Let us be brave enough to recognise that not one pollster, not one political analyst, not a single political leader – in short, no one at all – had imagined that the outgoing Prime Minister would be left trailing by Jean-Marie Le Pen in the presidential election. Nothing will ever be the same again in French politics.
Disappointed to the point of exasperation by the mediocrity of this strange presidential campaign at a time when they really needed clear landmarks and definite choices, the French expressed themselves with a cry of despair. No, 20% of the French population are not Fascist sympathisers, nor are 15% of them Stalinists and Trotskyites; but a good third of our compatriots are crying for help.
Most of them are victims of unemployment, people living in all sorts of precarious circumstances, victims of intolerable living conditions in what we call sensitive housing estates or of the unbridled urbanisation of rural areas. The others are their geographical neighbours, who, though unaffected by these misfortunes, are afraid that they might spill over. Twenty years of crisis, of slow growth, of unemployment that has been rather ineptly treated with early retirements, training schemes leading nowhere and casual jobs, have created huge pockets of social deprivation and hopelessness, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots, the ‘fracture sociale’, as Jacques Chirac called it in 1995. In this type of soil, insecurity has flourished, boosted by the powerful fertiliser of virtually guaranteed impunity.
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