We are living a depressed presidential campaign. The vagueness, the approximation, the disenchantment have spread to such an extent that the campaign of Eric Zemmour, turned towards the past, catastrophist and excessively brutal, is the only one to benefit from a dynamism which would make it almost joyful. This paradox between the darkness of the discourse and the enthusiasm it arouses is part of this political depression which tells of the agony of the so-called government parties, but also the shock of the pandemic and the vintage anti-democratic postures.
We do not measure enough the political shock of April 21, 2002. It marks first the beginning of the (very) long agony of the left. The withdrawal of Lionel Jospin from political life, after a failed campaign, steeped in contradictions and clumsiness, but also the laziness of a Jacques Chirac, largely re-elected but unable to renew the social pact, heralded 2022.
Naturally divided, returned to power in 2012, the left benefited from a collective illusion that kept it artificially alive. In 2017, it was the right of government which began its fall towards disappearance, confirmed by the polls which gratify Valérie Pécresse with an unprecedented score for her weakness. We could already learn a lesson from the campaign of the candidate Les Républicains (LR): the primaries are definitely not a French tradition. After the repetitive primary of the right in the fall, Valérie Pécresse finds herself engaged, despite herself, in a wild primary with the two candidates of the extreme right.
France has lost the north so much that it had forgotten that the first round has always been the occasion for a primary – wild or not. The misfortune of the government right is that it is completely compatible with Emmanuel Macron, but, by wanting to maintain itself at all costs without having been able to renew itself in ten years of opposition, it poaches on extremist lands, without mastering either the vocabulary or the postures. Valérie Pécresse, a serious and hard-working politician, is exhausted making the (impossible) connection between Juppé and Wauquiez, while the fillonists are heading straight for Eric Zemmour.
leftist totems
The campaign gives the feeling of not starting. The pandemic with its “whatever it takes” seems to be one of the causes. Since money is now magic, all the candidates line up gift certificates for the young, the old, the workers, the sky, the earth, without ever proposing a serious budget. French citizens, disgusted by promises that have never been kept, no longer even bother to believe in them – or to laugh at them.
Remember Anne Hidalgo’s proposal to dramatically increase teachers’ salaries. She provoked neither applause nor criticism, but a brutal indifference which should have made her abandon the campaign (and Paris, at the same time, which would have at least made us happy for a few days). As for the friendly Fabien Roussel, when asked about any funding for his projects, he bursts into contagious laughter and declaims: “It’s not the most important, we’ll see! We’ll find it!” Where ? When ? How? ‘Or’ What ? Mystery and Bolshevik Ball!
Despite their repeated failures, the anachronistic recycling of leftist totems continues: the program of La France insoumise (LFI) of 2022 is a copy-paste of that of Mitterrand of 1981, that of Taubira is non-existent. But it has the totem of invincibility of the moral left, all enveloped in a claimed humanism supposed to block the filthy beast.
Some of the main candidates are struggling to collect the necessary 500 sponsorships, because the mayors, victims of a sharp increase in violence, no longer dare to offer their signatures. We could have expected a democratic outcry from the entire political class. It would have been too beautiful! Fabien Roussel, who had accustomed us to more subtlety, is delighted that the mayors do not allow candidates credited with more than 15% of voting intentions to participate in the election! Some, like David Lisnard and François Bayrou, have saved the honor of politics by allowing the democratic game to take place. For better and for worse. It is up to us, citizens, to rise to the challenge.