Two political statements have caused an uproar on the left in recent days. That of the communist Fabien Roussel, who, in a speech called for greater control of immigration, speaking of “colander borders”. And that of the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire on social fraud. The two subjects – very different, and which there is no question of linking here – are two political “abscesses” which have weakened the left, and fed the right and the RN for years. And although the situation is not new, it would seem that most politicians on the left, therefore, have still not seen fit to carry out the necessary aggiornamento.
These two subjects are among Emmanuel Macron’s priorities for the coming months. Rightly so, since they occupy an important place in the concerns of many French people. The right (with social fraud, caricatured as “cancer of assistantship”) and the RN have long appropriated these themes.
The recent controversy born of a more or less controlled “slippage” by Bruno Le Maire – who implied that the problem of fraud would be the work of foreigners sending taxpayers’ money to the Maghreb -, perfectly illustrates the trap in which the left has locked itself. Without waiting, she stood up to denounce a caricature. Rightly so: fraud in France is a priori mainly not the fault of foreigners, but of us, French citizens… Delighted to be able to drape herself in her moral superiority, her favorite role, she therefore yelled at the stigmatization of foreigners by the government… thereby giving the vast majority of French people the feeling that they were denying the very existence of any fraud.
Under the pretext of not stigmatizing immigrants, on the one hand, fraudsters or the most modest that the right likes to portray as “assisted”, on the other, the left (and a good part of the administrations concerned) refused for years to quantify exactly the extent of social fraud. For having repeatedly pointed out the exasperation of our fellow citizens that I have observed in opinion studies for more than ten years, I have several times been told curtly (and with undisguised contempt) that I was peddling fantasies.
Betting on people’s intelligence
There is no worse blind than the one who does not want to see: with the best intentions in the world, the left is largely responsible for what we still do not fully assess, the reality of the phenomena, in all their complexity. The lack of precise data feeds the wildest fantasies and the most regrettable confusions. We often hear that RSA fraudsters are legion. Some estimates show that RSA fraud would be 100 times less important in volume than corporate tax fraud. About 300 million is very little compared to what most French people imagine. But it is also a lot, at a time when each minister is fighting to obtain a few million euros more for ecology, health, or education.
How do you agree on a solution when you don’t even agree on the nature of the problem? No compromise can be forged to deal with illegal immigration or combat fraud if the diagnosis of the real extent of the phenomenon is not widely shared. The debate must be based on clear, verifiable and undisputed figures, so as not to be confiscated by fantasies and postures.
It is therefore high time that the government put in place an independent, systematic and in-depth assessment of all tax and social fraud, in order to analyze the reality of it in all its complexity and with the necessary nuance – and therefore by avoiding easy caricatures… It is the same for tackling the explosive subject of illegal immigration: it is the only way to break the impasse of the current debate, between those who think of the massive invasion, and those who deny the existence of a problem.
It is not always necessary to change the institutions to modify the state of mind and the nature of our debates. It would suffice, for example, to bet, on these subjects as on others, on people’s intelligence and their ability to grasp complex phenomena.
Chloé Morin is a political scientist associated with the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a specialist in public opinion