There is a suicidal reflex in the defense of liberal democracies. The town hall of Paris has long been disconnected from reality – I am not even talking about the abyssal debt denied with a spectacular plumb -, but with the organization on the Catimini of a citizen consultation on vegetation, it crosses the rubicon of alternative reality. With 4 % participation, the Paris town hall should have capitulated, or at least avoid boasting 82.95 % yes. And yet as soon as the results were announced, we attended the parade of the members of the sect of the town hall, delighted and victorious, who took advantage of it to return all the grumpy to the far right – poverty of the argument, premises of fascism for real.
A few days earlier, Anne Hidalgo explained that her lamentable defeat in the presidential election (1.75 % of the votes) was mainly due to … polls. Disconnecting with reality is such that the Paris police prefect, Laurent Nuñez, tells us that anti -Semitic acts increased by 340 % in the Paris agglomeration between 2023 and 2024 and in Paris and in the Paris agglomeration, 88 % of anti -religious acts are anti -Semitic acts, against 62 % Against anti -Semitism or at least pretend to be interested in it or at least launching yet another citizen consultation.
The mayor of Paris has something else to do: elections 2026 to prepare and the crabs basket closes on the small sentences and the sharp knives in the back. While the illiberal democracies use elections as well as a deposit, already preparing the spirits, since the repeated denial of Donald Trump not to accept his defeat of 2020, to no longer attach importance to the votes of the polls, attending the distressing spectacle of a Paris town hall which jumps over the reality of the 4 % of participants to launch a vegetation which nobody knows what is a signing sign, announced defeat of liberal democracies.
What remains of liberalism to offer an alternative to populisms, libertarianisms and other illiberalisms in vogue? If we do not understand that the rearmament of Europe is not only military, but must be ideological, we have already lost. And when I write ideology, I do not offer doctrines, prohibitions, how to live or how to say. No, I speak of return to liberal fundamentals, freedom and debate that invariably go through a pride of Western and European history. In summary: Stop spitting in the soup so nourishing of liberalism, rereading John Stuart Mill, brainstorming to be the fruit of a history which has put down the obscurantism religious and absolutist, enabled the emancipation of the subject as a citizen, the free worker slave, free thinker bigot, freedom of expression, laughing tears, cultural, the possibility of a horizon rid of the weight of fate.
Excite the European citizen anesthetized by too much comfort but also of disrespects which have removed him from efforts such as polls, ambition as well as hope, it is to stop offering him a past which is only shameful, a future which is only bureaucracy, progress which is only societal, a present which is only afraid and tremors in front of the impotence erected as master.
Liberal democracies are struck with immobility. His children are disenchanted by deconstructing and fleeing the Western account, which has become vulnerable to the attacks of Islamists as populists on the left and on the right who only offer an illusory and dismal backwards. There is a fictitious figure that could be useful to us, which has the same importance for me as for Romain Gary – it must be a metal thing: “Arlequin was a child of the people, who had arisen from the deepest suffering to respond with his lazzi to the centuries of original sin, of Gothic art glorifying pain, nails and thorns – yes, he was out of the veil to tear a kick of the veil and The fig to everything that requires man submission and resignation. “
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