Martine Gozlan

Interior Minister at the time of the 13 November 2015 attacks, Cazeneuve knows what fear means. Isn’t it also the bloody aftermath of the Bataclan, the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher massacres, and the fascinations and fears born of Islamic terror that we are paying for today?

Didn’t Emmanuel Macron stay in power in 2022 thanks to the big scare that gripped a majority of public opinion in the face of the National Rally? Two years on, what citizen can claim to have gone to the polls in July 2024 in complete serenity, impervious to the prospect of competing and colliding chaos?

On the left – the New Popular Front – a majority that was as relative as it was divided did not make the people’s springtime. All of which feeds social and economic fears: which budget can be voted on at the start of the new school year, which reform can be amended, which low wage can be raised?

On the right – National Rally and LR-Ciotti – an equally relative minority with a growing number of MPs is preparing for a better, more structured future in the 2027 presidential election. In fact, the institutions are so weakened that they may even collapse before the deadline. Because the RN’s eleven million voters are gripped by a fear of invisibility. Basically, the system is giving them the glass ceiling all over again, whereas Marine Le Pen and her joker Jordan Bardella thought it had been shattered. This leads straight to the wall, with a major fear on the other side: for how long?

How long are we going to rely on fear to avoid having to deal with the far right? How long are we going to stop thinking about other people’s reasons? How long are we going to be afraid of their fears? How do you describe your adversary other than with anathema?

Our political life is ebullient, passionate and impetuous, but dangerously empty intellectually. The speed with which the Republican Front, which was said to be dead and buried, was reconstituted is matched only by the speed with which it dissolved, once the RN had been defeated once again. Where are the collective brainstorming sessions capable of turning this obscure object of desire into a substantiated and achievable response to France’s great fears? In a nutshell: schools, security, health, immigration and justice. Against a backdrop of dwindling purchasing power and an abysmal collective debt that the inimitable ecologist-feminist Sandrine Rousseau intends to absorb – deconstruct? – by siphoning off savings!

Where are the voices capable of reflecting collective anguish other than through the prism of ideology (Mélenchon – Le Pen), vanity (Macron) and personal ambitions equally shared in all canteens? But we don’t seem to be short of writers or philosophers. It was even one of the French virtues of this crowd of “fellow travellers” who came from the Republic of Arts and Letters to lend a hand to the other, the capital Republic. The problem is that they have now turned into petitioners from a single camp, always the same one. Ariane Mnouchkine, an idol of the cultural left, put her foot down in an article (published in Libération on 12 June 2024) that caused quite a stir before the first round: “We let the people down, we didn’t want to listen to their fears and anxieties. When people said what they saw, they were told they were wrong, that they didn’t see what they saw. Then, as they insisted, we told them they were idiots, then, as they insisted even more, we called them bastards.”

These words are all the more meaningful given the temptation, once the shock has worn off, to sweep them under the carpet along with the dust that will continue to accumulate. We’d be wrong. Because the worst is always here…