The worst thing that could happen to France at the moment is to be at the start of a presidential campaign and to have a president eligible for reelection. While the French State must take some really serious decisions, political elites will be at each other’s throats for six months on programs made obsolete day after day by a rapidly changing situation.
The French Constitution provides, however, and rightly so, in principle, all powers to the president of the republic until the last day of his term. But he cannot exercise them if the country, ruined, must beg for money; If the banks and insurance companies have been weakened; and if the public debates are censored by the threat of the rating agencies.
So we need everything except a weak government since this semester could be fraught with danger. And if we were not so close to some major elections, we should really call for a break into partisan debate, recognize, share all truths and work together to find solutions.
However, we do not: during the election campaign, both sides are blaming each other, everyone is telling only his truth; and the bearers of bad news are considered guilty for what they announce or considered bad French people, because they state unbearable facts.
Thus the debate on the rating of the French public debt: yes, France has, actually, lost its triple-A, no one will disagree with that. And if the rating agencies do not yet recognize this, it is probably because they do not dare, for the moment, to influence the election campaign. In doing so, they are in fact, once again, doing a disservice to the country, which needs an electric shock to act before it is too late.
And those who serve poorly their country are not those who say this, and not rejoicing over this; but those who refuse to take notice of this sad reality and make every effort to regain the best rating; through budgetary savings, new taxes and especially bold proposals to build a federal Europe, the only route to a positive outcome, and that many suggest, in France and Germany.
We are not taking this course of action. And by May, much will happen. Including, if the European leaders continue to mismanage the situation so badly, the end of the euro and the bankruptcy of France. Let us call it like it is: If we continue like this, the presidential campaign will be mainly centered in the last days of April 2012 on the following topic: « France has defaulted, the French banks and insurance companies being ruined and the euro being doomed to disappear, should we side with Germany’s strong euro or Italy’s weak euro? »
Do we really want this to happen?
Politics, is not just about opinions, there are also facts. The French people need truth, political education and to make a joint effort to get through a terrible crisis. France has all the resources, financial, economic and social.
We are starting to dream, to get there, of an impossible option of the national unity government. Or another, not to say impossible resignation of the president to accelerate the hurdle of the French elections. And then we say to ourselves that the only thing we have left is to tell the truth as clearly as possible, as if there was no campaign, as if all our efforts should be directed towards getting to the truth, necessary condition for useful action.
For at least (as Karl Marx wrote so mysteriously, in the last months of his life, at the end of his critique of the German Social-Democratic Programme) « dixit et salvavi animam meam »: I have spoken and saved my soul.