Chloé Morin is the former Prime Minister's opinion advisor from 2012 to 2017. She currently works as an associate expert with the Jean Jaurès Foundation.
The word was dropped by the Minister of Labor Muriel Pénicaud: "wage moderation". You heard right: "moderation" . You moderate your ardor, you moderate your criticism. Our salary, we would like to save it, make it small, but moderate it ... how to say?
With the deconfinement, here is the return of these words which aim to make us take bladders for lanterns, which have done so much harm to politics, and which we would have liked to see disappear with the virus.
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We also knew about the “Job safeguard plans” , which aim to cut jobs, or “social plans” - or how to definitively kill the beautiful word “social” , which has become an insult in our country.
Or "flexicurity" , more flexi than security in general ...
There was a time when political neologisms were funny.There was a time when political neologisms were funny. Where they drew horizons, where they made our imaginations speak by pushing the limits. A time also when they created a bond between the politician and the citizen, by allowing the latter to find their elected representative funny, or even to feel valued by finding the stupid "elite".
Who does not remember the Raffarinades, these blistering formulas of the Prime Minister of Jacques Chirac from 2002 to 2005? "Our road is straight, but the slope is steep" . "It is curious to note in France that widows live longer than their husbands" ; " Young people are destined to become adults" . Or the best: "Win, the yes needs the no to win, against the no".
Or Balladurettes, this bonus of 5,000 francs paid by the Balladur government for the purchase of a new vehicle (we will have to think of calling the new bonuses announced by Macron the "Macronettes").
François Fillon had invented "unstoppable" to minimize his nervousness by reframing a turbulent majority in 2009.
And of course, we remember the “bravery” of Ségolène Royal, then presidential candidate visiting the Chinese wall.
Alas, those days are over. Politics no longer makes people laugh, they annoy. The complicity has disappeared, and neologisms are used today to put the citizen at a distance, and make him believe that if he does not see reality with the glasses of the high administration, he must change glasses. These words which multiply, from abstruse forms into inaudible political speeches, draw a country out of reality, a country of euphemism and cowardice.
Controlling words means controlling perceptions, and therefore twisting the real.Politicians, often surrounded by communicators more than competent people, know this: words have immense power. They make it possible to frame thought, to lay down the terms of a debate. As the communicator and pollster Frank Luntz said, "It's not what you say, it's what people hear".
Controlling words means controlling perceptions, and therefore twisting the real. George Lakoff describes very well the way in which our brain, reasoning by metaphors, appropriates reality and can therefore be manipulated by the use of good images and metaphors.
But we have come to the end of this path. Political communication has exhausted itself from twisting reality to compensate for the insufficiency or ineffectiveness of acts. Today, it only adds mistrust to mistrust. Saying things simply but clearly, without frills: this is precisely what Edouard Philippe has been doing for weeks, and with success - as evidenced by his embellished pollster. It is therefore time to generalize this political aggiornamento , to twist the blow to neologisms, to "storytelling" - which obviously does not mean giving in to the cult of transparency and abandoning the whole symbolic dimension of politics.
Asking the question of the wages of the richest as Muriel Pénicaud does, or even of all French people, is not prohibited. It is a fundamental economic debate. It divides, but it is not shameful to pose it in times of crisis. But let's be clear. Let’s stop packing, packing, diverting, euphemizing. Let’s stop violating language so as not to rush the French.
