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The writer is a professor at Queen Mary University in London and the author of ‘What Ails France’? ‘
Voters across France are going to vote this month regional council elections. They will look at the results for next year’s presidency and find instructions on the outcome of the legislature elections. However, this national political vision, while attractive, may miss some broad and important lessons.
This is not to rule out the “dress rehearsal” value of these autonomous elections. For many voters, candidates elected by political parties will be replaced as president or delegate by Emmanuel Macron Marine Le PenThe far-right leader of the National Rally seems once again to be the main opponent or “none of the previous ones”.
In municipal mayoral competitions, the political affiliation of candidates – if any – is often worth less than a stance in favor of burning local issues. But the opposite is true for those who want to fulfill their responsibilities in transport, business development and public health, which are assigned to 13 regions.
Usually in a prolix conversation Published in Zadig on May 27, in the big quarter, Macron spoke about the fear and anger he had in French society. In a forward-looking challenge, he saw this feeling pushing French civilization into the new Renaissance. He described artlessly land wading into more enemies 2018-19 yellow vests protest movement to revive “one of the creative ideas of our country”: the violent Jacquerie or the peasant uprising.
The capricious “heritage” skirts around this central event of the Macron presidency – a huge mobilization of needy workers, especially from the economically and socially marginalized towns and villages. Geographer Christophe Guilluy year nailed this problem of the left “periphery” influential book seven years before publication yellow vests exploded to the scene.
In France there have been renewed breakdowns in recent political headlines law and order especially in and around suburbs with concentrated populations of Muslim immigrants. A discussion arose in April, following an open letter a group of retired generals warning of the civil war. Although they received a sympathetic mention in that letter, yellow vests the movement is not nativist: its main complaints are social and economic.
The roots of the dire state of the periphery lie in deindustrialization, which is now half a century old. But because they violate a poor lifestyle, today yellow vests blame them for their difficulties not in economic history, but in government, for raising taxes and distorting public services.
Criticisms of Guilluy’s thesis deal with it the poorest regions receive more than a third of the state’s average population. I don’t see any real contradiction here. In 2015 the reorganization of regional governance established local public services in a smaller number of population centers that allegedly serve the interior of rural villages. Instead of feeling the effects of the recorded expenditure focused on their path, they stuck more sparsely populated areas see only the closure of schools and post offices and the small shops and cafes that often play a socializing role.
Pre-election tour of the provinces in early June, Macron appeared eager to identify what identity he has with hard-to-explain areas, rather than what to share Writer Christian Bobin It is a proud and confident view of the periphery of the Paris oligarchy, which he says is “a dark pit of complaint and rebellion.”
What a political campaign for colder blood can write Historian Pierre Verme the marginalized territory is called “the country of Le Pen” as unrecoverable, in a safe appearance that assumes that the peripheral population is a smaller group than the metropolitan population. However, these hypotheses do not seem to be quite comfortable. Compared to the last presidential election in 2017, Macron versus Le Pen was in the second round sudden landslide, last Harris survey it shows that the margin for the president to win in the future has been reduced to 54-46 percent. This discovery surely spreads fear and anger, but perhaps not so much for a new French Renaissance.
Macron told Zadig that the root problem of France is not a centralizing bureaucracy, but corporate interests. I have the opposite opinion: breaking the French impasse must begin with a much more radical decentralization. Although only a start, the results of this month’s election would lead to a liberating explosion of responsibility and competition.
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