Toulouse. Faced with Macron and Le Pen, all in the street this Sunday!
Sunday’s date obviously echoes the aftermath of Sunday night’s results and the resulting 2017 remake. With massive abstention reaching 26%, it is Marine Le Pen and outgoing President Emmanuel Macron who will be in the second round. The climate of this one will therefore be 100% reactionary and very different from that of 2017.
Indeed, the far right has gathered 30% between the candidate of the National Rally and the ultra-reactionary figure of Eric Zemmour who have both surfed with their xenophobic ideas on the breach opened by the various governments for decades and more. particularly by the Macron five-year term. The “president-candidate” has indeed allowed a normalization of the far right with his repressive management of social mobilizations such as the Yellow Vests as well as through the various reactionary or Islamophobic laws that he has put in place. It will be much more difficult this year to embody the “Republican Front” which allowed him to win in 2017. As Sunday’s call shows, whether Macron or Le Pen is not by the elections therefore that we can count on an improvement in our situations, but through solidarity in the mobilizations:
“We are not fooled, for years successive governments have been conducting anti-social policies by repressing our struggles (police and judicial violence) and seeking to divide by opposing certain parts of the population. This strategy is fertile ground for far-right ideas that need little fighting regardless of the labels behind which they hide. »
Moreover, Sunday’s rally is not an isolated event. Just hours after the first-round finalists were announced, spontaneous protests took place in Rennes and Lyon [ https://www.revolutionpermanente.fr/Deuxieme-tour-Macron-Le-Pen-des-manifestations-spontanees-a-Lyon-et-Rennes-dimanche-soir ] . Bringing together several hundred demonstrators in both cases, these demonstrations, which were repressed by the police, saw the rejection of a neo-liberal and reactionary policy which is embodied in the two candidates in different ways. This rejection was also seen in the youth where a mobilization is also being built.
On Monday, students began to occupy one of the buildings of the École Nationale Supérieure Jourdain with a call to launch a national mobilization by occupying schools and universities. [ https://twitter.com/yeezlouise/status/1514177993446408195?t=L2L044F35IreBVvB9tSc0A&s=19 ] . Tuesday, it was in Rennes that an AG was held with more than 150 students in order to organize a mobilization against Macron and Le Pen. Finally, today a General Assembly is also held at the Sorbonne University with an amphitheater filled with more than 500 students with the watchword “Ni Le Pen ni Macron”. Similarly, this Tuesday 12, a general assembly brought together more than 150 people at P8 to demand the registration and regularization of all refugee students regardless of their origins, against racist sorting. Whether in the street or in the universities, a response the day after the 1st round is therefore already forming.
Sunday’s rally carried out by the Antifascist coordination of Toulouse and its surroundings is therefore in line with these mobilizations. This coordination which has just been created and “which brings together various movements, collectives and unions” calls on all the other trade union organizations or not, collectives or associations to join the rally to prepare beyond the Sunday rally a response to the Toulouse scale.
While these various mobilizations show the path to follow, we must now prepare for the third social round through the streets, our places of study and work in the face of the future five-year period which will be made up of attacks on our social camp, whether either Macron or Le Pen. It is necessary to create a block of resistance from below to defend itself, but also to counter-attack in the next social mobilizations which promise to be explosive.