Category: VIEWS

French people, we are almost there, just one more effort!

08-07-2024

Published in the Libération on 8 July under the title: “Quickly, a provisional government with the left, the centre and the right”

The majority is not unfindable. France – after exit polls – is not ungovernable. It is not chaos. A majority exists. It is there. All you have to do is to accept to see it, because 174 elected members from the united left-wing parties and 156 from the centrist parties that supported Emmanuel Macron’s re-election make how many MPs in all?

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Democracy is not dead

02-07-2024

There is so much bad news that we are not able to see the good. We know about the bad news. Next Sunday, the French far right could come to power. Even if it does not occur, Europe’s second-largest power is in danger of becoming ungovernable for a long time to come. Germany is not in much better shape, and so the whole Union is weakening at the very moment when war is taking hold on its eastern border, when total chaos is threatening the Middle East, and when the United States is turning away from Europe and the Mediterranean to focus on Asia and the Chinese challenge.

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France is not dead yet

19-06-2024

I am now thinking that maybe this gamble was not so crazy. I say this cautiously, without totally believing it because, since the announcement of the dissolution of the National Assembly, I have been through all the stages. First of all, I thought and said publicly, in the heat of the moment, that we should indeed, yes, absolutely, ask the country whether the 40% or so of the vote that went to the extreme right was only an expression of anger or of a real desire to bring the Lepenists to power. I was convinced that we had to go through this moment of truth, because in my view it was impossible for 4 out of 10 French people to have swung to the extreme right, but the next day, Monday morning…

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How not to become a Lepéniste

12-06-2024

Op-ed published in the Libération on 11 June

Yes, of course, these results are overwhelming almost everywhere, especially in France. With extreme right-wing parties adding up to some 40% of the votes cast, France has clearly been weakened by these European elections and could soon be even weaker, tragically so, if the early elections that Emmanuel Macron decided to call on Sunday were to give power to the Lepénistes in less than a month’s time.

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The scenery after the battle

03-06-2024

The European political scenes are going to Americanise. This is inevitable and now desirable because, whatever the precise outcome of the battle of the European elections, extreme right-wing groups will become a key force in the Parliament.

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Foreword

Dear Readers,

welcome to this site.

It is not simply the webpage of the Member of the European Parliament, who I have become with great apprehension. Not of the journalist either, who I have been for half a century.

It is a wild ambition: I wanted to give a report on my work as an elected representative in Brussels and in Strasbourg, to continue to follow the evolution of world politics and to try to describe and decipher the stakes and the mysteries behind the scenes of the European institutions.

I wanted to create a multilingual site, to step across the borders that sometimes still separate us.

“Smithing makes the smith”, I hope you will bear with me.

Yours, 

Bernard Guetta

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