For months (years) the question has been tormenting the left: who can take back control, reconnect with the 50% + 1? In this dysfunctional family, we no longer know whether to ally, to hate each other, to point out the differences, or on the contrary to polish them to give the illusion of brilliance. The less we diverge, the more we triumph, thinks the decrepit left. The problem now is that the left, almost entirely, also applies this theory to its electorate, real and hoped for. Here she acts as if it was no longer a question of drawing a vision, although the characteristic of noble politics, of modeling an ambitious and exciting common project, but as if the only thing that mattered, to win, is to marry and to legitimize supposed electoral battles, regardless of whether they turn out to be so harmful to society.
In an interview with L’Express, the philosopher and MEP Raphaël Glucksmann regrets the decline of the citizen behind the man, this is the danger that the left poses to its voters. By establishing society and more broadly the State and its institutions – starting with the school – as censors of the individual and their identities, it gives substance to mistrust. By twisting at each demonstration, at each riot, the discourse on violent police, only violent, it fuels fear and rejection, while making the reality of the faults inaudible to the other part of the political spectrum.
Caricature feeds caricature and blindness. Jean-Luc Mélenchon knows it. By posting on moment that it consolidates the Republic and strengthens living together. He yields. Before those who judge God greater than the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, he bows, out of patronage, his detractors will say. For convenience, obviously.
Because, in the France of 2023, the left has a fight to fight. Except there’s nothing easy about it. Mélenchon and his people could want to restore meaning and, above all, tangibility to this universalism that we sometimes agitate without realizing that today for many this beautiful word rings hollow. Rather than approving ever more minority, ever more fragmented demands, rather than reinforcing a part of the youth in their conviction of being victims of a State which hates them, of policies and media which despise or stigmatize them , rather than letting itself be overwhelmed, the left would benefit from daring, once, to say “Enough!”. Erect dikes to preserve footbridges. Show the ravages of communitarianism, remind grieving minds of the rights of the individual to give meaning to their duties, in short, build walls between the decliners of the Republic and the distraught voters so that, tomorrow, dialogue with the Social Republic resumes and continues. During elections, in community, political, cultural life… Thus citizens, supported by political leaders, will recreate something common.
In an intelligent book devoted to Jean-Jacques Goldman, published at the end of August in Le Seuil, the historian Ivan Jablonka recounts how the singer, ontologically left-wing, gradually turned his back on the latter when it became clear to him that she had thrown overboard the values that matter to him: merit, work, “the legal means” by which to get out of it as Goldman sings in Fly Me, and the differences that bring together instead of dividing. Jablonka comes to the conclusion that Goldman has reinvented “a pragmatic left”. This is undoubtedly the one whose advent the Republic must wish for. The left finally has a candidate.