Florence Portelli: "Empathy, humility, transmission and panache must guide the right"

Florence Portelli is vice-president of the Île-de-France region and mayor of Taverny.

One thing is clear: politics in France has reached a degree of vacuity never before achieved.

The presidential and parliamentary electoral cycle, which is generally the one where every five years, debates and projects clash and where the political forces and the personalities who represent them put them into programmatic form and an agenda, has been emptied of all content .

Government agreement, coalition, national union, majority of projects, rallying of opportunity... Our fellow citizens are watered morning, noon and evening with notions that smell of the good old political grub, with the same chefs in the kitchen applying the same recipes, using and abusing the same basic sauce, that of treason, debauchery and compromise specific to Court societies.

This cynicism recalls the Abbé de Vilecourt in the film

when he replies to the king: “

”.

What to do ?

Should we withdraw into the private sphere, like this half of citizens who no longer vote, and watch this parade for a defunct policy as a spectator, or take up the challenge of giving meaning to commitment?

One thing is certain: it is time for reflection, foresight, an inventory of what remains fundamental after decades of public policy failures and the collapse of ideologies.

This is why we must call on women and men on the right, who might be tempted to abandon everything in the face of the rubble of successive failures and believe that their political family is an absent subscriber, to question the references, the values, which irreducibly remain our markers, our deep identity.

The word “respect” has never been used so wrongly and indiscriminately, and never so much has been taken away from our fellow citizens the dignity necessary for their development.

Florence Portelli

For my part, I see four cardinal values ​​which must establish our raison d'être.

If there is one value that has emerged strengthened from the pandemic we have been through, it is empathy, which I do not confuse with the cult of emotion.

The consumer society, and its corollary which is triumphant individualism, have gained the upper hand since the 1970s and, little by little, put down the feeling of otherness.

Indifference to others has found its best ally in the repentant discourse of the left, which has offered whole sections of the population a victim passport.

" has never been used so wrongly and indiscriminately

and never so much taken away from our fellow citizens the dignity necessary for their development.

More and more French people feel, in fact, the social downgrading.

They feel, often rightly, hampered in their professional career, poorly regarded, and even powerless to offer their children a future.

In short, they have the deep feeling of being an object rather than a subject in this world where the globalized economy is deregulated and the dream Europe technocratized to the point of absurdity.

Humility is the Christian value par excellence, the one that nourishes the innermost course of our History and that makes France built against empires.

It is the antithesis of the behavior of the little marquises who govern us and who have returned from everything without having gone anywhere.

From century to century, these remain unchanged.

It was they who, through their taste for privileges and prebends, wanted a nobiliary reaction which provoked the French Revolution.

Humility requires courage: that of accepting one's faults and recognizing that collective intelligence is much more effective than the vaticinations of a single man.

It is an essential value when we go through crises and storms, and we have seen how badly it has been lacking lately.

The panache is, of all, the most French value.

But, as Péguy underlines, it is not limited to great feats of arms.

It is also in the gesture of the craftsman who produces a work through his know-how.

Florence Portelli

Transmission is, without doubt, the most attacked value and yet it nourishes our common humanity.

We find it in education but also in the necessary solidarity between the generations and the concern for the world that we will leave to our children, whether it is a question of ecology or the public debt, but also of our culture.

When there is no more inheritance, there is no more heir.

Transmission also expresses this intimate link between foresight and history: we cannot project ourselves into the future without including the transmission of the values ​​that make up our identity, of the heritage that makes up our roots, and that goes for the person , for the family, for all the communities starting with the national community.

For this, we must believe in the capacity of man to create,

The panache is, of all, the most French value, the one that favors elegance over baseness.

We find it in many pages of our national novel but also in novels as a whole, whether it's The Three Musketeers, Pardaillan, and even Lupin with this fascinating banter that conveys a certain idea of ​​pride.

This is Cyrano's last word: "

”.

But, as Charles Péguy points out in

, it is not limited to high feats of arms.

It is also in the gesture of the craftsman who produces a work through his know-how: “

If panache is not the virtue of morality professors who increasingly haunt our political landscape, it is indeed a morality, but a morality that makes us grow.

It is on the strength of these cardinal values ​​that we will finally be able to build, not a catalog of measures, but a project that makes sense, creates society.

The desperation and indifference that have been manifested for several elections force us to rebuild an ideal that transcends us and allows us to finally build the France of the 21st century.