DO

Emmanuel Macron has tried to dismiss the gilets jaunes as having failed to understand the environmental question, in a bit to deny their movement credibility. The protestors’ own slogans — insisting that economic justice and climate justice are the same fight, because the people responsible for their day-to-day hardships are the same ones responsible for environmental problems — have powerfully rebutted the various smears. They have shown that confronting the obscene division of wealth in society is key to creating a sustainable economic model. This is a sign of the gilets jaunes’ maturity: they are far more attuned to the climate crisis than the government itself is.

As you say, Macron’s strategy has been to turn everything into a rerun of the second round of the presidential election, setting his own LREM party against Le Pen’s RN (ex-FN). Everything is then a matter of mobilizing progressives against the apparent fascist threat. This is damaging in a vote like the European elections when there is low turnout and the middle classes are most mobilized. And we don’t want Macron to be able to claim that he has a mandate just because turnout is low: our main fight in this election is against abstention.

At the same time, Macron is not all-powerful, and his bid to pose as the resistance to the far right clashes with his bid to create a “party of order” uniting conservatives. His government has taken an authoritarian turn through the gilets jaunes protests in particular, with some ten thousand arrests and two thousand injured. We haven’t seen this since the war in Algeria — and that was, indeed, a war.

Fundamental rights are under attack, and emergency laws have been introduced which have been condemned even by the United Natioins. The Interior Minister Christophe Castaner has posed for photos with his far-right Italian counterpart Matteo Salvini and even copied his rhetoric about NGOs who “help smuggle refugees.” The leading candidate for Macron’s LREM party at the European elections, Nathalie Loiseau, has even been found to have stood on a far-right list at university.

None of these problems for LREM automatically mean that La France Insoumise will benefit. And certainly we need to do more than unite the Left, or the various parties of the traditional left. Our aim is not to unite a bunch of acronyms, but to federate the people itself. They don’t necessarily want to vote in the European elections, but the gilets jaunes movement shows how the old forms of political alliance and representation on the Left are falling by the wayside. The point for us isn’t to add up vote totals among left-wing parties, but to bring together the people in struggle, from the gilets jaunes to the youth on the climate march. That is exactly what our movement is about.