Georges Marchais

Georges Marchais, 1981

Georges Marchais (born June 7, 1920 in La Hoguette , Département Calvados , † November 16, 1997 in Paris ) was a French politician and trade unionist . From 1972 to 1994 he was head of the French Communist Party .

Life

After an apprenticeship as a machinist, in 1940 he worked as a worker in an aircraft engine factory. As a volunteer - according to his own version as a forced laborer - he took part in the Service du travail obligatoire in Germany in 1942 as an aircraft mechanic at a German air force base and at Messerschmitt in Munich , and in 1943 he left for France. An episode in his life that was the target of polemical and legal attacks between 1977 and 1980. From 1943 to 1945 Marchais was underground. Nothing is known of any involvement in the Resistance .

In 1946 he became secretary of the metalworkers' union of Issy-les-Moulineaux . In 1951 he was promoted to secretary of the CGT and between 1953 and 1956 was secretary of the Union of Metal Workers' Unions of the Seine Region .

Since 1947 Marchais was a member of the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1959 he was a candidate for the Central Committee of his party and Secretary of the Federation of Seine-South, in the same year he rose to the position of a member of the Central Committee and Politburo . From 1961 Marchais was organizational secretary and from 1970 deputy general secretary of his party.

In May 1968 he attacked Daniel Cohn-Bendit as one of the heads of the student strike as a “German anarchist”.

In June 1972 he was a co-signatory of the joint government program of the PCF with the Parti socialiste français (PS) and the Radicaux de gauche under the heading Union de la Gauche . In the same year, in December 1972, he succeeded Waldeck Rochet as Secretary General of the PCF, who gave up his function due to illness. After the 1978 election result, which was disappointing for the PCF, Marchais sought greater distance from the PS.

Marchais met with the General Secretary of the Italian Communists Enrico Berlinguer , with whom he shared the idea of Eurocommunism . At the PCF party congress in May 1979, the “ dictatorship of the proletariat ” was rejected. Unlike the PCI, however, the PCF, under the leadership of Georges Marchais, saw itself as the party of the working class that claimed leadership in the transformation process. Together with the PCI, the policy of interventions by the USSR in Czechoslovakia ( Prague Spring ), Poland, Afghanistan and, in particular, the CPSU's claim to leadership over the world communist movement under the heading of “proletarian internationalism” was rejected. On the other hand, the PCF stuck to the traditional two-camp theory , according to which the communist parties were the “vanguard of the world revolution ” and had to “work closely with the general interests of the proletariat against the imperialist opponent”. After more than five years, Marchais returned to Moscow for talks with the CPSU in early 1980 for the first time . In October 1982 Marchais supported the demand for independent trade unions in Poland and advocated the reestablishment of his party's official relations with the CCP. In July 1983 Marchais even called for a reduction in armaments in East and West, in which he called on the French force de frappe, called the PCF, to be involved in the disarmament negotiations between the USA and the USSR.

In March 1973 Marchais was elected for the first time in the Val-de-Marne department (Arcueil-Cachan-Villejuif) as a member of the National Assembly and was regularly re-elected in every legislative period until 1997. At the top of the PCF list in the 1979 European elections, he was elected a member of the European Parliament until 1989 .

As a candidate of the Communists in the election of the French President in 1981, he received 15.34% of the votes in the first ballot against François Mitterrand , which did not qualify him for the second ballot and was seen as a failure of his party in the election. Nevertheless, the PCF then supported Mitterrand in the second ballot and belonged to Pierre Mauroy's government with four ministers. After the new left government had initially pursued the goal of realizing socialism in France through extensive nationalizations and social programs, it changed its course in the face of symptoms of economic crisis: From then on, Finance Minister Jacques Delors pursued an austerity policy that abandoned the indexing of incomes to the rise in prices . This caused displeasure among the supporters of the Communist Party: Marchais came under increasing criticism in April 1983, which aimed through his person at the fundamental role of the PCF in the coalition. In April 1984 Marchais intensified his party's criticism of the government's economic policies. The French railroad workers, mainly organized in the CGT, and the Paris Metro went on strike for weeks. After his party suffered heavy losses in the European elections on June 17, 1984, the government alliance with the PS ended with the withdrawal of the communist ministers from the government. In September Marchais proclaimed a tough course against his former coalition partner and practically ruled out a re-establishment of the governing coalition. His new goal was a new popular front on the grassroots. However, this could not prevent the PS and PCF from swapping their traditional roles as a result of Mitterrand's presidency: the PCF, which, unlike e.g. For example, the DKP has always been a party with a large number of members and has better results across the country than the socialists, which had split up into various parties before 1971. Since then, it has continuously declined in votes and importance, while the PS became and remained the larger left party in France.

At the 28th PCF Congress in 1994 Marchais left his role as General Secretary to Robert Hue , but remained a nominal member of the Politburo. In the same year he became President of the PCF Committee for the Defense of Freedoms and Human Rights in France and the World.

Marchais was a notable figure for his mannerism ( C'est un scandaaaale - “That's a Skandaaaal”) and abrupt demeanor, e.g. B. when he disgraced the journalist Jean-Pierre Elkabbach Taisez-vous Elkabbach ("Shut up, Elkabbach") and was therefore often the target of bitter parodies by the comedian Thierry Le Luron .

Georges Marchais died in 1997 at the Hôpital Lariboisière of complications from a heart disease.

Works

• Les Communistes et les Paysans (1972)
• Le défi démocratique (1973)
• La politique du PCF (1974)
• Communistes et / ou chrétiens (1977)
• Parlons franchement, B. Grasset, Paris (1977)
• Responses (1977)
• L'espoir au present (1980)
• Democratie (1990)

Web links

Commons : Georges Marchais  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Georges Marchais in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Georges Marchais in the database of Members of the European Parliament