Right-wing primary buried, 5 November strike: the street keeps the agenda

According to France 24, the political week opens with a fresh round of social mobilisation, with lycées blockaded and a strike planned for 5 November. The channel also mentions the primary of the right and centre that candidate Gabriel Attal wanted, which Natacha Polony and Édouard Philippe have just, still according to France 24, flatly refused. The debate, broadcast as a video, brings together Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet, a supporter of Gabriel Attal, and Stéphane Vernay, of Ouest-France. The summary does not specify the strikers' slogans or the detail of their demands: we will not invent them.

What we read here is a question of hierarchy. On one side, would-be candidates negotiating for weeks over the format of an internal vote, like squabbling over the size of the tablecloth before the banquet. On the other, lycée students and employees who block, walk out, and remind us that politics rarely begins in a salon on the rue de Vaugirard. It begins at the school gate or the workshop door.

Rosa Luxemburg observed it in Russia: the great mass strikes almost always start from a partial conflict, a wage, a working day, a pension fund, before sliding, almost without anyone noticing, onto political ground. She wrote that it is "almost impossible" to draw a border between the two (our translation, Luxemburg, Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions). We do not claim that November 2026 resembles 1905; that would be as serious as promising revolution by Tuesday. But the methodological lesson stands: separating the "social" from the "political" is a reflex of the editorialist, not a reality of the striker.

Trade unionism fights over the price of labour, its hours and its conditions. That is necessary, Marx said, without being sufficient, since wage labour itself remains standing. Still: every walkout reminds us that working time is not a law of nature but a balance of power. And that productivity gains, those marvels whose curves we are so often sold, have an unfortunate habit of stopping short of the payslip. Someone pockets that surplus.

The right, then, will not have its primary. Each will go into battle with his own flag and his own version of the same old refrain: work more, for longer, so that "France" holds together. Liberty, equality, fraternity, the motto reminds us; yet it says nothing about raising the retirement age or the profitability of the quarter. We will see which candidate dares to answer the street with anything other than a press release. The lycée students, for their part, do not need a primary to know what they think about their future.