I am not politically aligned with you, but I respect your office and your election.
Clearly, your second term is ending badly, with little to leave behind in history. Your only achievements so far are the inclusion of the right to abortion in the constitution and a few fair and memorable inductions into the Panthéon. This pales in comparison to your ministers, a good half of whom should be tried, removed from government, or even imprisoned. It is not too late to change things and leave a mark that will ensure that in a few decades you will be remembered as a great president.
1) Stop the Duplomb law—it’s good that the Constitutional Council has made your job a little easier, but it would have been much better if it had come from you. The argument used by our neighbors is an insult to your intelligence. Frankly, if your neighbor commits suicide, are you supposed to do the same? Certainly, a few farmers will suffer, but they will adapt. And we must remember the far greater suffering of miners, metalworkers, and textile workers, who suffered much more when entire regions were transformed into fields of ruin. Can we really despise science and the suffering of cancer patients to such an extent?
2) Your decision to recognize Palestine is a belated but courageous one that deserves admiration. But it must be accompanied by action, not just food drops, which are dangerous and ineffective. No, trucks loaded with food (or a military fleet) flying the French flag must be allowed to enter Gaza, otherwise all economic and scientific relations with Israel must be severed. Pre-Nazi thugs like Netanyahu only understand this language. Europe, with its cowardly “commission president,” can bow down before the Yankee king, but not France. One of your predecessors, De Gaulle, predicted in 1967 exactly what has happened since. He had a great vision for France. A text signed by numerous French ambassadors makes similar proposals: “It is time for France to take back the initiative in the Middle East.” The appeal of 35 former ambassadors In an op-ed in Le Monde, a group of diplomats calls for a return to the defense of international law on emblematic issues in the Middle East, stressing that France’s restraint “may have led to the minimization of serious facts.”
This text describes exactly what needs to be done for France to regain its former glory. Imagine, for a second, that you decide to break off diplomatic relations and all ties with Israel for as long as the massacre in Gaza and the West Bank continues and until this government reverses its decision to annex all of Palestine! France would then be ahead of its time and an example to other countries, as it was when it sought a balance in the Middle East rather than blindly aligning itself with these fanatics who are leading us towards perpetual war and the return of terror in Europe. You must have enough information to know that a genocide is being perpetrated there and that silence is a sign of complicity. We must not imagine that these massacres and this domination there will not have disastrous consequences here. For the moment, Hamas has never attacked outside Israel—unlike terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and its affiliates—but violence breeds violence, and Europe’s complicity with Netanyahu will inevitably be paid for in cash. To this end, we must stop listening to the B-H Lévy, Arfi, the CRIF, the purveyors of fake news in the US and elsewhere, and those who are leading Israel into a dead end.
3) Finally, take real action at the same time, not just between the rich and the very rich. Step out of your class and show, as you said at the beginning, that trickle-down economics is a myth. The Zucman tax, like the 15% tax on GAFAM, will show the French people that you are their president, not just the president of a caste of rentiers. It is estimated that GAFAM generates $500 billion in tax evasion that goes to tax havens, including around 30 billions for France, and we are trying to save 4 billions by depriving ourselves of two public holidays… No argument can justify why the Arnaux, Saade, Milliez, Amazon, GAFAM etc and others pay 2% in taxes (or less) while your humble servant, who works hard to develop medicines, pays 30%. The argument that they create jobs does not hold water, because those jobs also deserve decent wages, and the gap between their wages and those of their bosses is unprecedented in history. Moreover, most serious economists and quite a few billionaires are also calling for this. You are creating a generation of rentiers, the exact opposite of the France that wins and the meritocracy that you have defended in words. The concept of morality exists, and you will be succeeded by the far right, because “they’re all rotten” and this will indelibly tarnish your presidency. You will be the one who brought incompetent racists to power, and who knows how long it will be before a revolution and civil war send them packing. The rise of the far right is also largely due to this total absence of morality, which tirelessly recycles the same people into the circles of power and large companies where they happily cozy up, the “High Authority for Transparency in Public Life” of France an empty shell that partially rejects 4% of requests to move from the public to the private sector….A move to the private sector should, at the very least, result in either a time limit on continued public service or the reimbursement of public expenses and salaries, which often remain unpaid, or even the benefits that remain valid.
4) Finally, frankly, do you really want to let someone like Rachida Dati, who belongs elsewhere, destroy our public television and further strengthen the powers of Bolloré, Saadé, Arnaux, and others, who brainwash us by buying newspapers, media outlets, and television stations like laundry detergent? Is she really worthy of holding this position? The public system remains our distinctive feature and our wealth at all levels, in hospitals, schools, and the media, something we are proud of despite the constant criticism from civil servants. They keep us in a country where life is good, with a much higher life expectancy than in the country you hold up as a model—the US. All aspects of life are far better here than in the lair of capitalism, from infant and maternal mortality to premature birth rates, baby life expectancy and maternal death during labour, obesity, and cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases etc. The flagship example of capitalism is showing its limits. Can we take seriously someone who replaces the opinion of IPCC experts with a bunch of amateurs who have no experience in climate analysis? Who is going to sell hundreds of billions of dollar’s worth of shale gas, resulting in a 4 to 8°C increase by the end of this century instead of 1.5-2°C° ? Who fires a statistics expert because the figures don’t suit him? Who declares war on knowledge and Science? Who rejects all animal testing and mRNA treatments that have saved so many lives? With Trump, we have a dictatorship in the making, which will be overtaken in a few years by the far more intelligent Chinese, who value trade over wars that the US have been losing for decades, with billions of dollars lost and thousands dead and others disabled for life. They have not fought a single just war and have lost them all. In short, this is not really an exemplary country, far from the Marines who liberated us from the Nazis, and freeing ourselves from them is an urgent task, first by preserving our wealth and cultural exception at all costs, and finally by calling for a European defence and reminding everyone that our old continent still has something to say and an example to follow.
You might say that all this is wishful thinking, perhaps, but good will exists and we see it every day in the actions of volunteers who work to maintain this country—the country of Hugo, not Thiers—the country of De Gaulle, Mendés, Chirac—despite its major flaws—and Mitterrand, at least from 1981 to 1983, who left their mark. Reading De Gaulle’s wonderful speech on science in the 1950s is a far cry from what your ministers are saying as they transform the French science centres (CNRS, INSERM and other organizations) to centres of yes-men with no capacity for free innovation and risk-taking, dictated by the need to obey the private sector and projects that reinforce technology over innovation, forgetting that technology is a wonderful servant but a very bad master. Innovation always happens outside the box, and that requires a great deal of freedom, even if it means failing from time to time. It is not the dictate of working on predefined projects that will solve these problems and bring us back to the recognition we once had when France’s voice mattered. In short, trust science rather than snake oil salesmen and billionaire bosses of GAFAM and others who will validate Orwell’s prophecies. There are them and the masses who are only good for serving them.
In short, you still can make an impression and leave with your head held high despite the cacophony in the assemblies and the pitiful calculations of those over there. It’s not too late to obey your intelligence rather than your tendency to see everything through the eyes of an economist/banker.
Yehezkel Ben-Ari
Photo : Christian Mang / Intermittent
