Category: VIEWS

Just one word – “ghetto” – and you will understand everything. If you are wondering why it is that France so regularly sees the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of its 60s immigrants – who are French as they were born in France – take to the streets to smash up everything, including the schools, city media libraries and sports facilities that they are going to deprive themselves of in the process, the answer is that they live parked up in blocks of flats which constitute little bits of an “elsewhere” on the outskirts of the big cities.

We do not know. We do not know either what Vladimir Putin was able to offer Yevgeny Prigozhin to convince him to halt his march on Moscow or what security guarantees this putschist was able to obtain for himself and his men. What we do know, however, is what did not happen on 24 June, and therein lies the crux of the matter, in the accumulation of anomalies that point to the weakening of the Russian President.

If you replace “France” with “Europe”, Michel Rocard had already said it all. “France cannot take in all the misery in the world”, declared François Mitterrand’s Prime Minister some thirty years ago, “but it must take faithfully its share of it”, he added in the same breath.

The contrast is striking. At the end of the last century, the United States had to take matters into its own hands to silence the guns in the former Yugoslavia, whereas today, faced with the new fire threatening Kosovo, the firefighters are European.

Both at home and in the diaspora, they are feeling around and searching. In other words, the Russian opposition is still a long way from forming one single opposition with common objectives and a common programme, but in Berlin a short while ago, in Paris last week and in the European Parliament on 5 and 6 June, their meetings are multiplying and their convergences are getting more and more pronounced because they are now all convinced that they will have to define the “post-Putinism”.