Rafik Smati is a digital entrepreneur and president of Objectif France. Author of essays on sacrificed youth (including
Praise of Speed, the revenge of the texting generation
and
Revolution Y, the generation that will redesign Europe
).
They are eighteen, twenty, or thirty years old.
They are called Thomas, Emma, Youssef, or Marie.
They live in the city, in the suburbs or in the countryside.
These young French people all have one thing in common: they think they are part of a sacrificed generation.
The present in which they grow up is not like them.
It is often synonymous with uncertainty and anxiety, and the future rarely synonymous with hope.
The injustices exasperate them, the feeling of being sometimes guilty too.
To read also:
"The government does not intend to lower the debt before 2025 ... It is much too late"
Their future is mortgaged by economic difficulties and a debt that is durably aggravated by the health crisis;
it is weakened by a breakdown of the social elevator, from school to employment;
it is threatened by international tensions and crises, by an anxiety-provoking climate in France itself;
it is sacrificed by a political power which has given up thinking about the future ...
Some will object that the situation was much worse for a young Frenchman of 1914 or 1940. Of course, young French people today will probably die neither in war nor starvation.
But other evils threaten them: ecological peril, mass unemployment, social insecurity, the impossibility of planning for the long term ...
It's a fact: for decades, political action has sacrificed young people on the altar of cowardice and renunciation
In this respect, the lives of these millennial children could make one think of “
The Enemy
”, that magnificent poem by Charles Baudelaire: “
My youth was only a dark storm, Crossed here and there by brilliant suns;
The thunder and the rain have wreaked such havoc, That very few ruddy fruits remain in my garden
. "
It is a fact: for decades, political action has sacrificed the youth on the altar of cowardice and renunciation.
However, a solid republican pact could not allow the youth of a country to be considered as an adjustment variable.
This capitulation to the future explains why more and more of our young people are turning to a protest vote to make themselves heard ... when they vote.
And that others, unfortunately more and more numerous, choose to leave France.
To read also:
"When the government does not want to deal with a debate, it says that it is a controversy"
Also, if we want to avoid a major generational schism, it is urgent to make youth a national priority.
In top priority, even.
However, this paradigm shift goes well beyond a purely accounting and financial approach.
Political leaders often have the unfortunate reflex of thinking that pulling out the checkbook is enough to ease a complex situation.
In reality, the best way to serve our young people is not to infantilize them or make them prisoners of any kind of help: it is above all to offer them a future in which they have the means to act, to flourish and create.
Saving young people means seeing far ahead, thinking about the future, arming France to prepare it to face the dangers that are before us.
Exactly the reverse of the policies pursued for decades.
Saving youth is first and foremost to achieve the ecological transition for good.
Let's work for the emergence of a positive ecology, which combines temperance, protection of biodiversity, scientific progress, and relentless international action to change the lines on the climate.
Saving the youth means establishing greater democratic vitality, giving pride of place to the referendum (...) and a new unifying national story
Saving the youth also means defending a new economic and social model, which is based on easier access to employment, sound management of public funds, and better social equity, through the establishment of an Income Universal Basic.
Saving youth means establishing greater democratic vitality, giving pride of place to referendums, including citizens' initiatives, and a new unifying national story.
Saving the youth means finally carrying a project of civilization, which must work for the emergence of a solid - and not technocratic - union between brotherly European countries, for a lasting peace in the Mediterranean, for a partnership of equals. with Africa, and a new role for France.
I am driven by the idea that we have a duty to offer our youth such a galvanizing and elevated project.
A project so positive and unifying that it would allow Thomas, Emma, Youssef, or Marie, to unite in their differences and to project themselves together in the same French epic.
Read also:
Rafik Smati: "Freed from Leviathan, France will once again become the place of all innovations"
A window on the future that would open the way to a new hope, for a new rebirth.
The time has come to offer our youth a new future to believe in.