Annecy yesterday, Bordeaux today… Various facts follow one another and seem to push ever further the frontiers of horror. Repeatedly relayed by flabbergasted citizens, the images – when available – arouse fear, and generate a legitimate demand for answers and reassurance. Are news items isolated facts, or social facts? What are they called, what are their causes? Is there a link between poverty and mental health, between poverty and delinquency, or even – an extremely divisive question in public opinion – between immigration and delinquency? Is the solution to be found in health policy and psychiatry, in the fight against poverty, in education or even in controlling migratory flows? So many questions, and many more, which deserve to be asked clearly and calmly, in order to open a serene debate on extremely complex subjects.
It is legitimate that, as with any subject – from floods to heat waves, passing through the tragic shipwrecks in the Mediterranean or even the drought affecting our territory – political leaders rely on topical controversies to offer their reading of events , their interpretation as to their causes, and their solutions. This is what is most normal in a democracy. However, part of the political class inevitably jumps on all subjects related directly or indirectly to insecurity (this is also true of immigration) to condemn the “recovery” made of it by the right and the Rassemblement National.
Seeking to impose a reading grid, to convince our fellow citizens based on current events, is not in itself reprehensible and immoral: it is quite simply playing politics. No more no less. If we consider that the arguments invoked by some are illegal or immoral, it is legitimate to say so, and to provide arguments to combat them. But argue a priori and systematically on the electoral intentions lent to such and such is quite vain: the citizens no longer expect their elected officials to dictate to them what to think and who to listen to for a long time.
It is even counterproductive, because the time and energy devoted to these political condemnations would be much more usefully used to develop substantive arguments, able to convince the greatest number that the “recoverers” are wrong. The feeling fueled by these constant political controversies is that part of the political spectrum has trouble understanding, giving meaning to and therefore dealing with certain political and social realities. All political families have unthought, of course. But in the same way that a party that would never talk about the environment would be destined to be quickly marginalized by the voters (hello right!), a party that would have nothing to say about insecurity other than ” other people’s solutions are immoral” would not have a great future ahead of him. Democracies never die from an overdose of debate. They collapse when certain subjects are evacuated, disqualified, or when some consider that there are subjects too important to leave them to the voters.
Chloé Morin is a political scientist associated with the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a specialist in public opinion