Was he right, the child in Andersen’s tale? Was he right, Emmanuel Macron, to reveal that the emperor was naked, declaring, in the columns of the Economist, the “brain death” of NATO, before adding that the rule of putting a ceiling on public deficit of 3 percent of the GDP also belonged to another century?
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“So what?” I retorted to her, both stupidly and rightly, because… I‘m going to tell you. I had asked for the call the evening before. I asked for 7am, Paris time, the time when the typists arrived to the Monde. My pal with the husky voice had picked up the phone. “Come on, hurry up”, I told her. “I’ve got ten pages for you”. Silence, embarrassed silence on the other end of the line. “Bernard… I would be surprised if they took them. – Why wouldn’t they? – You don’t know? – What don’t I know? – The wall fell last night”.
Read MoreGood news, people say of course, because nothing is more right and comforting than reasons that unite so many men and women in huge processions in every corner of the world.
In Hong Kong as in Beirut, in La Paz as in Bagdad, in Conakry as in Alger, and in many other towns, these crowds demonstrate for the rule of law and against social inequalities, for freedom and against corruption, for redistribution by taxation and against the destruction of nature, for democracy and against military, presidential, oligarchic or communist dictatorships.
How could anyone fail to see that what now takes place in Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq and Algeria is the second act of the Arab revolutions, thought dead and buried so quickly, now resurfacing, still in the name of human rights and not out of identity and religious fanaticism?
Read MoreIt was not only Budapest. The Hungarian capital switched sides for the opposition last Sunday, the 13th of October, but Viktor Orbán also lost in ten of the twenty-three largest towns in Hungary, while in the meantime the conservative Polish Law and Justice party, although largely won the lower house of Parliament, lost nothing less than the Senate.
It is not the meltdown of “the new right” of the Polish and the Hungarian right-wing parties, far from it, but the setbacks they have suffered are nevertheless spectacular, because these powers have been shaken, even though they exert total control over the audio-visual media, and their countries’ economies are in full growth.
We owe them for the defeat of ISIS, the liberation of Mosul and Raqqa, the saving of tens of thousands of Yazidi people who escaped from sexual slavery and from brigades of children-soldiers. In other words, we owe them for the victory of humankind against the most unlikely barbarism, because as the international coalition struck from the air, it was the Kurds who were on the ground, brigades of men, brigades of women, mixed brigades, advancing metre-by-metre and falling in great numbers.
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