What Future for the Anti-liberal Movement?

What next steps for the anti-liberal movement? Can the disagreement concerning the candidature for the presidential election be surmounted? How?

"The passage by force (for the candidacy) of the French Communist Party (PCF), and, on another scale, the refusal of the leaders of the Communist Revolutionary League (LCR) to engage in the process, will leave scars", said Christophe Aguiton, interviewed in the newspaper Libération. To the question as to whether certain people had not tried "to redefine a Left of the Left over the ruins of the PCF", he acquiesced, and said "But this was not done, and it is an illusion, because it is necessary to rebuild, taking into account collective experiences and histories." But, according to him, "we can predict that this movement will persist, and will be able to change the odds on the Left".

"This is a hard blow to the unitary dynamic", declared, for her part, Clémentine Autain, once the results were known for the vote by members of the communist party. Considering that the candidature of Marie-George Buffet "had not received double consensus", the elected Paris official, herself a candidate for the anti-liberal candidacy, holds that the Buffet candidacy is "a candidacy of the PCF", and that "the multiplicity of candidates now positioned to the left of the Socialist Party will not permit a unitary dynamic."

Furthermore, two members of the National Council of the PCF, Pierre Zarka and Isabelle Lorand, who asked for the withdrawal of the candidacy of Marie-George Buffet, judge, in a communiqué, that the result of the consultation with the communists is "bad news", and that it leads the PCF to "quit the unitary process". They accuse the party leadership of "creating conditions in recent weeks for a veritable collapse into self-interest concerning their organizational identity."

It is an entirely different vision of things that is expressed in a text that communist militants are to distribute in the form of a handbill, starting today. Reaffirming their engagement to the construction of "an assembly for the presidential and legislative elections, to transform the landscape on the Left, and to construct a majority aimed at attacking inequalities and suffering". They recall the vote of more than 61% of the collectives in favor of Marie-George Buffet, adding "Ever since that vote, the process has been blocked, and weeks pass during which the national organizations fail to arrive at an agreement on their candidate."

According to the PCF, it is essential for the people’s anti-liberal Left to make their views heard during the electoral campaign, and to this end it calls on "all those socialists, communists, ecologists, voters of the Left and Extreme Left", who are engaged in the unitary movement.