France, its steeples, its cheeses (246 varieties according to General De Gaulle), and then therefore, its Trotskyist candidates. This year, two rivals who have not left each other for ten years, both candidates for the third time, after 2012 and 2017: Philippe Poutou, for the New Anticapitalist Party, and Nathalie Artaud under the colors of Lutte Ouvrière .
>> To read also: Nathalie Arthaud and Philippe Poutou, similar and yet so different
It seems like a lot, and yet there is low tide. During the presidential elections of 2002 and 2007, there were three Trotskyist candidates. With, in addition, a suitor from the Workers’ Party, Daniel Gluckstein then Gérard Schivardi.
It’s a bit like in those villages where neighboring families haven’t spoken to each other for generations without even remembering the reason for the anger. In this case, the cause of the quarrel is the split of the Fourth International in 1952. Since then, several families have been fighting over the pieces of the true cross of the guru, Leon Trotsky.
The most austere is Lutte Ouvrière, mainly established in factories, which evolves on the margins of clandestinity, and was for a long time embodied by Arlette Laguiller, six times a candidate. A branch more sensitive to societal issues, to feminism, to minorities, those known as the “Pablists”, founded the Revolutionary Communist League of Alain Krivine, recently deceased, which became the NPA of Olivier Besancenot.
And then there are the Lambertists, of Pierre Lambert, real name Boussel, presidential candidate of 1988. They have a particularity: to influence the left, they practice entryism, that is to say that They infiltrate trade unions, like Force Ouvrière, or parties like the PS in the past, which welcomed Lambertist activists who became famous: Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, Jean-Luc Mélenchon or Lionel Jospin.
What brings them together is their hatred of what they call “bourgeois democracy”. That is to say, representative, parliamentary democracy, in short, democracy period. Just listen to Philippe Poutou and Nathalie Artaud wish that “everything blows up” for “get rid of the capitalists” and hope that “everything ends up being settled in the street”!
While waiting for the revolution, they use the elections to make themselves heard, even if the ballot boxes have no legitimacy in their eyes. And it is in this that we recognize the incomparable greatness of democracy: it authorizes the competition of even those who want to bring it down.