The revolution is underway in Damascus. Once again, in the Arab world, history takes a dramatic turn, and the Syrian people hold their breath. Bashar al-Assad has fled the country, and Islamists have seized power. What lies ahead? The battalions led by Abu Mohammed al-Joulani, a former jihadist of ISIS and then al-Qaeda - whom he allegedly parted ways with in 2016 - thank Allah from the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, a radiant symbol of Sunni Islam. These images will go down in history, though no one knows how it will unfold.

Kamel Daoud should have won the Goncourt Prize in 2014. That year, his debut novel (“Meursault, contre-enquête,” Actes Sud) was the favorite. Legend has it that he was edged out by “Pas pleurer” by Lydie Salvayre, thanks to a vote (opposed to Daoud) from Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Goncourt jury member and the only North African writer to have won the prize, in 1987, for “La nuit sacrée” (Seuil).

More than just an electoral victory, it is a landslide victory that places Donald Trump back at the top of the world. Moreover, it grants him unprecedented powers that no other American president has ever held. On January 20th, the egocentric billionaire, with a personality as colorful as his famous orange hair, will not only reclaim the keys to the White House. His administration, the 47th of its kind, will also have the support of the majority in both chambers of Congress. It will also count on the backing of the Supreme Court, which he had shaped with conservative appointments at the end of his first term (2017-2021).

Are the democratic values championed by Europe and the United States destined to fall under the expansionist fury of Eastern autocrats like Khamenei, Putin, Xi Jinping, and Erdogan? Jean-François Colosimo, author of “The West, Global Enemy No. 1” (Albin Michel), and Amin Maalouf, who examines the roots of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in “The Maze of the Lost: The West and its Adversaries” (Grasset), prompt a necessary reflection on this topic.

Are we that far from them? The ocean that separates us from the Americans seems to be shrinking on the eve of a crucial presidential election for the United States and the world. Could the breakdown of the American dream, crystallised by the enthusiasm of half the nation for a Donald Trump who is delirious - “executing babies after birth, Haitian refugees eating cats and dogs” - and threatening the worst if he does not win, be the XXL version of the breakdown of the French dream? They are going to vote while we are still recovering from our own elections, from the European elections in June to the legislative elections in July. Loss of buying power, rifts between communities, hate-filled dialogues, ultra-violence, the dictatorship of social networking sites, the grip of conspiracy theorists: the debates that have set the American scene ablaze are echoed in our own.

The recent European and parliamentary elections show the extent to which a large proportion of the political class is out of touch with the people and incapable of delivering a long-term project that unites the nation as a whole. On the one hand, the Macronie elites, whose sole obsession is to “deliver” us from the peril of the far right, have shown no vision for turning France around. To put it plainly, they have done nothing but avoid confrontation with reality. On the other hand, the Woke compatible media, which practices Big Brother-style inversion of values, has for years been constantly telling the French how they should think, travel and consume, without imagining that they would one day make them pay for it, this overflow of inane moralizing.

The results of the second round of the French legislative elections on July 7 have generated an unprecedented political crisis in France. An impasse due to the absence of a sufficiently large parliamentary majority to be able to govern in a calm and lasting manner. However, despite the risks of blockage which threaten to shake the institutions of the Fifth French Republic, there are at least 4 reasons to rejoice at the outcome of this election:

Between fears and deceptions, France is swaying. Despite the rodomontades of Jean-Luc Mélenchon who, at 8.07pm on 7 July, announced that the affair had been completed at the same time - he implied - as his attaché case for Matignon, nothing has been resolved. “Having avoided the worst - the arrival of the far right in power - does not protect us from another worst: the ungovernability of the country”, warns Bernard Cazeneuve, former Socialist Prime Minister (between December 2016 and May 2017), with a secular and universalist left-wing leaning.

Face au risque d’une victoire électorale qui offrirait la majorité parlementaire à l’extrême droite, le salut ne peut venir que d’une mobilisation républicaine ralliant tous les démocrates, car aucune formation politique ne peut résister, seule, à la poussée du Rassemblement national. Or, de nombreux clivages entravent le ‘‘cordons sanitaire’’ républicain. Pour les dépasser, il conviendrait de substituer au bon vieux ‘‘Front républicain’’, dirigé exclusivement contre l’extrême droite, un ‘‘tri sélectif républicain’’ destiné à isoler et bloquer tous ceux que les outrances et les dérives placent hors de l’arc républicain, de quelque bord politique qu’ils se revendiquent.

The world of yesterday described by Stefan Zweig in his Brazilian exile in 1943 has never been so close to us. His lament as a European, contemporaneous with the swallowing up of everything he loved, continues to haunt us as a new Europe and a new France emerge from the ballot boxes on 9 June, and then, in our country, from those on 30 June and 7 July. The crisis campaign preceding the European elections was marked by the disappearance of the key principles on which our civilisation is founded: courteous confrontation, rationality versus delusion, the search for meaning versus the senseless and the unthought-of.