From now on, at each election, here or there, despite the polls, the forecasts, the in-depth articles, the reports from the field, the surprise is there, followed by in-depth articles explaining learnedly why what was planned n ultimately did not take place.
The 89 deputies of the RN who entered the National Assembly had thus passed under the media radar because of Melenchonist vociferation and his commercial coup of “vote for the Prime Minister”. The bait was tempting: it is more exciting to cause political astuteness than the emptiness of programs which bore – to be polite – by their repetition and their impossibility (in this respect, the last French elections broke the record of thoughts and magic money). Thus, no one saw the “no” coming to the Chilean referendum on the new Constitution or the narrow victory of Lula over Bolsonaro or that, relative, of the Republicans to the midterms Americans.
Of course, ideological bias is involved. The journalist gradually merging – and for the worse – with the activist who hopes for his good points of “righteous thinking”, the temptation is then great to take his idealistic aspirations for facts. The Chilean referendum on the new Constitution is representative of this ideological bias, especially since following the first referendum which questioned the need for a new Constitution to replace the unjust one of Pinochet, the Chileans had voted en masse “yes”. But to bet on the same “yes” in the second referendum was to deny the radicalism of the Constituent Assembly which refused to involve the Chilean right in the debate. But the commentaries preferred to focus on the radicals on the front line, out of ideological fascination but also out of revolutionary spirit – which always appears in comparison “sexier” than the lukewarmness of the reformists.
The Trumpists made “pschitt”
The blindness is also due to the laziness which wants to see only the front line, the most noisy, that of the radicals. Nothing more exciting to read and watch than a report from the countries of Trumpist conspiracies, each more lunar than the other, shelling outlandish theories with chilling certainty. By dint of portraits of an America convinced of the massive and imaginary electoral fraud of 2020, we would come to forget the “normal” citizen who counts his money and worries about the rise in crime but also immigration. The Republicans who won in the midterms were the “mainstream”, while the Trumpist candidates have made “pschitt” – even if it remains amazing that a Marjorie Taylor Green, assumed conspirator on the QAnon line, is reappointed to Congress.
Everyone had thus buried Jair Bolsonaro. It was still to confuse his desire with the Brazilian reality which looks at Lula differently, at the height of corruption. It was also to forget the lamentable old-fashioned campaign of the man who had nevertheless managed, during his two previous terms, to create a real middle class. In a country where the majority gets information on social networks and where religion has a fundamental place, Bolsonaro’s mystical campaign, coupled with the daily outpouring of fake news could only compete with reason. If Lula won, Bolsonaro remains on the lookout, galvanized by faith to the detriment of reality.
forgotten citizen
Finally, it is the citizen who is often forgotten in the analyses. The one who does not yell, does not demonstrate, does not spend his days on social networks spitting his hatred. The citizen who votes willy-nilly and who hopes. The tragedy is that he hopes less and less. While he is now aware of global warming and adapting to preserve the future, he is confronted with apocalyptic speeches and childish and counterproductive sequences of agit-prop which occupy the free time of spoiled children of the West.
The citizen is stuck between the bellows without solutions and a vision of the future that is long overdue. Fortunately, there is still Casanova to still hope: “I saw that often, to put reason on the path to truth, you have to start by deceiving it; darkness has necessarily preceded light.”