While we can only rejoice at the return of French citizens to the polls, while we can only be pleased to hear the French talk politics and tactics, share fear and hope, and this everywhere, in shops or during friendly and family dinners, the fact remains that the attitude or even the posture of politicians, intellectuals and the media is not up to the challenges. The challenges: parliamentary deadlock, economic immobility, resentment, even disgust of citizens. One of the causes of this unprecedented and toxic shambles is above all widespread artificialization.
Artificialization of the vote first. Let’s not kid ourselves, despite the relief of having avoided the arrival at Matignon of an ill-prepared Jordan Bardella, without a solid backbone, opportunistic to the point of accumulating beginner’s mistakes: the RN came out the winner of the legislative elections by doubling the number of its deputies. RN which wanted to flatter its historical electorate with the unhealthy doubt distilled on dual nationals while giving pledges of “melonization” to the economic world, taking the risk of losing its electorate disappointed by the left, which votes above all for its purchasing power and against the elites. Agreed.
But the nearly 11 million French people who slipped an RN ballot into the ballot boxes are not Waffen-SS. The roadblock erected against the RN – a party whose unsavoury face hidden behind its tied face we can, like many speakers, debate, but which has been playing the game of democracy for several years – and the panic built up to make this republican roadblock hold, going so far as to whitewash France Insoumise, which is increasingly less concerned with democracy and republican values, and whose responsibility in the rise of anti-Semitism is unforgivable, leaves a bitter taste, too bitter.
Artificialization of the blockade vote that should require attentive listening to RN voters, respect for the issues that bother them, including immigration, and responding to them politically, without ideological posturing. As Christophe Guilluy said in our columns last week, “for some, the concern about migratory flows is at best an invention of the extreme right, at worst proof that the French people are racist. The most revolting thing is that a calm debate is prevented by hypocrites who, in real life, behave like perfect social and ethnic secessionists.”
Artificialization of the blocs born on the evening of the second round of the legislative elections. What is holding the New Popular Front together, if not the visceral fear of the Mélenchonists? They have managed to create such a climate of terror that the left-wing alliance seems to be caught up in Stockholm syndrome. The program signed by everyone does not hold water because it is so dangerous, and it is not the ideological economists who support it who are reassuring – a certain number of whom will flee to the United States when they return to escape the economic disaster. Nothing holds together except magical thinking: the French have chosen our program. Wrong. The French voted against the RN as they had voted for Emmanuel Macron against the RN, the programs of the three blocs were not debated – except to note that they were scandalously out of touch.
Artificialization on the left, artificialization on the right. The Republicans who have become the Republican Right are nothing more than an alloy of personalities who no longer know much except the hope of creating a surprise in 2027. If France is clearly on the right, the right has not been able to create an alternative in twelve years of vegetating in the opposition. They resisted the RN-Ciotti wave, but they offer nothing except a posture of incorrigible independents, each one going with his formula to keep the country going year after year until the presidential election.
Artificialization of Macronie from the beginning, but which is now bursting into the open. Emmanuel Macron can no longer hide behind his great lyrical speeches which alone held his camp together, an association of more or less successful debaucheries. The king is, finally, naked, but the indispensable authenticity does not yet have the right to exist.