ARTHAUD. With 0.6% of the vote, Nathalie Arthaud’s result in the first round of this 2022 presidential election remains in line with the scores of candidate LO in the last elections.
With 0.6% of the vote, the Trotskyist candidate finished last in the ranking of the 12 candidates in the first round. It is still nearly 200,000 French people (precisely 197,141) who chose to run for her, a score similar to that of 2017, where she obtained 0.64% of the vote (i.e. 232,384 voters). Like the anti-capitalist Philippe Poutou, she harbors revolutionary far-left ideas that go against the political system as we know it. If voting Lutte Ouvrière is a bet, many have done so in the past: we remember in particular the scores of Arlette Laguiller, former spokesperson and candidate for the party in the elections six times who had reached 5, 72% of the votes in the presidential election of 2002. This year, the useful vote benefited the rebellious Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to the detriment of the small candidates of the left, including Nathalie Arthaud.
The Lutte Ouvrière candidate gave a speech to her supporters in reaction to the announcement of the results of the first round of the presidential election. The workers’ camp warmly welcomed her. She thanked those who gave her their vote, thus expressing their confidence and their pride in “belonging to the workers’ camp”. Her speech centered on criticism of the two qualifiers for the second round, whom she sees as enemies of the working class that she ardently defends. Her vocabulary and ideas, structured by class struggle and Trotskyist ideology, served to describe the danger she saw in these “bourgeois” candidacies. She also spoke of the continuation of the “revolutionary struggle”, particularly in businesses and working-class neighborhoods. In the same way as Philippe Poutou, she wishes to raise forces to protest against the reforms to come, such as the change in the retirement age wanted by the outgoing president.
The two candidates for the final duel are, according to Nathalie Arthaud, “enemies of the working class”. She castigated Marine Le Pen, whom she considers to be a “bourgeois defender of capitalism with its inequalities, injustices and oppressions” and recalled that her party was “the heir of the supporters of French Algeria and the OAS” with in its shadow “fascist brotherhoods from the police and the army”. She portrayed her “anti-immigrant demagogy” which aims to “pitch workers against each other”, and thus “weaken them”. Nathalie Arthaud believes that she will work for the richest “in the same way as her predecessors in power”, but in an even “more reactionary” and “more authoritarian” way.
As for Emmanuel Macron, she says he is representative of his social class “to the point of caricature”, with his “contempt for social workers and the poor” and for “everything that does not come from above”. She accuses the promise of the candidate LREM to be the bulwark of the far right as a “lie”, believing that his five-year term has only “strengthened” it since the hatred he has aroused in popular circles has “pushed disoriented voters into the arms of Marine Le Pen”. His election will “not make the fascistic forces disappear”. “The workers do not have to support their future oppressor by their vote”, she concluded, thus giving no voting instructions. She then clarified on her Twitter account: “We have the choice between two enemies. On April 24, I will vote white”, adding that “the fight continues in businesses and working-class neighborhoods”.