Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is the heir to the National Front founded by her father, Petainists, nostalgic Nazis, supporters of French Algeria and the most virulent anti-Gaullists. There is no need to torture the neurons to put this reality on the table. That Marine Le Pen, by excluding her father, by trying to clean up the most Vichyssoise fringe of the party and the most xenophobic speeches, has managed to de-demonize the RN – helped by the excess of Zemmour and the zadist circus of LFI – is also a truth. Opposing the RN cannot however be reduced to recalling its nauseating origins. If it is good to recall them, as it is necessary to hammer home the crimes of communism, the 90 million deaths in the name of Russian, Chinese, Khmer communisms, etc., we must effectively abandon the moral postures which did not allow, for thirty years, to curb the inevitable rise of the extreme right.
However, there is enough to respond to the political proposals of the RN: its economic program, as unrealistic as that of LFI, smells good of Venezuela, the euroscepticism which gave birth to Brexit is a failure – if the goal was to take control of destiny of the country by closing the borders and offering a better health system, it is even a resounding flop -, the Russian tropism, as widespread on the extreme right as on the extreme left, is so stubborn that even the war in Ukraine does not allow it to be moderated, the central question of immigration is poorly thought out at the RN and denied by the left. But is it still enough?
At a time when each citizen is locked in his bubble of certainties, when the contradictory debate only inspires mistrust, when the political adversary has turned into an irreducible enemy, and when the excess of language like the lies scatter as easily as pollen in the spring, it becomes very difficult to contradict, to respond, to propose. Witness the last interview with Anne Hidalgo, who talks about France in economic bankruptcy, the end of democracy (one would be tempted to offer her an internship in Poland or Hungary) and the very good financial health of the City of Paris (7 billion in debt) without being contradicted by her interviewers – for fear of advancing the far right?
Elucubrations and disproportions
The increasing difficulty of putting the right words on reality, of daring to reply to the mediocre, of slaying the lukewarmness of speeches, of responding to the rantings of one and the other is the sign of an irrational fear of fueling the extreme LAW. Paradoxically, this fear installs the RN in the minds, makes it the alpha and omega of any public positioning and inevitably reinforces it. On the other hand, by exaggerating the economic situation of France, by depicting with disproportionate big words inequalities and poverty, by describing a non-existent ultra-liberalism, by forcing the line of climatic catastrophes and by denying real progress, by presenting the fight against sexual violence as chimerical and ineffective, we cut the quid to the contradiction. Because who wants, in the era of digital lynchings, to pass for the bastard who dares to rectify the apocalypse on all tones on all floors? Who to carry a political discourse that is not encumbered with alarmist inflation, constant reference to the RN, denial of reality?
The left is still agitated, but for the worse: there are no longer two irreconcilable lefts, but three. The LFI left, more disconnected and totalitarian than ever, a Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol left which does not dare to break with LFI, not even allowing itself the report of the rupture, and a republican left, which resumes its ranges, work, merit, school, secularism, universalism, social-liberalism, represented by Bernard Cazeneuve. But can it still be credible? There remains the fractured right, from which, in the swamp of ambitions, we still hope for a liberal and emancipatory discourse, which confronts reality and offers tomorrows which may not sing, but which will have the face of a real building by our collective ambitions.