[The following statement was released on March 5 by the Central Committee of the Ligue Communiste, French section of the Fourth International. It was printed in the March 9 issue of the Ligue's newspaper, Rouge.
[The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
From this point on, the URP [Union des Républicains de Progrès — Union of Republicans for Progress] "majority," bankrupt, splattered with scandal, judged and condemned by the workers, is a minority in the country -able to draw only 35 percent of the votes cast.
The slickness of electoral gerrymandering, rigged to aid the URP, and support from the reformers may allow the Gaullists to maintain a slim majority in parliament.
If that is the case, then after the second-round vote is in, the Pompidou government, already battered and confronted both with a working class enriched by the May 1968 experience (one that more and more feels its own strength) and with growing social problems, will be nothing but a caretaker regime, constantly threatened with parliamentary or governmental crisis.
Considering the efforts expended, the Union of the Left did not do much better than its parties did in 1967. Moreover, many workers supported the Union of the Left more in order to fight the UDR [Union des Démocrates pour la République- Union of Democrats for the Republie] than because they agreed with the content of the common program. They hoped to open the way for the deep changes they desire by throwing out the rotten UDR.
Now, by retreating before Pompidou's blackmail about disorder, by saddling itself with respect for the 1958 Gaullist constitution, which was nothing but the legalization of a mil- March 26, 1973
itary coup d'etat, the Union of the Left is demonstrating its own trepidation.
And this even though the only way to win over people who are wavering and to bolster unity is to show an iron desire to beat the UDR by any means necessary, to throw Pompidou out, and to sweep aside his constitution.
The Ligue Communiste and Lutte Ouvrière have shown that a revolutionary current exists even on the electoral level. The large number of meetings and the size of the workers' mobilizations even more than the electoral results show that there is a force for which the only real solution to the crisis of the system is the revolutionary transformation of society and the building of a socialist society.
From now on, whatever the outcome of the elections, the problem of post- March is starkly posed. The parties of the United Left, complete prisoners of parliamentary cretinism, can come forward with no solution.
Nevertheless, as far as social demands are concerned, a big backlog remains to be made up. Many questions were in effect left hanging in the hope of winning a general resolution of problems through an electoral victory over the UDR.
Nevertheless, the size of the mobilizations of youth against capital's army and the struggles over the question of abortion testify to the depth of the regime's crisis.
Nevertheless, waiting for the 1976 presidential elections to settle accounts on the social and political levels is out of the question.
On the second round, we will not do anything that could indirectly favor the victory of the bourgeois candidates of the URP and that could thus serve the left parties as a pretext to explain their own capitulation.
We think that the electoral gains of the Union of the Left will still be seen by the workers as a shifting of the relationship of forces in their favor and as an encouragement to struggle.
This is why, without in the slightest suggesting support to the content of the common program or to the reformists, traitors, and capitulationists who express it, we call for a vote for the candidates of the Union of the Left on the second round as a means of fighting the URP.
Nevertheless, we will not call for a vote for candidates of the Union of the Left who agreed between the two rounds to make changes in the alliance in order to gain the support of the reformers.
Once again it has been shown that elections can settle nothing. The workers can have confidence only in themselves and in their own mobilization to defeat the employers, destroy the bourgeois state, and lay the foundation of a different society, a socialist society.