In each of the last few issues of Socialist Resistance I’ve written a fairly long piece on a faraway land of which we know little. This month it’s a place called France.

This is a draft on the presidential elections. It still needs a bit of work. I’m open to suggestions for a rousing closing paragraph.

The major parties in France are offering voters a choice between two equally unattractive options in the presidential elections. On the hard right, standing for the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) is interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy. This is a candidate who, in some countries, would probably have been forced out of office for abuse of power. Earlier this year he asked the domestic intelligence agency to investigate rival candidate Segolène Royal’s environment advisor. Last year he managed to get the editor of Paris Match sacked for publishing a photograph of his wife with her lover. When he was mayor of Neuilly a property developer gave him a discount of over one million euros on a deal. The newspaper Libération has run articles questioning the accuracy of his tax returns.

Sarkozy’s political programme borrows heavily from that of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far right Front National. When police used tear gas outside a Paris school while trying to arrest and deport a Chinese man who had come to pick up his grandchild Sarkozy said “illegal immigrants must be arrested wherever they are.” This comment from the man who had said that he would use a power hose to wash the “scum” out of the suburbs gives the lie to his claims to have mellowed and got in touch with his emotions.

Until recently it seemed certain that Sarkozy’s rival in the second round was going to be Segolène Royal of the Socialist Party. She got the left wing part of her election campaign out of the way in the first couple of weeks with promises about the minimum wage that have not been heard since. From then on she has been trying to fill the same right wing space as Sarkozy. Her speeches are now peppered with references to law and order, code for clamping down on unemployed youth. In a country where it is thought eccentric to fly the national flag outside the home she is suggesting that everyone do this on Bastille Day this year. Moving the debate onto themes of “national identity” and “what it means to be French” is accepting the terms of discussion set by the hard right.

Disillusionment has set in among many of the traditional supporters of the Socialist Party and many voters on the soft right find Sarkozy’s message too confrontational. This has opened a space for the surprise third candidate. François Bayrou describes himself as on the moderate right and is offering voters a bit of a pick and mix from the UMP and SP manifestos. But he agrees with both other parties on the need for an attack on the social benefits that French workers enjoy. He compared the 35-hour working week “the old tax on doors and windows”.

Although the perception abroad is that France is in a constant turmoil of class struggle. This is not true. There has been a low level of industrial militancy in recent years and a succession of neo-liberal reforms made possible by workers’ defeats. Union membership is low and both union leaders and social democrats are moving right too. But in 2005 the campaign against the European constitution won in defiance of all the establishment parties. This campaign was led by a broad anti-neo liberal coalition. Later that year there were riots across the country as the urban youth rebelled against poverty and racism. In 2006 a movement of youth and workers defeated an attempt to introduce a law which would have given young workers the type of precarious short-term contracts prevalent in England and the United States. But these are short periods of social explosions. The lessons are not fully developed and understood by the workers and youth who take part in them. They do not conclude from their brief experience of struggle that a militant political alternative is required. The “no” referendum campaign brought together members of the Socialist Party, the Greens, the far left and thousands of non-aligned citizens. But this alliance was not able to agree on a common approach when it came to election time. They knew what they were against but hadn’t reached agreement on what they supported and how to approach the question of government and political power.

These facts go a long way to explaining why the anti-neo liberal left is so fractured at the minute. In addition to Marie-George Buffet of the Communist Party and José Bové there are three Trotskyist candidates standing in the presidential elections: Olivier Besancenot of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, Arlette Laguiller of Lutte Ouvrière and Gérard Schivardi of the obscure and peculiar Workers’ Party.

The LCR has been widely criticised for standing Besancenot as a candidate. It has been accused of being sectarian. If this were true the other forces would have agreed a common candidate and Besancenot would be standing against this person. In fact the LCR said repeatedly that it was prepared to withdraw Besancenot and make compromises on its election programme to smooth the way for a unity candidate.

It is more accurate to say that the push to get an agreed candidate failed because there was no agreement on what type of relationship such a candidate would have to the Socialist Party. This would be a real problem if Royal was elected on her right-wing platform and the Communist Party agreed to enter government with her. The LCR demanded that before the election the unity candidate gave an undertaking not to enter this type of government. The Communist Party refused to make this pledge. Instead its rhetoric was about “uniting the left” staying mute on the Socialist Party’s rapidly developing Blairism.

But it is by no means clear that Royal will get elected. Opinion polls show that the combined left vote barely amounts to 40%. It is no longer even certain that she will make it into the second round as François Bayrou eats into her vote.

The LCR’s attitude was strongly influenced by observing the negative experiences of socialists in Brazil and Italy. Lula and Romano Prodi both had governmental coalitions that contained a spectrum of views from revolutionary Marxism to neo-liberalism. The radical political alternative in France cannot contain both those who supported the European constitution and those who fought it. The constitution was the neo-liberal manifesto for the continent. This rules out any type of coalition with the Socialist Party leadership. Every time the radical left makes an alliance with parties and organisations to its right it has to be aware of the constant pressure to move to the right and implement the neo-liberal agenda. By having the argument before the election this demoralising disaster is prevented.