Alexandre Portier is LR deputy for the Rhône, professor of philosophy, and member of the Higher Council of Programs.
Offer all students a meal at 1 euro: the promise is beautiful, isn't it?
Worthy of bad publicity:
“You sign for studies?
Well, for 1€ more, the meal is offered!”.
However, this is what the Nupes is proposing this Thursday, February 9, as part of a bill brought by the Socialist MP Fatiha Keloua Hachi.
Empty as an advertising slogan, the idea is unfair, infantilizing and terribly demagogic.
But above all, it raises the whole question of our relationship to work, to solidarity, and above all to our young people.
Unfair first, because this measure is once again made for very large cities.
Behind the beautiful incantations, the 1 euro meal wanted by Nupes would only affect students from large cities.
How can we accept that students from medium-sized cities, already eternally forgotten by transport and housing policies, are once again excluded?
Remember: the first inequalities are territorial before being social.
When the €1 meal was set up during the Covid, the distance from the catering outlets was a major obstacle, as pointed out by the Court of Auditors (2022 activity report).
Because yes, higher education is not just Paris, Lyon or Marseille.
Helping students who need it, yes, but when did it become abnormal to have to make an effort to succeed?
Alexander Porter
With less than 800 structures, the Cnous offer does not currently cover all the cities hosting university sites.
In our country, nearly 20% of students do not have direct access to this offer.
Concretely, it is therefore nearly 500,000 students who would find themselves left behind, because they are located in the “white zones” of university catering where the IUTs, the BTS or even the nursing schools are located.
The €1 meal wanted by the Nupes is an iniquitous but also infantilizing measure.
To the financial difficulties of students, the left only responds with the eternal antiphon of the cheque.
Still and always.
Helping students who need it, yes, but when did it become abnormal to have to make an effort to succeed?
Since when is it abnormal to have to fight to finance your studies?
It's even the surest way to want to succeed, and to be proud to get there by your own means.
Basically, at the heart of the €1 meal, the sad symbol of the divorce between the left and work is revealed.
It puts on the same level those who make efforts and those who do not.
Paying becomes suspect;
work a problem, even a punishment.
The “whatever it takes” and the health crisis did not help.
How long will we continue in this spiral of contempt for reality and the value of things?
While “everything free” is already ravaging our health services, the left dreams of extending it to all sectors of activity.
Alexander Porter
National solidarity is precious.
This Thursday, I will therefore propose a simple thing: that any student who wishes to benefit from this €1 meal commits in return for two hours a week in the service of a local community.
It's something easy to set up, adaptable to young people's schedules and a first experience that would be invaluable for the professional life to come.
However, in committee, the left yelled at "hidden work" - you had to dare;
the volunteers of our associations will be happy to learn it!
No, this is simply called the balance of rights and duties.
A cardinal principle for making society.
It is quite the opposite of this terribly demagogic measure that is the meal at 1 euro - yes demagogic, that is to say expensive and contemptuous.
Expensive, because there is no magic money.
Approaching more than 200 million euros than the 60 announced, such a measure would considerably weaken the means of the 26 CROUS of France whose catering activity is already structurally loss-making by 25%.
Contemptuous, finally, for our farmers and the agents of the university catering whose meal at 1€ would make the value of the work disappear.
Eating has a cost.
The work of our farmers has a price.
Stop pressuring them.
While “everything free” is already ravaging our health services, the left dreams of extending it to all sectors of activity.
Far from being an ideal, it is the surest face of the nightmare: that of a world where nothing would have any more value.
SEE ALSO
- Pension reform: "We see that Nupes only serves to engulf the entire left", observes Guillaume Tabard
