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AB 2000 studies

Alain Boublil Blog

 

France:the defeat of the "patapolitics"

The first round of the French presidential election has been less in accordance with polls and media forecasts than these ones are trying to convince us. Voter turnout remained high. As the population reaching the voting age is growing, the real number of electors who went to vote has also increased. Regarding young people, about whom we have been continuously told they were not motivated and they did not find in the current political proposals the answer to their expectations, their number was also on the rise. Next, Marine Le Pen score is inferior to what had been forecast. She finishes in the second position, closely followed by François Fillon and even by Jean Luc Melenchon. Not so long ago, she was supposed to have a large lead. At last, French people gave their opinion about programs, against the media coverage which was concentrated on  the candidates personalities.

So the great loser has been “patapolitics”, these political practices which consist in proposing imaginary political solutions to the French people to answer to their worries and to make them to believe their authors are taking care of the causes of their discontents. The top position is occupied, without any doubts, by Benoît Hamon, through his universal revenue, his ecologist credo and  the supposed magic consequences of his revival policy. His disastrous score is the result of the incapacity of the Socialist Party to elaborate a policy which is the answer to the new constraints to which our country, as all the others, is confronted with and to convince French people that this answer is appropriated. This failure does not reflect a crisis of the political parties, whose role is recognized in article 4 of the French constitution, and even less as the announcement of their coming disappearance. It reflects the incapacity of a political party to endow itself of thinking groups, to attract enough diverse talents in order to get a debate rich enough to formulate to political leaders the proposals they will submit to the country. The Socialist Party incapacity is not new: it started after Lionel Jospin failure in 2002. Nothing has been done to fill this political gap when the world was changing and French people needed to get an explanation about the consequences that change would have on their behaviors and their choices. The reconstruction of the Left must go through a reconstruction of the thought of the left in taking into account the irreversible phenomenon generated by the opening of France toward the world.

The right didn’t perform better. There is, with the non-qualification of François Fillon, a personal reason but to reduce his failure to the consequences of the scandals would be a proof of blindness. It is his program, the solutions he proposed which didn’t convince because they carried benefits as imaginary as those Benoît Hamon proposed. When the last one proposed to dream, the other tried to convince that the future must be like a nightmare. To try to persuade someone that to force employees who have a job to work more without being paid more will permit to hire those who are unemployed can be diagnosed as phantasm. The innovation trend, which is as irreversible as globalization, will not fall off in the future and its main consequence will be to reduce the amount of human work to the profit of more and more sophisticated machines and even automatic systems which will use artificial intelligence. To imagine that will permit to create as many jobs as those which will be destroyed is as stupid as to pretend that the manufacturing of tractors has compensated the reduction of jobs in agriculture. Benefits from a massive reduction of the number of civil servants are also imaginaries. It is only at the end of his campaign that François Fillon made a difference between the hypertrophied bureaucracy of the French administration and the public services which are indispensable, exemplary and envied by the entire world. In keeping away from this program as unpopular as unfit to the French society, the right can come back on the political scene with the general elections. François Fillon exit from the next campaign will facilitate it.

The Extreme-left did worse. Its imaginary solutions have attracted attention but not enough to qualify it to the final debate. To change France status into a non-aligned one, withdrawn into itself after the exit from European treaties and free-trade agreements, to believe that during in just one generation, we should be able to do without fossil fuels or that the ecologist rebound will permit to create in five years “the major share of the three millions jobs his program intends to create” give a good sample of what can be produced by “patapolitics”. It is rather worrying that there were seven million French voters to believe that could bring an answer to their difficulties. But it is even more shocking that the candidate they chose and who was claiming he belonged to the “people”, after a long career as a left elect, did not give any vote indication for the second round, even as a personal decision, and renounced to block the Front national. Mélenchon populist adrift is reminding us very painful souvenirs, when former socialists and communists rallied occupying forces. It is not possible, today as in the past, to claim you belong to the left and to refuse to fight against the extreme-right, even if that one is trying to hide itself behind an economic program which seems to answer to legitimate demands, but which, if it was put into practice, would lead the country toward chaos, whose first victims would be precisely those Mélenchon is supposed to represent.

Marine Le Pen qualification for the second round of the presidential election and her unavoidable defeat will show the limits of “patapolitics”. She will not convince a majority of farmers that in exiting from European Union they will overpass their difficulties since they are the first beneficiaries of the common agricultural policy. She will not convince employees in exporting companies that their situation will be improved if we close borders because that would put into turmoil their enterprises. She will be rejected by millions of savers who will quickly understand that the return to the franc will mean for them an immediate impoverishment and a danger for their additional pensions. She will be rejected by all those who don’t want that their country closes up on itself, denies its history and its tradition and put in danger its international influence.

Emmanuel Macron program is, maybe, not precise enough and lacks of imagination. It doesn’t make you dreaming. But it has an essential advantage and it is why his author has gained a substantial lead after the first round: it feeds the vacuum resulting from the incapacity of political parties to elaborate credible proposals which correspond to the expectations of French people. In the perspective of next general elections, it will be the challenge of these political parties  to feed this vacuum. In the opposite case, they will be eliminated again.

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