The slip of the tongue of the Prime Minister, perhaps because of fatigue due
to jet lag, is welcome. We cannot continue to refuse to recognize that rigor
is needed, urgently. Our deficits are abyssal, those of the State and of
Social Security, local authorities and other public services. For now, they
are financed by loans, which finance their own loans, that is to say the
cavalry, under sometimes scandalous conditions, as for Social Security.
What is announced for the financing of pensions regulates only one small
portion of what would be necessary for this expenditure, which does not even
rethink one quarter of the total savings to be made elsewhere. The 2010
Budget is carried out with total laxity. The 2011 Budget is built on
unfortunately absurd assumptions of growth, and undoubtedly 10 billion Euro
will be missing, at least at the end of the year, to keep the commitments
made. This will add to the need to find 60 billion Euros in 2012 and 2013 to
prevent debt from growing beyond 90% of the GDP. And nothing is said to the
country about the fact that we will need to sustain the same effort for 10
years, no matter who is in charge in Government, to reduce debt around 65%
of GDP, which is probably, in the case of France, the maximum tolerable.
No one has the courage to say it all. Neither the government nor the
opposition. The government seems to want to defend all the great privileges,
while the left-wing seems to want to preserve all the weakest. In our
country, which declines without wanting to admit it, the alliance of large
fortune inherited and small vested benefits works at full speed; the
connivance of large and small rentiers (docker, teacher, journalist, head of
department at the hospital or entrepreneur), imposes its law to all. All
these people conspire successfully to prevent the rigor from touching their
privileges.
The others, all the others (poor, without relations, young people or
foreigners), with no vested benefits, are the intended victims of the
decline which begins. The turn of the others will come. But it will be then
too late to avoid the disaster.
Socially just rigor must become a commonplace in all sectors of society; it
must be a sustainable rule of conduct. It assumes that a social pact be
rebuilt, that the French people have the feeling they are treated equally,
that their children retain a chance for social mobility and in particular
that we do not consider the suburbs just like a battlefield for police
forces.
The victims of this system, mostly young people without inheritance,
“Nobody’s Children?” feel indeed that this rigor socially just will not
impose itself by the natural interaction of democracy. Neither with a
right-wing government. Nor with a left-wing government. For the moment they
leave. That may be the best that can happen to those who govern, or aspire
to govern: if these young people were to stay, and claimed their due,
nothing would remain of these privileges. One way or another, they would
impose, they will impose one day, a just rigor.