THE mainstream media in Britain seems astonished at the speed and totality of the French people’s revolt against President Emmanuel Macron. As someone with a lifelong interest in French politics, I’m not surprised at all. 

His election as president was not in any sense an endorsement of his policies or of himself as an individual. 

It happened because, in a typical bit of squabbling by centrists who can’t accept their ideas have been overtaken by the realities of modern history, the now redundant and utterly loathed Parti Socialiste refused to withdraw their candidate in the first round of the last presidential election, thus splitting the left vote and eliminating the radical socialist candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon. 

This meant that that the run-off was between far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and neoliberal bankers’ candidate Macron. 

Many on the left refused to vote for Macron, even to keep out the far right (“Ni patron ni Macron” — neither boss nor Macron). 

But, because he had cast himself as an “outsider” with no party political base and thus unconnected to the “elite” — a career technocrat, he most certainly is — many French people somehow though he would represent them, despite his overt neoliberal, pro-globalisation, pro-free market stance, on show even before the vote. 

And of course, many voted for him simply to keep out fascist, Vichy-rehabilitating Le Pen, daughter of one of the most contemptible figures in modern French history. 

It didn’t take long for the reality to sink in. Tax cuts for the rich, public spending slashed, attacks on workers’ rights. 

The scenes on the streets of France are a popular revolt against one of the last representatives and advocates of a world order soon to be swept away by history. 

Neoliberalism, globalism, globalisation and “the laws of the free market” which have left so many people hopeless, homeless, devastated, forgotten are being rejected in a howl of rage by people right across Europe. 

The politics of the centre is dead. The choice is now clear. 

It’s either we socialists, who seek justice for all and put the blame for the devastation of free market economics on those who cause it — bankers, bosses and their hirelings in the media — or the scapegoating and division of the far right, now bankrolled by wealthy elites as they were 80 years ago. 

No worker takes the job of another. A boss gives it to them because he is greedy and can make more money from people so desperate they will work for less than a decent wage. 

No hospital runs short of beds because of immigrants. It runs short of beds because the bankers’ stooge politicians starve the NHS of funds to bail out bankers, who should have had their assets seized and been tried on public television for their crimes instead of being told they had “done nothing illegal.”

The current showdown in France will soon turn into one between Melanchon’s La France Insoumise and Le Pen’s Front National, now renamed Rassemblement National. 

As in Britain there’s a divide between us on the left and the far right of the Tory Party/Ukip. The politics of privatisation and globalisation are over. In Britain, as in France, there is a massive majority for the return of the commanding heights of the economy to public ownership. 

The “populists” of the far right will pay lip service to this while ensuring it doesn’t happen — they are bankrolled by the rich. It is socialists who can make the transformation. The future is ours. We need to seize it.