The darkness and the lights

“It is getting dark in the land of lights”. Someone wrote this on a window of a ground floor in a Paris street. What is happening is not a moment of collective rage, but the consequence of a presidential model absolutely detached from the citizenry. We can go into a thousand details and speculations, but the chaos that France is currently experiencing expresses the failure of President Emmanuel Macron. Six months before the end of his term, his political figure has run out of breath and is now only lashing out senselessly. It is the culmination of arrogance. Of a character who has not understood that the presidency of the Republic neither grants impunity nor is above the citizenry, to whom it must be accountable. And what has happened is that the president's insolence, the self-complacency that illuminates him, has created the sensation that France was neglected. And in part it is true. But above all, it is the inability to understand and address the concerns of the citizens that has trapped the president. And it seems as if he still does not want to realize it.

And so a situation of deterioration has been reached in which restoring republican order is indispensable. But this does not just mean triggering repression and shifting attention towards a few thousand agitators, as if this were the root problem, but seriously addressing the demands of the millions of citizens and protesters who say enough. It is necessary to do what has not been done until now, which has led to the current deterioration: to open a social dialogue, which has practically not existed since Macron's arrogance settled in the Élysée. And to provide concrete political responses to an urgent agenda by assuming an evident reality.

It is not just the president who is responsible for this situation; it is an entire vertical concept of the state, partly the result of the mark left by its founder, General De Gaulle. But those were unique times and the president embodied a new beginning after the war. And now what is needed is what too many rulers refuse to do: face reality. And not the easy game of playing with confusion, focusing attention on those who make noise and cause destruction in the street while covering up the root issues: the rising cost of living, the difficulties in having decent housing, the obstacles to accessing work, the discrimination based on origin and condition, and the falsely liberal demagoguery that seeks to hide the deep social fractures.

Macron's failure is his refusal to see the reality of the country. And the tenacity in denying the problems makes it inevitable to believe that there is complicity, even if only by omission, with those responsible for the great fractures that lead to the growing weakening of the welfare states, which is the engine of the protests these days. A good part of the people who have taken to the streets –not those who make noise and cause destruction– have done so precisely because of the realization of the regression that Europe is entering. And that this is happening in France makes all the alarms ring louder.

The president's definitive failure will arrive if next year Marine Le Pen presides over France and the far right governs to impose, with its authoritarian streak, the demands of certain powers. A threat that is currently hovering, with different intensities, all over Europe. If French democracy does not find the mechanisms to avoid it due to the weakness of some (the left) and the surrender of others (the right), it will generate mortal wounds in the coexistence and dignity of people. The socialist candidate Raphaël Glucksmann, for the moment, has opted for a low profile, but he must be aware that this challenges him more than anyone else. The evolution of the economic system and social balances called for a democratic mobilization. A part of the French citizenry has undertaken it, and those who have no other language than violence only favor the far right. All of this completely blurs the figure of Macron, who did not want to anticipate the threat. And now he finds that his legacy may be the return of the far right to power, partly the result of the will to not want to see the threat, even as it was being written day by day.

So the political and social crisis that France is experiencing right now challenges all of Europe, where the return of neo-fascism is increasingly evident. And here we have the PP and Vox close to power. There is no room for complacency.