Dec. 4, 2024—In a short video, leading French political figure Jacques Cheminade reacted to the fall of the Michel Barnier government this evening. The fall came as a result of a vote of no-confidence against the budget Prime Minister Michel Barnier presented, initiated by the left wing, La France Insoumise (LFI), but joined by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Altogether 331 members of parliament, more than half, approved the vote of no-confidence.
“The Time Has Come for a Popular Unity against the Financial Oligarchy and War,” is the title of Cheminade’s statement. The official statements by Le Pen and by Éric Coquerel for LFI were not up to the situation to say the least. Le Pen called it the “end of an ephemeral government,” and Coquerel said it was “the end of the presidential mandate” of Macron.
The government and the right wing supporting Barnier, however, are trying to use the “instability” to blackmail the country. Yet they are the ones who created the instability, stated Cheminade, by turning management of the French debt over to the “financial feudal powers,” a term used by the National Council of the Resistance at the end of World War II, which inspired the preamble of the French Constitution.
This vote of no-confidence was delivered by a coalition of contraries, but only at the level of political labels and leaders, said Cheminade. “We must come back to a reality principle,” he said, adding: “what the French are demanding is a real popular bloc, which deals with the true problems. Stopping the race towards war in which we are engaged, which was raised by nobody at these events; stopping the domination and the constraints imposed by those financial feudalistic forces on France, through their representatives, including in the Bank of France. Stopping the narratives of the media which support the idea of rearmament, support the financial oligarchy and promote the war. …
“Today my heart is with the teachers, the railway workers at the SNCF, and all those whom the current system in the way it functioned for more than the past 40 years had reduced to bankruptcy in the firms where they worked. Therefore, the fight, the fight of all patriots is to create the conditions for this new popular bloc to emerge. And this will be a difficult task; it will require rigor and even sacrifice, but will be a task for the truth, and for justice, and it will be a task that will again give back to France its place in the world.
“Today, whenever anyone mentions France, anywhere in the world, they smile, even laugh. And no! We have to put a stop that. And in order to do so, we need a veritable national unity, like that created by the National Resistance Council (CNR) and by the program the National Resistance Council allowed to be created in 1945. Oh, there were contradictions, lots of contradictions in that CNR, but there was a strong commitment to rebuild France, to create true human labor, to educate the workforce in science in order to improve their jobs … and a true policy for housing….
“That is what I would have liked to have heard in the National Assembly ... but there was no reality about where we are. And the principle of reality is what needs to be brought back onstage, and I think the French are ready to hear it, and they will show their demand for that unity that we need if we expect to give back to France the idea of the Free French.”