France, admirable when it was crowned football world champion for the first time at the Stade de France on July 12, 1998, became the laughing stock of the world in this same place on May 28. Ruthless comments illustrated the sad spectacle offered around and inside the stadium: thefts, intrusions, fraud, damage, verbal and physical violence.
The consequences of ten years of laxity in France were unveiled before a flabbergasted international press. In front of hundreds of millions of viewers, the executive saw his safety failure jump in his face. Defensive messages from the ministers in charge have increased the unease. By preferring to discard rather than assume, they hoped to save the essential: their place in government and the voices of young people from 93, reputed fan of Mélenchon, in the legislative elections.
If there should be only one consolation to this disaster, it is to have contributed to putting the spotlight back – finally – on one of the countless missed appointments of this campaign: the endemic insecurity which prevails in our country and which is getting worse from year to year. When a bus stop is too dangerous to be served, when gangs and traffic invade the halls of buildings in unprecedented proportions of violence, when mortar fireworks startle a whole neighborhood awake, when burglaries are on the increase in individual houses, a whole population is worried. And when this population, which lives in cities as well as in the countryside and which suffers silent violence, the one we never talk about on the 8 p.m. news, constantly hears the soothing remarks on “living together”, “benevolence” , “peaceful society” in Paris, she feels a deep sense of anger and injustice.
How to deny this evidence? All the mayors observe it and denounce it: a society in which we no longer speak to each other, we no longer listen to each other and we no longer respect each other is a society in which we are afraid of each other.
Solutions abound
Contrary to what the government is trying to make people think, the daily difficulties of the French are not just limited to the only problem of inflation… This fiasco reveals the increasingly difficult relationship of our rulers with the notions of authority and security. As if these terms were fundamentally incompatible with democracy. But it has never been written anywhere that the republic is combined with laxity and disorder! Quite the contrary. In a democracy, it is up to the executive to be the guarantor of the protection of citizens. Otherwise, the dictators will take over.
The president would do well to rethink Clemenceau, a man on the left who knew how to veer to the right in this matter, rather than opting for minimum service with the sole obsession of preserving – he dreams – voters on the far left. This policy of avoidance stems from a historical error which directly threatens our republican pact.
Because it leads millions of French people of all ages, of all origins and, I insist, of all religions, mostly the most modest, to understand that the Republic is abandoning them to the bosses.
What is Mr. Macron waiting for to react, when Mrs. Le Pen reached 42% of the vote on April 24? In terms of security, let’s put our feet in the dish, it is a right-wing republican policy that must be implemented. Solutions are not lacking, but they require immense determination to twist the arm of well-meaning people who will only have the word “anti-fascism” in their mouths: precise laws, including in matters of education, decisions of justice, the systematic use of video surveillance, a massive recruitment of armed national and municipal police and magistrates, not to mention a completely redefined penitentiary policy. If these decisions are not taken quickly and assumed by the Head of State, the nation will continue to crack silently until the moment of the explosion. But the ministers of the right would then be confronted with a matter of conscience which should naturally lead them, for honor, to leave the government.