Ln an interview on BFM-TV on July 5, Gérald Darmanin distinguished between two types of opposition to the presidential majority: if the Republican deputies and certain socialist or environmentalist deputies are “adversaries” with which it would be possible to find compromises to pass laws, the Rassemblement national (RN) and La France insoumise would, on the other hand, be “enemies” which cannot be relied upon. The statement shocked a number of parliamentarians who, within the New People’s Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) and the RN, felt they were regarded as pariahs of the republican arc, while they represent millions of voters in The national assembly.
The words of the Minister of the Interior should, however, hardly come as a surprise since they are part of the extension of Emmanuel Macron’s strategy since the start of his electoral adventure. To conquer the Elysée in 2017, he weakened his opponents by appropriating the values common to the two majority political formations, right and left, in order to be the only one able to act as a bulwark for the RN.
In the recent past, Eric Dupond-Moretti justified his entry into the campaign in Hauts-de-France with a view to destabilizing Xavier Bertrand in the regional elections of June 2021, with the same semantic nuance as that of Gérald Darmanin: “Xavier Bertrand is an adversary, he specified, Marine Le Pen an enemy. » Revealing the evolution of partisan power relations, this strategy of weakening the adversary in order to confront the enemy comfortably is particularly interesting from the point of view of political philosophy.
Post-political illusion
Since 2017, a tacit rule has guided the game of the presidential campaign, repeated in 2022: the Grail goes to the one who will qualify in the final against the representative of a protesting electorate who has sociologically seceded by remaining firmly above 20%, without being able to gather in the second round. To feed this winning strategy, Emmanuel Macron replaced the old left-right divide, the one that opposes, said the philosopher Karl Popper, the supporters of an open society [démocratique et gouvernée par la raison] against the proponents of a closed society. This new political deal is the symptom of a sociological evolution that goes beyond the French context.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, liberal democracy has triumphed over socialism. According to the American researcher Francis Fukuyama, this victory marked the end of the story that was going to stop to allow law and reason to heal us from conflict and politics. This post-political illusion dealt a fatal blow to social democracy when its emblematic figures, like the British Tony Blair, the German Gerhard Schröder or the American Bill Clinton, chose to adapt to the constraints of neoliberalism, by favoring the third way modestly called “social-liberal”.
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