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When in France will the legislative elections be taken seriously? When in France will people be more interested in the programmes of the candidates than in their posturing and ranting? When will the parties propose serious, ambitious and comprehensive programmes? When will they take into account the tragic evolution of climate and diversity, inevitable world famine, explosive inflation, weakening secularism and security? And also, despite the more or less timid reforms dared during the last three presidential mandates, when will they take the measure of a school in full rout, a university in abandonment, a dilapidated health system, an industry less and less competitive, and public spending higher than anywhere else in the world!
Once again, the electoral campaign for the legislative elections, which ends this week, will not have been an opportunity to debate a credible project for society, in the face of all these challenges, nor any of the major issues of the next five years (except for purchasing power and pensions), but to throw invectives, even insults, at each other, calling into question the respect owed to our elected representatives and our institutions, and to launch proposals as unrealistic as any other:
On the far right and the far left, they propose to return to retirement at 60, which made sense 40 years ago when life expectancy was seven years less than it is today, but which today would imply a considerable increase in tax and social charges.
On the right and the extreme right, ghostly programmes are proposed, totally centred on immigration, of which we no longer know, according to the latest speeches of the various parties, whether these parties wish to stop it, or to send foreigners back or, according to the latest speeches, to better integrate the necessary newcomers. And practically nothing on the other issues.
The extreme left, which has succeeded in obtaining the blind submission of the social democrats, is proposing a very innovative programme on the sea and the French-speaking world, and a very inadequate one on ecology (bold on some subjects and completely unrealistic on many others, since it claims to cover the country’s energy needs by first doing without nuclear power, then wind power, and soon oil); a totally delirious programme on the economy (it announces increases in public spending five times higher than those implemented by the Left in 1981 and promises to finance them with suicidal taxes for companies and savers, without any of the structural reforms that the Left dared to implement in 1981 (without ever renouncing them, contrary to the myth of a “turnaround” in 1983); a largely anti-republican programme (renouncing secularism in order to praise creolisation); a diplomatically cowardly programme (questioning, without really daring to say it, any support to Ukraine). And, to spice it all up, with explicitly anti-Semitic postures and allies.
The parties in government show some courage on pensions and on the return to work, but they propose nothing better to compensate for inflation and to respond to emergencies of all kinds than unlimited budgetary spending, without any real structural reforms, savings or new taxes.
Reading this, one wonders if the French really know that it is the Parliament that votes the budget, that it is the Parliament that ultimately decides on the composition of the government, that if the extreme left comes to power and applies its programme, it will ruin all the hopes of the poorest in less than a year, pushing France into the arms of the right for another thirty years; and that, if the current majority retains power, we will have to trust its pragmatism, and constantly push it to have the courage to dare to put the country into a war economy, to give it all the means to work, and no longer only to consume. To face all the challenges ahead. To switch as quickly as possible to the economy of life.
j@attali.com