TRIBUNE/OPINION – We could stick to this biblical proverb, which says it all. Because it is a violent wind that has been blowing for a long time on France and the French. The streets of Paris strewn with garbage cans, an Elysée under siege, the consequences of the cold legal violence that is decided and persists in hushed meetings.
People from the same world attach to it heavy burdens which they lay on the shoulders of working people: they would not last a day on a construction site, an automobile chain, in a slaughterhouse, clearing household waste, as a nurse’s aid or to drive a subway. There is no spontaneous generation of the social storm, it is aroused.
The government and the “Renaissance” deputies (1) are right to say that the unions have not succeeded in “bring France to a standstill” and to “bring France to its knees”.
Admittedly, only the President can claim to have achieved these two results. France at a standstill, it was done on March 16, 2020 after its quixotic declaration of war on Sars-CoV2, by means of a brilliant strategic withdrawal (confinement in our homes, conducive to quiet family contamination).
Let’s face it: he was the only one to have dared to do this in the whole history of France, and to drown out the wave of protest that this crazy decision was to raise, under the budgetary infusion of an unreasonable “whatever ‘it costs’, taking the public deficit from €73 billion to a trifle of €211 billion in 2020. presidential majority in the 2020 municipal elections.
And he is in the process of proving before our eyes that he can still do it again today, deaf to the fundamental protest against a useless reform, since the extension of the contribution period, including in the special schemes, is already achieved, in the form of discounts in the event of retirement before a full career, under the Touraine Law. Marisol Touraine has also clearly expressed herself against the current project (2), which it would be better to call the project to deteriorate the living conditions of the less fortunate.
As for bringing France to its knees and humiliating it, this is, if we link the chain of the character’s words and body language, a personal obsession: there is again only him to having succeeded in doing so and even persisting in doing so. He did so in the face of the unprecedented popular movement of yellow vests, which police provocations managed to make violent in order to disqualify him and which was repressed with unprecedented police violence (according to Release (3), 82 seriously injured and 12 people blinded).
He also recently confirmed his crushing victory over the yellow vests, whose movement was based on historic increases in the price of fuel. By snatching from Patrick Pouyanné the cap on the price of gasoline at 1.99 €, he signed a real snub to the yellow vests, now locked in a mute anger that should not reassure anyone.
We don’t remember that in the fall of 2018, the country was on the verge of chaos, from which it was only saved by the president’s magic trick. His long-awaited speech on December 18, in which he played double or quits, succeeded in drowning the movement with the promise of a Great National Debate.
Great Debate which quickly turned into the presidential Grand One Man Show organized by the prefects, without leading to anything memorable. If not the reinforcement of the presidential pride, inflated by its power of illusionist, capable of imposing this “advisory way out of crisis” according to the “elements of language” of then. “The French are conified by words”, said Celine.
Bringing France to its knees, he again succeeded in doing so with the speech of July 12, 2020, despite the protests of hundreds of thousands of French people from all walks of life, and this in the middle of summer. By creating an unthinkable apartheid between vaccinated and non-vaccinated French people, thanks to the voluntary enlistment of the media benefiting from the public windfall (€3 billion between 2020 and 2021).
These repeated acts of force have left indelible traces: remorse after submission torn off by an uninhibited Machiavelli, unions trapped by “science” and this form of large-scale Milgram experiment (4) that was political management of the health crisis.
Despite prolonged mistreatment by the media, which have taxed any criticism of health management as “conspiracy” (5); despite the alzheimerian virtue of presentism which dominates contemporary societies, the French have not all lost their minds or their memories. It’s time for the bill, and it’s salty.
The French are still struggling to understand how a sudden open bar policy consisting of:
1) to pay for doing nothing a whole part of the population prevented from working by virtue of delusional and incoherent health protocols;
2) to generalize “free” tests for everyone but dearly paid for by the CNAM and ultimately without much meaning given the quantity of asymptomatic positives;
3) in an all-out vaccination policy at the expense of the princess.
In short, how could a policy consisting of throwing tens of billions of euros magically out of a presidential hat, bogeyman and Santa Claus at the same time, fail to bankrupt France.
Comment, on the contrary, could a forecast imbalance in the pension system of a few billion in a few years put France into bankruptcy? It seems that the credulity and the patience of a population have found their limit.
One question remains: can a country so long damaged by its leaders and descended so low recover?
(1) It would be necessary to psychoanalyze this new baptismal name of what was “La République en Marche”. If she is to be reborn, that means a priori that she was dead…
(2) “Marisol Touraine castigates the pension reform described as ‘passport for far-right populism'”.
(3) Cf. Checknews of January 12, 2019.
(4) On this subject, see the popularized and remarkably staged explanation of Milgram’s experiment in Henri Verneuil’s film, Like Icarus from 1979, with Yves Montand.
(5) See the slow construction in the United States by the CIA of the questioning of “conspiracy theories” after the publication of the not very credible report of the Warren Commission of inquiry into the assassination of President Kennedy, then that of his presidential candidate brother who risked reopening the JFK assassination file, in The origins of the “conspiracy theory” by Lance Dehaven-Smith, published in 2013 in the United States, in 2022 in France by Yves Michel editions.