A keen observer of French political life and regular contributor to the FigaroVox, Maxime Tandonnet has notably published
André Tardieu.
The misunderstood
(Perrin, 2019).
The renunciation of François Baroin to stand for the presidential elections of 2022 is experienced by supporters of the "right" as the loss of a chance to regain power.
The arguments that have been put forward by the person concerned say a lot about the image of the prevailing politics in the country.
“I don't want to,”
he reportedly said on France Info.
This statement echoes many statements that tend to present the candidacy for the Elysee as above all a matter of personal desire:
“You have to want it”
or
“be the one who wants it the most”.
Since the adoption of the five-year term in 2000, the presidential election has been the sole pivot of national policy.
It absorbs the legislative elections which systematically take place just after, and only confirm its result.
Collective emotion - easily manipulated - around a character, is essential as the key to the collective future to the detriment of the debate of ideas or social choices.
Thus, in a logic of exacerbated narcissism, the fate of France would henceforth merge entirely with the jolts of individual whims.
The presidential function would be above all turned towards the personal satisfaction of the occupant of the Elysee - the realization of his "desires" - to the detriment of the common good or the general interest.
This obsession with "envy" and "desire" as the engine of Elyos ambition signals the sinking of French policy in nihilism.
The prospect of a return of the right to power is not hypothetical.
There is nothing anecdotal about Mr. Baroin's withdrawal.
Beyond “the absence of envy”, it marks the violent degradation of the presidential function.
French political conscience has remained on the false belief in an all-powerful head of state, that of the Fifth Republic in its infancy.
But by a formidable paradox, the one who is presented as the embodiment of authority is faced with the reduction of his room for maneuver by the transfers of jurisdiction to Brussels, the grip of judicial controls, the explosive state of society. France, its decay in violence and chaos, the scale of the debt and public deficits.
To give the feeling of fulfilling their promises of a "new world" or "transformation", all the presidents have left is the emphasis, the logorrhea and the daily gesticulation, in one form or another.
But since the people are infinitely more lucid than the political leaders imagine, their fate is to sink into unpopularity if not contempt.
That Mr. Baroin does not feel the vocation of an illusionist, nor that of a national scapegoat, is to his credit.
What can be the meaning of a candidacy for the Élysée today?
Is it possible to ward off the curse of the Élysée Palace?
The leaders of the right, do they not have an interest in leaving the current occupant of the "Palace", in such a chaotic and calamitous context, assume its balance sheet and continue a descent into hell for five more years?
For three and a half years, polls have predicted in 2022, a renewal of the duel of the second round of 2017 Le Pen / Macron leading to the re-election of the second.
Eight in ten French people say they do not want this duel (Marianne February 10, 2020).
Why, faced with a country that has become ungovernable, not accept the fatality of the poll?
In fact, the prospect of a return of the right to power is not hypothetical: the predictions of the polls, 18 months in advance, never come true;
the disintegration of LREM, the presidential unpopularity (29% of confidence according to the barometer Figaro magazine), the supremacy of LR and its allies in the by-elections, leave a margin of hope on this subject.
What for?
The political revolution requires a discourse of truth about what is possible and not possible and a collective commitment to the major issues of the time: public debt, youth unemployment, control of migration, fight against violence and communitarianism.
French policy needs to accomplish its cultural revolution.
If the right has a role to play in the upcoming elections, it is to give meaning to the word political.
Its mission could be to try to wrest French politics from its shipwreck in narcissistic nihilism.
The
leaders
right are the first to say: we must
"incarnate"
.
Maybe, but embody what?
The vain spectacle, the daily staging, the narcissistic nothingness?
The priority is to reconcile the French with politics and democracy. This mission consists of giving them a message according to which political leaders do not take themselves for demigods but are nothing other than servants of the Nation. It consists of trying to convince them that the government of a country can be something other than an obsession with re-election or "the mark in history". Rather than miraculous promises, it goes through a discourse of truth about what is possible and not possible and of collective commitment on the major issues of the time: public debt, youth unemployment, control of migration, struggle against violence and communitarianism. The priority is to prove that the right is capable of collectively defining a line of action in the service of France in an attempt to restore confidence, knowing that the question of the “candidate” can only result.