The French Left, Le Pen, and the 2002 Presidential Runoff
The LCR, Chirac, and what the 2002 runoff actually permitted
Read alongside the FAQ on ‘lesser evil’ and anti-fascism.
The vote gets remembered wrong. In the received account, the spring of 2002 is when the Fourth International’s French comrades made their peace with lesser-evilism: Le Pen through to the runoff, Chirac the only barricade left standing, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire calling to bar the fascist in the booth as much as in the street. From that memory, a general permission is drawn. When the danger is real enough, so the story goes, the revolutionary left holds its nose and votes for the bourgeois man. Reach for 2002 as your precedent, and it appears to open the door to every defensive vote you have wanted to cast since.
It opens nothing. Read properly, 2002 is the case that shows how much has to be true before such a vote is even allowed, and therefore how rarely the conditions arrive at all. The LCR was right that April. The mark of taking that judgement seriously is refusing to pretend its conditions are present when they are not.
Three conditions
So begin with the conditions, and treat them as a bar rather than a description.
A defensive vote clears the bar only on three counts together. The threat has to be a qualitative leap in the form of the state, fascism reaching for power, not a marginal shift in how bourgeois rule is administered. The vote has to be cast from independence already built, by a left that has stood on its own account first and so has something of its own to protect. And it has to be welded, from the morning after, to the struggle against the man it just helped elect. Miss one and the vote stops being defensive at all, and becomes capitulation in the mask of tactics.
Measure 2002 against that bar and it holds, barely.
What had happened was a shock, and the shock did the official left’s thinking for it. Jospin, the Socialist prime minister, the man everyone had pencilled into the runoff, went out in the first round. Le Pen came second. That left Chirac, the incumbent conservative, as the only name on the second ballot that was not the Front National’s, and within days the whole official left had thrown itself behind him: the Socialists who had just been humiliated, the Communists, the union federations, marching to re-elect a president most of them despised under the banner of the republican front. The question for revolutionaries was what to do inside that stampede.
Against that stampede, the far left had just made its strongest combined presidential showing of the Fifth Republic to that point: Besancenot for the LCR, Laguiller for Lutte Ouvrière, nearly 2.85 million votes between the two candidacies before a single anti-fascist demonstration had assembled. Independence built, and visibly. The threat was Le Pen, and whatever the arguments about how far the Front National had by then travelled toward fascism proper, the runoff put a man of that lineage within reach of the Élysée: a leap, not a shuffle. Jospin’s plural left had spent five years alienating the working class it claimed to speak for. Alienating is too soft. It had governed against them, privatised more than the right had dared, and then affected surprise when the vote drained rightward and away. And the LCR did not stop at the booth. Its Political Bureau, after an initial silence it never quite lived down, called to bar Le Pen while naming Chirac as one of the architects of the road Le Pen walked, and tied the vote to preparing, from the Monday morning, the fight against everything Chirac would do to workers, youth and immigrants the instant he was returned. Three conditions, met at once, in the presence of hundreds of thousands already in the streets. That is what clearing the bar looks like. It looks like almost nothing else.
Which is why Lutte Ouvrière deserves better than the walk-on part the older version of this argument gave it.
LO refused. Both men were servants of the bourgeoisie; no worker’s ballot would go to either; Le Pen would be beaten through the struggle or not at all, and to say otherwise was to tell the popular classes that a cross on a ballot could do the work only mass action could do. Call that a hang-up the LCR wisely transcended and you have the story backwards. LO was stating the default. It is the line the whole tradition holds by instinct, that the class owes no debt to any manager of capital, ever, and the LCR’s vote was a narrow, argued, heavily conditioned exception to that default, not a supersession of it. You do not have to end where LO ended to see that LO was guarding an important principle. Every exception to the rule has to earn its way past a very high wall, and the wall is what LO was defending.
What would fail the tests of 2002?
Take the conditions in turn and the failures are not hard to find. A single parliamentary seat that changes no government, that moves no lever of the state, is no qualitative leap. A contest a left enters with nothing built, no independent showing of its own, no forces to defend, fails the second condition before the first is even reached: there is no independence there to protect, only a borrowed preference between other people’s candidates. A vote attached to no subsequent struggle is cast and then forgotten; it defends nothing. And a ‘lesser evil’ who is simply a more presentable bourgeois politician, or worse a joke candidate, a spoiler run to embarrass, is no barrier to anything, only a way of feeling clean while the far right sets the terms.
None of those cases is exotic. Each is the ordinary shape of the lesser-evil appeal as it actually reaches us, which is the trouble. The appeals almost never announce themselves as capitulation. They arrive urgent and faintly embarrassed, framed as the obvious thing any sensible person would do, and the reasoning has a life of its own once you accept it in a single case. If you may vote against the worse candidate here, then why not there. If there, why not everywhere the far right stands a candidate. And by the time the logic has run its course, though perhaps it never fully runs, perhaps there is always some comrade at the back of the room holding the line, the left finds itself doing something it never actually decided to do.
It is marching behind Chirac in every constituency.
Lesser-evilism is not our road
Detach the defensive vote from its three conditions and a bounded exception becomes a standing rule, and the standing rule is the one that installs the far right as the permanent backdrop against which the left is forever asked to vote for austerity, for the deportations, for the cuts, always as the price of stopping something worse. That is not anti-fascism. It is the normalisation of the fascist as the fixed point of the political universe, the thing that is simply there, that we organise our votes around the way you organise a room around a pillar you cannot remove. 2002 done once, and hedged to the hilt, was a one-off. 2002 turned into a principle is a life sentence.
Which is why the argument matters as more than history. The lesser-evil appeal recurs, cycle after cycle, wherever the far right stands and a more presentable candidate stands against it, and each time it arrives dressed as common sense. Set the recurring case against the bar. A single seat that shifts no government: no leap in the form of the state. A left with next to nothing of its own built on the ground it is asked to vote on: no independence to defend. A vote that ends on polling day: nothing welded to it. The danger being real, and it often is, does not turn a symbolic ballot into the barricade of 2002. The revolver analogy the companion FAQ leans on holds only where there is a revolver. What the 2002 comrades earned, at a bar set this high, was the right to cast one defensive vote and keep their independence intact. What almost everyone has wanted from them since is a blank cheque made out in advance. The bar exists so the cheque stays unsigned. Whether the left can hold that line when the next threat arrives closer than a symbol and further off than a fascist within reach of power: that is the question 2002 leaves open, and it is not obvious the tradition has an answer ready to hand.