Impeccable tailoring, carefully brushed hair, classy elocution… Ségolène Royal has lost none of her stature as a stateswoman. At least in appearance. On April 18, the former socialist minister is the guest of Cyril Hanouna’s show Don’t touch my post, on C8, to promote his book Refuse the cruelty of the world! The time to love has come (ed. of the Rock). Between two teasing, the host takes the opportunity to ask him about the pension reform.
“Each time, there is a new reform supposedly to save the pension system. I’ll tell you: it’s ideological, she judges. It’s to scare people. It’s for that people go to private insurance. Pensions are 340 billion euros [de dépenses par an]. So private insurance and banks want to get their hands on this jackpot. It’s like the public hospital! If the public hospital deteriorates, the private hospital will take customers and make people pay.”
The reality is miles away. To the point that Stéphane Carcillo, professor affiliated with the economics department of Sciences Po and head of the employment and income division of the OECD, admits “not having understood the logic” of the enarque. Of course, in some countries, citizens are forced to save individually, because the basic pension provided by the state is very low or even non-existent. But France is neither Australia, nor the United States, nor Chile. “In countries where there is a pay-as-you-go system and in which the level of retirement is relatively comfortable, as in France, households have very little incentive to worry about putting money aside for their own retirement, explains Stéphane Carcillo. The objective of the pension reform is precisely to ensure that future generations can have a comfortable level of retirement.”
Give a few facts (“pensions are 340 billion euros”), deduce in a learned tone from obscure links of interest (“private insurance and banks want to get their hands on the jackpot”) , then adorn the whole thing with equally vaporous examples (“it’s like for the public hospital”) to establish his reasoning… Just enough to give the accent of the truth without risking being accused of falling into untruth: this is the recipe that has been skimmed over the past few years by Ségolène Royal – who did not wish to respond to L’Express. Not without a few hiccups…
“War propaganda through fear”
In September 2022, the former companion of François Hollande had questioned the veracity of the crimes committed by the Russian army in Ukraine, denouncing the “propaganda of war by fear” carried out by Kiev. The latter wanted as proof “the bombed maternity” in Mariupol, in the south-east of Ukraine, a few months earlier, or even the massacre of Boutcha. What are “the places, the names of the victims? Where? When? Who?” she had questioned, judging “monstrous to go and broadcast things like that only to interrupt the peace process”.
Problem: five months earlier, the NGO Human Rights Watch published a report on the Boutcha massacre (whose assessment was admittedly provisional at the time), which confirmed a certain number of summary executions and murders, as well as the presence of vehicles bearing the symbolic “V” of support for the Russian invasion. Ditto for the bombardment of the Mariupol maternity ward, which two photographers from the AP agency had documented. “You can imagine that if there was the slightest victim, the slightest baby with blood, in the age of mobile phones, we would have had the images…” she had nevertheless dropped, thus taking up the arguments of several Russian embassies , who had denied the presence of victims at the scene.
Faced with the outcry, Ségolène Royal had flatly apologized on Twitter (“I have never denied war crimes and I happily apologize to the victims if they thought so”). Then had admitted having “mistaken” with CheckNews (Release)… Before skidding again on LCI in the face of Ruth Elkrief by invoking the “financial interests” of those who “do not want peace”.
Praised by Zemmour, the Complosphere and the Kremlin
According to Tristan Mendès France, associate lecturer at the University of Paris, specialist in digital cultures, this episode is “symptomatic of the ecosystem from which Ségolène Royal draws her information, at least concerning the war in Ukraine. Her elements of language were the same as those distilled within the pro-Russian conspiracy”.
This conspiracy expert describes a “synergy” between the personalities turning to the conspiracy and the public that the latter drains. “Ségolène Royal is welcomed by communities who show a distrust of ‘mainstream’ information, which strengthens her in her ‘crusade’ against the ‘system’.” It didn’t take long for the ex-candidate of the “union of the rights” Eric Zemmour to salute his “courage”, or – more problematically – for conspiracy sites and even Russian television to endorse his remarks. (while transforming them) as proof of the credibility of Kremlin propaganda.
“As by chance”
For Tristan Mendès France, 2019 undoubtedly marks a turning point in the communication of the one who was the first woman to reach the second round of a French presidential election. “The setbacks she had with the press concerning her mission as an ambassador for the poles may have sown the seeds of her distrust of a hypothetical media ‘system'”, he believes. . The start of the 2019 school year had indeed started badly for Ségolène Royal. In September, a fact-check of the site CheckNews revealed that the ambassador of the poles, appointed in September 2017 by Emmanuel Macron, had never set foot in the Arctic Council. Response from the person concerned: “And as if by chance, this stinky ball arises when some people ask me about the next presidential election…”
Barely two months later, it was the turn of French Radio to publish an investigation revealing that she had sometimes used her position as pole ambassador to promote her personal activities. Taking up the rhetoric of “as if by chance”, Ségolène Royal had noted, at the microphone of RMC, that these “rubbish” coincided with her “very hard fights against lobbies, glyphosate, pesticides”. Or that these accusations came, again “as if by chance”, “when [elle] appeared
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