Lhe legislative elections will be part of the continuity of an institutional system that will not respond to the lack of representativeness of elected officials in the new French political landscape. A democratic renewal is necessary. Equally obsolete is the social-democratic testament that the last survivors of the governing Socialist Party have sold off for a decade, ignoring the lessons of decline before disintegrating into the populism of the “rebellious”. The right of the Les Républicains party has since sunk in the same way.
The two emerging populist blocs unashamedly display their radicalism against everything that escapes them: the economy, entrepreneurship, competitiveness, new technologies, innovation, the market, Europe… With real success among young people which should challenge us. Between these two blocks, there remains only a center embodied by Emmanuel Macron, which absorbs the rest of the political space. If his person received the support of a large majority of the country, the proposals of the parties quickly united under the label “Together! are imbued with an ideological and programmatic vagueness that could open too much space to populism.
This is all the more worrying since the elected president will not be able to stand again in 2027, unlike the leaders of the extreme parties who, whatever they say, are already preparing for it. It is not only in France that the dynamics of the political project are slipping towards the extremes. In Italy, the hard right is not far from rallying the majority of voters, while a radical majority has imposed itself within the 5 Star Movement. In the United States, Trumpism has conquered the Republican Party, while a doctrinaire left, from Bernie Sanders to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is gaining influence among the Democrats.
The “happy days”, promised by the former communist candidate in the presidential election, Fabien Roussel, yes, we wish them collectively. We aspire to it with fervor but also with lucidity in the face of demagogic programs which ignore the realities of the economic and social situation of the country and of the international environment. Implemented, these programs would lead us to financial rout, like Alexis Tsipras making the Greek crisis worse, and to relegation to Europe.
Restore equality of opportunity
However, the French, a political people if there ever was one, faced with health and climate crises and then with the war in Ukraine, need hope, a perspective of collective and individual progress in which to believe and for which engaging, of a story to which we collectively want to adhere. Our young people, in particular, expect their concerns to be listened to and taken into account in the political debate. There is therefore an urgent need today to lay the foundations of a “French-style third way”, in the image of Anthony Giddens, opening up an alternative between hardline conservatism and the leftist drift of Labor in the United Kingdom of the 1980s.
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