left opposing capitulation to imperialism, to the Center Left and class collaboration, to discuss the political challenges posed by the changes in the international situation and to work jointly with the CRFI for a European Conference to elaborate our revolutionary tasks today.