The French far-center is radicalized and adopts far-right arguments

I think we are clearly at a tipping point. We are at a crossroads, in terms of the direction in which this country, this continent, human civilization, is heading, whether in terms of climate crisis, democratic institutions or growing inequality.

I have been in politics for a long time now – although this is my first term as an MP, I have also been involved in the [presidential] campaigns in 2012 and 2017. The past four years have seen some form of radicalization. But from two different points: both from the extreme right and from the extreme center, which has become an annex of the extreme right. We see this when we consider macronism as a political force, as a form of power, both in its anti-social dimension and in its anti-ecological dimension.

They accelerated the democratic deficit at the heart of the crisis of the Fifth Republic. There have been remarkable moments in this regard, since the Benalla scandal [the beating of protesters by the president’s personal bodyguard, disguised as a policeman] in the response to the yellow vests. The management of the pandemic is also revealing of their inability to think otherwise than within the framework of neoliberalism, where it is the market which regulates everything and it is necessary at all costs to return to “normal”, to the status quo. .

These people are unable to think otherwise, even when governments elsewhere begin to wonder, “Maybe neoliberalism cannot solve the current crisis. I am thinking in particular of Joe Biden – under the pressure of popular movements, of course. Macronism has proven to be shockingly reactionary – ideologically, culturally and economically.

The factors that convinced me to join France Insoumise and to build this alternative have only been confirmed by the developments of recent years. The times have justified our analyzes and the place we occupy in the political arena. We are the main progressive, ecological and alter-globalist alternative to macronism and to the right.