EIs there a greater political danger for France than the arrival of the far right in power? But how to prevent it if the voters of the working classes continue to turn more and more to the Le Pen – 17% of workers in 1988, 39% in 2017 and 42% in 2022 in the first round of the presidential election? These questions are posed to the power in place and refer to the condescension, even contempt, that Emmanuel Macron has often shown. The great merit of the deputy La France insoumise of the Somme, François Ruffin, is to dare to affirm that they concern in the first place and in a vital way the left.
The strength of his little book I am writing to you from the front of the Somme (Les Liens qui liberante, 144 pages, 10 euros) is to be based on a lived reality: the little music of “I can’t vote for the left, I’m for work” and the repeated aggressiveness against “those who “do not get up in the morning (…)receive aid” while “we are not entitled to anything””heard during door-to-door visits in his constituency, between Amiens and Abbeville.
Based on a double observation – the success of Jean-Luc Mélenchon among the bourgeois of the city center and among the inhabitants of the suburbs with an immigrant background, and his failure against Marine Le Pen in the suburban and rural areas –, the elected representative of the Somme calls for reconciliation of these two electorates, a sine qua non of past and future victories for the left and a weakening of the far right. The left, which in the eyes of many voters has become the “camp of the assisted”, must, he says, once again become that of fairly paid work and the pride it provides.
“Scent of Abandonment”
Stolen by the extreme right like secularism or patriotism, the “work value” – also put forward by Fabien Roussel, the national secretary of the French Communist Party – must be defended and linked to the imperative of the fight against climate change, itself a provider of jobs and collective hope. Under the “scent of abandonment” of the France of the peripheries that François Ruffin feels, under his plea in favor of universal social rights “without obligation of misery”, One can imagine the criticism of a left that is more mobilized on societal than social issues, more inclined to magnify particularisms than universalism.
In fact, how can we hope to divert popular voters from the Le Pen vote when some, on the left, spend most of their energy in controversies that irritate them, stir up anxiety and fears without offering a solution and unnecessarily exacerbate divisions? With his defense of burkinis in swimming pools, the mayor (EELV) of Grenoble, Eric Piolle, probably only reinforced the prejudices about a supposed complacency of the left with regard to radical Islam.
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