--------- Forwarded message ---------- http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,686295,00.html Allez Arlette! Arlette Laguiller campaigns for violent revolution and an end to democracy. So why are 3.5 million French people going to vote for her in this weekend's presidential elections? Jon Henley on how a radical won the hearts of a nation Jon Henley Wednesday April 17 2002 The Guardian
If you believe the polls, in the first round of the presidential elections this Sunday, some 3.5 million perfectly reasonable French people will cast their vote for a 62-year-old retired typist fighting for the overthrow of parliamentary democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Not very many of Arlette Laguiller's supporters have a clue as to what those splendidly Bolshevik ideals mean, of course, and fewer still would want them actually put into practice. But then the diminutive Trotskyite's extraordinary and enduring popularity has never borne much relation to the public's opinion of her policies.
Arlette the Starlette, as she is affectionately known, is riding sky-high in this, her fifth presidential campaign. Credited with between nine and 10% of the first-round vote, she drew more than 6,000 near-hysterical fans to her final campaign meeting last weekend at the leading Paris rock venue le Zenith.
There are so many disillusioned socialists saying that they are going to vote for her, that the left's leading candidate, prime minister Lionel Jospin, has had to hastily reprofile himself as "the representative of the concrete left, the one that actually wants to govern and does not say - like Ms Laguiller - that it doesn't give a damn about what happens after the first round".
But Jospin cannot be too scathing about Laguiller. If he is to stand any chance at all of winning the second- round run-off on May 5, he will need her first-round supporters to back him against the conservative incumbent, Jacques Chirac. Laguiller, of course, has sworn that she will never endorse the prime minister, describing him as a "traitor to the working class" and a "capitalist turncoat".
In 1974, Laguiller, the voice and face of the shadowy Lutte Ouvrière, or Workers' Struggle party, was the first French woman ever to run for president - despite the fact that she believes (to quote the party magazine) that the aim of all workers must be to "destroy the apparatus of the bourgeois state, its government and its parliament, its courts, its police and its army, and seize power themselves directly because ballots do not change lives".
Back then, she got 2.3% of the vote. By 1995 she was polling 5.3%, and in regional elections three years later she won a similar percentage of the vote and collected 20 seats on regional councils. In 1999 she was elected an MEP. "She's so well known, she doesn't even need to campaign," says Jean-Marc Lech of the Ipsos polling agency.
This year's doubling in Laguiller's support is due mainly to the fact that the mainstream Communist party has been a part of Jospin's Socialist-led coalition for the past five years, and so it is tarred with his Blairite brush. But her doggedperseverance and increasingly endearing personality - which includes bursting into tears when interviewers attack her - are also a factor.
A recent survey by French Elle found that Laguiller was the one candidate out of the record 16 who qualified for the first round of the elections (including three other representatives of the French far-left) with whom voters would feel comfortable sharing their problems.
Her integrity certainly carries weight. She lives according to her principles, owning virtually nothing and never varying her message. "Before, people always used to criticise me for saying the same thing," she says. "Now that's become a quality, people say of me: she's sincere, she's faithful to her ideals. As if that was an unusual thing to be."
Arlette the Starlette lives in a two-room, 13th-floor council flat in the Communist-led Paris suburb of Les Lilas, and survives on a £1,000-a- month pension from Credit Lyonnais. She worked for the bank (albeit mainly as a full-time union organiser) from the age of 17, straight after leaving secretarial college, until retiring four years ago.
Born in 1940, Laguiller has been, in the words of one former colleague, "a committed revolutionary since roughly 1939". In 1960 she found her muse, Leon Trotsky, in a tract published at the height of France's bloody war against Algerian independence by the Union Communiste Internationaliste, an obscure outfit created after the second world war on the margins of the Fourth International.
Disbanded in the wake of the 1968 student uprising, the UCI - a few dozen militants - was reformed in secret in the early 1970s, with Lutte Ouvrière as its principal front. Laguiller's political career was launched, as the party's spokeswoman, in the 1973 general elections.
Lutte Ouvrière is an underground organisation. It has no HQ where the public can go for information, just a PO box number. Its leaders never speak in public and are known even to party activists only by their pseudonyms. There is a telephone number, but it is hard to find. Party members usually return calls from a public phone box because, in the words of one member, militants "live as if the police were spying on them - and are getting in training".
The French media have talked of tests that must be passed before a prospective member can join: selling the party newspaper, gaining a certain number of contacts. Members are asked to make "special financial contributions" from wherever they can find the money. Women who are particularly serious about their political activity are, it is widely rumoured, discouraged from having children.
"They make you read a novel, Domilita, which tells the story of a Bolivian militant who was arrested and tortured. She ended up talking because they threatened her children," one member told Libération. Starting a family is, in short, seen as becoming bourgeois - and thus incompatible with the revolutionary ideal.
The generally sweet-faced Laguiller says angrily that this is nonsense, part of a litany of evil tales cooked up by the capitalist media to frighten off would-be revolutionaries. She has even taken the Green MEP (and former hero of the student uprising of May 1968) Dany Cohn-Bendit to court for describing Lutte Ouvrière as a sect, and herself as the obedient servant of a cult headed by a shadowy guru known only as Hardy.
But she did, a month or so ago, admit to the really-not-very-proletarian gossip magazine Gala that although she had a man in her life, she "kept him well hidden" and that she had never had children because "my militant life makes me feel I'm fighting for every child in the world".
It has taken a long time, but the glossies have finally got hold of Laguiller. Gala was the first, showing the unreconstructed angel of the hard left in her flat, cooking a simple meal, flipping through a biography of Trotsky, and revealing that her entire MEP's salary is paid to Lutte Ouvrière. Paris Match followed.
Nowadays, she's such a draw that there's no chance of getting a personal interview. According to Caroline Monnot of Le Monde, Lutte Ouvrière is using the tactics that a movie star's agent would employ. She says that accreditations have to be applied for in advance and that there are waiting lists. And once in the presence of Laguiller, only three timed questions are allowed.
Laguiller's short-cropped hair and sensible shoes create a false impression of vulnerability, one that the iron-willed and self-sacrificing revolutionary is not unhappy to encourage. When she finally took to the stage at le Zenith last weekend, after the last strains of the Internationale had died away and the cries of "Arlette - revolution!" had waned, she appealed to her cheering fans: "Stop it! You'll make me cry."
But then, with her raucous trademark greeting of "Travailleuses, travailleurs", she's off into a familiar, if blistering, attack on "the bosses, the imperialists, the market traders and the parasite classes who exploit the workers". She wants wages raised; lay-offs by profitable companies outlawed; banking secrecy laws scrapped so that the workers can keep an eye on their bosses' dealings.
"Most of the candidates are socially and politically in the camp of the bourgeoisie," she says. "They are competing only to better the affairs of the bosses, the managers, the businessmen and the bankers. Me, I am from the workers' camp. It is their interests - moral, material and social - that I want to defend."
And after waiting more than 40 years, she is patient, Laguiller, very patient. "People are beginning to hear us," she says. "I'm not naive, I know it will take as long as it takes, but I am convinced that capitalism will not be the last form of society that we know. The revolution will be violent, but doubtless much less murderous than any war. So . . . it will come."
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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