’Are you okay?‘ he asked me, and I was stunned, just as unable to respond with the ritual ‘Very well, and you?‘ as I was to venture a ‘No, not at all, of course not‘. We were too close friends for a simple lie, but we hadn’t seen each other for so long that I didn’t know where to start.
France? Europe? That temptation of indifference that sometimes rises up in me? I ended up telling him that this time it was over, that I had no family: I had never been less attracted by the Right, orphaned by my own Left and was mourning a Centre whose colours I am wearing but which had failed to make its mark.
I can no longer bear, I told him, to hear the right wing predicting the apocalypse if we take away a handful of undue tax breaks from the richest, but I can no longer accept that the left’s only major battle is now to maintain the retirement age.
The right and the rich are both shocking to me. Already having moved to the extreme, the right wing of the right horrifies me, but the left fills me with despair. The left humiliates me personally, because retirement was not designed to create a third stage of life, a time for leisure, but to prevent people from falling into poverty at an age when they lack strength. That is what the labour movement fought for, not so that we could live for fifteen or twenty years on pensions paid by the working population at a time when their numbers are dwindling, life expectancy is increasing and we remain healthy and capable, except in certain professions, of working much longer than in the past.
The battle of the left should not be about pensions, but to prevent the rise of unstable work, the increase in rents due to the explosion of tourist rentals, and to help Europe find its strength against Trump, Putin and Xi. By caricaturing yesterday’s battles, the left is failing to fight today’s battles, which the centre is also failing to fight, and we are surprised at the rise of the far right? And we are surprised that a whole section of the right is now tempted by ‘the union of the right-wing movements’? And are we surprised that the National Rally may soon take control of France?
On that day, European unity would be seriously compromised. Trump and Putin could pop the champagne, but today, who is making Europe’s voice heard? Who embodies it? Where is the democratic coalition that defines, loud and clear, in Parliament and in the Council, the priorities of the Union and how to move them forward?
The Union is not sinking, and neither is France. It supports Ukraine, asserts its autonomy and is rearming itself. It is clearly not doing enough, but it is doing it. However, like France, it no longer has a face, no capacity for political mobilisation and nothing that can inspire the slightest enthusiasm.
Such shortcomings could be fatal, but I didn’t say any of this to my friend. I just thought about it for less than a minute before replying: ‘Very well, and you?’.
Photo: Sebastian Fuss
