Small moments of truth

April 22. First round of the French elections. 10 candidates. Sarkozy 26% in the latest polls and Hollande 28%. (But a run off with only two candidates in round two, gives Sarkozy 44% against Hollande's 66%.) Le Pen mark 2 is polling 16% at the moment while Melanchon, the candidate of a left bloc around the French Communist Party, is also on 16% and rising.

May 6. Greek parliamentary elections. New Democracy and PASOK - the parties of the ruling coalition - now down to 36.5% in the polls from over 80% in the last elections. Latest polls predict a one seat majority for the ruling coalition. All the other (up to seven) parties are anti-austerity but two are right and extreme right and the two main parties of the left (who poll over 10%) are split. (A united left bloc might have doubled that support and would certainly have increased the open wound in the dying PASOK according to Greek commentators.)

Through the murk can be seen a new political shift in Europe. We can see both sides.

In France, despite Hollande's undoubted intention to make peace with austerity, the shift is decisively to the left. If Melanchon equals Le Pen (coming from virtually nowhere) and Le Pen's vote rises no higher than her father's at the last election, France will have generally shifted to the left politically and also halted the march of the far right minority. It will clear the way for an entirely new question.

'Do we accept austerity' is being answered in France with a resounding' no!' The new question will be; 'ok we don't want it, now, what do we do about it?' That is the new question. The next year in France will be about answering that question - and organising and then re-organising the mass of the population around the answers. For sure, if there is the slightest reliance on Hollande for an answer, then we will back at the beginning - or worse. At this time, even huge political shifts get used up fast.

In Greece we see the collapse of the main political foundations of Greek politics - to be replaced, in all likelihood by -  deeper confusion and uncertainty. A sharp political crisis of the old rule does not equal the emergence of the new. In other words the political cisis in Greece is the crisis of the past - AND the future.

Here the stage is set for a direct clash between a mobilised population (with a thoroughly disordered political leadership) and the state. The nominal political representation in the new government that looks likely to emerge from May 6th does not look able to give a clear direction to either the 99%, or to the rich and their international backers. The crisis is both more advanced in Greece and politically less mature. That means the battle could move more quickly onto the plain of force.

By June, Europe will have shuddered itself into a different place.