"The collapse of the intellectual level of the political class is a threat to democracy"

A keen observer of French political life and columnist for FigaroVox, Maxime Tandonnet has notably published

André Tardieu.

The misunderstood

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“What will Mbappé do after 50 years?”

Asked Sandrine Rousseau in the Social Affairs Committee, about the examination of the pension bill.

Evoking the situation of an immensely wealthy sportsman about the revolt of millions of employees, who suffer to make ends meet and worry about their old age, may legitimately seem incongruous.

However, the deputy was not joking at all:

This surreal statement, in the context of a very serious social crisis that is shaking popular France, raises inevitable questions about the intellectual level of the French political class.

Because the deputy is far from being the only one.

The strategy of provocation, which consists of making people talk about themselves at any price, including that of the worst aberrations, is now commonplace.

The communication shots result in often absurd words or gestures, symptomatic of a decline in the educational level of senior leaders, like national elected officials as a whole.

The quest for the symbol or the good word which will make it possible to arouse media attention pushes the political world to mediocrity, like the minister who prided himself on wearing turtlenecks to save heating, his colleague who advocated the banishment of individual houses, or of this MEP provoking a diplomatic incident for having spoken of

, or even of the gigantic outcry (stifling the debate on the channels of irregular immigration) around the declarations of a MEP inviting the Vicking Ocean

.

The hysterical National Assembly looks more like a playground than a place to exercise sovereignty.

The intellectual decline is expressed in the vocabulary of certain political leaders, and the loss of mastery of the French language.

Rudeness, when it becomes commonplace and even becomes official, constitutes a form of violence that reveals the inability to express one's thoughts other than through vulgarity.

However, for some years now, the politicians of the highest rank have made rudeness a usual mode of expression: the word "annoy" is used in all respects by the politicians of the highest level, like that of "asshole".

A minister proclaims in a tweet: "Damn, I'm French".

Recently the word “brothel” with its variants, “bordéliser” or “bordelisation”, has imposed itself as a reference in political language.

Why ?

Because they no longer know how to speak otherwise.

The growing mediocrity of national politicians, from which the French are turning away, is also an invitation to rethink the ways in which democracy is exercised.

Maxime Tandonnet

In fact, politics is most often reduced to a spectacle, to games of symbols, totems and red rags, the manipulation of collective emotions which stifles the debate of ideas and reflection.

During the health crisis, the vast majority of the political world, for lack of historical hindsight, ignored the fundamental question of freedoms and the rights of individuals, allowing an “Absurdistan” to develop as draconian as it was ineffective.

Today the positions concerning the pension reform are tense on the totem of 64 years (absurd given the rules of annuities), without seeing that the essential is elsewhere, in the exasperation of popular France in the face of the contempt of its ruling elites.

Disconnection or

inability to sense the expectations and anxieties of the country is a symptom of this intellectual decline.

The Third Republic certainly had its faults, but it at least knew how to produce statesmen of a high level like Jean Jaurès, Waldeck-Rousseau, Raymond Poincaré, Édouard Herriot, Léon Blum or André Tardieu.

The Fifth Republic in its current version rather trains vain histrions, specialists in publicity stunts and provocation, deprived of a historical vision and a sense of the state.

So how can this collapse be explained?

On the one hand, it is the inevitable consequence of the general collapse of educational standards reflected in international rankings.

But above all, it signals a loss of prestige in the political career, dominated by an image of narcissistic showmanship much more than by the idea of ​​serving the common good.

The mandates of parliamentarian or minister, and even of head of state suffer from an accelerated devaluation.

Who wants to become a deputy, senator or minister?

Barring exceptions, the most intellectually and humanly sound young people, motivated by the desire to be useful rather than to boast, will preferably go into university, scientific, literary, medical, legal, commercial or industrial professions.