Each country, clearly, looks at the world from the top of its bell-tower. And the landscape of France, at the moment, seen from this perspective, is not particularly exciting.
We appear to be shifting, much like in a water-slide, towards the biggest failure: ministers are called into question, a discredited government (at least according to public opinion surveys) same fate for the right, also extremist parties who, from right and left, say the same thing and already see themselves as winners in the local and European elections. Then comes next an impossibility to govern; after that will come a temptation to dissolve, which could benefit the President, if the right then back into the picture did not perform better than the left, and no better than over the past ten years.
If the President simply offered some responses related to cases that are still under examination, he would never satisfy public opinion: the more it puts hope in a team, the more it is angry when this team fails. And no ethical reform, however necessary it may be, will be enough to appease public opinion.
We will likely find we need to ensure as soon as possible total transparency of the financial assets and income of candidates for any executive or legislative functions, national or local, and give much more means to the tax police for checking compliance; this may also mean to accelerate the prohibition of plurality of mandates and come back on the disastrous reduction to five years of the Presidential term of office, which prohibits any action over the long term. In my view, though, none of that will do in terms of appeasing public opinion.
If the government wants to have another chance to get through these very tough times and, for the benefit of democracy, to last as long as the mandate entrusted to them by the electorate, they must do things differently, get rid of the stench, and put the country in front of the real issues of the day.
And the real issues are now, European: the resolution to the problem of unemployment is European. The beating heart of growth is European. This is the path that we must dare to embark on.
We cannot keep the current arrangement: where the bricolage of Europe is holding together only through the joint good will of Mr. Draghi and Mrs. Merkel, both putting each day increasing pressure on
other governments, accelerating unemployment and recession, limiting their sovereignty, by allowing, or refusing them, a level of deficit. The Greek, Spanish, Cyprus crises, Portuguese today, Italian tomorrow show what awaits us if we do not act very quickly: a collapse of our institutions in favour of extremes. That is where, more than in any other cause, we need to look for the real reason of the French malaise today.
France should therefore offer an exit from the top. This gives meaning to politics beyond the current cheap political tricks. Either we acknowledge the failure of that Europe, and, hoping to escape reality by some great magical tricks, we exit the euro, consciously entering into an irreversible decline. Or we dare to move forward on the road towards greater Franco-German integration, and federal power, which will provide us with some flexibility in order to organize growth and increase employment. And in particular, to pool and deploy the means of control of the exemplarity of elected representatives.
Of course, we will not be able to make any decision on this before the German elections. But, to guide them, to provide the right direction, to come out on top, it rests with France to propose this movement. Now.
j@attali.com