“Sovereignist”. It's a word that we throw around in public debate, a label that we want to be as sticky as possible. A bit like the plague-ridden corpses that armies threw over city walls to contaminate the inhabitants. “Sovereignist”, under the pen of the telegraphers of power, has become an insult. For what ? Because we must at all costs silence those who denounce the oligarchy, those who were right to warn of deindustrialization, social regression and the ravages of deregulation, those who warned against the misappropriation of European construction for the benefit of multinationals specializing in tax optimization and social dumping. Marianne is logically the target. Sovereignist? But let's see, it's the Asselineau and Philippot line, the supporters of Frexit, as subtly explained on
Historically, the term “sovereignism” was imported from Quebec (where it designated the fight against the Canadian federal state) during the 1990s, in continuity with the Treaty of Maastricht, to designate those who opposed federal advances. of a European Union increasingly distant from the Treaty of Rome. Philippe Séguin and Jean-Pierre Chevènement – social Gaullism and the republican left – led the debate in 1992, arguing for the democratic problem posed by making sovereignty, that is to say the source of power, reside elsewhere than in the Constitution voted by the people. You just have to listen again to Philippe Séguin's speech before the National Assembly on May 5, 1992 to understand that the debate is about the legacy of 1789. About democracy.
READ ALSO : François Bayrou facing Natacha Polony: “To reunify a divided country, take citizens seriously”
The sequel proved him right. Especially since, at the time, he prophesied that it was a one-way trip. which is the case. Pointing out the innumerable deleterious effects of the double Maastricht process and eastern enlargement on the French economy does not imply believing that a Frexit would be possible or desirable. He is not. But knowing the causes of deindustrialization – the systematic refusal of French elites to properly defend our SMEs, our agriculture and our industrial flagships in this economic context that these elites themselves forged – is the only way to effectively reorient our policy.
Delusions and defamation
Who is making this speech today? Reasonable people from all political families. François Bayrou, in our columns while defending European construction, expressed his distrust of mechanisms, such as qualified majority voting, which could prevent France from defending its vital interests. François Bayrou is not anti-European or extremist. He embodies this centrist current which believes in France. And who continues to think that political debate does not justify the demonization of the adversary. We also remember the indescribable editorial by Jean-Marie Colombani in the worldexplaining on the eve of the first round of 2007 that the Bayrou vote was “not not a democratic vote “.
READ ALSO : Thirty years after the Treaty of Maastricht, is the failure of the sovereignists irremediable?
Why these delusions? Why this need to defame? Why these activist accounts on social networks and these messages from editorialists excited to smear Marianne by explaining that our newspaper is “pro-Putin”, “populist” and, therefore, “sovereignist”? Everyone feels how tense the political climate is, how much we are tipping into an era where, even within the media landscape, we would like to force citizens to choose between two camps: the National Rally-Reconquest pole! or the system as it is. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, when he practices excessive clientelism, when he compares a university director to Eichmann to victimize himself and denounce a censorship which does not bother him at all when it is his own troops who impose it, admirably serves this project .
READ ALSO : Sovereignism: “A boulevard then a big dead end?”
The goal ? Continue again and again to maintain a system that is failing on all sides and whose electoral support is shrinking like nothing else. And to do this, erase the impediments to going around in circles defending both social justice and secularism and tirelessly demonstrating that the defense of the Republic and the preservation of the planet are not compatible with generalized free trade. Erasing them with caricatures and anathemas, raising the specter of anti-France and “foreign agents”. But these apprentice sorcerers clearly do not understand that by using the same populist means as the extremes they claim to fight, by radicalizing their troops in the same way, by pushing all reasonable opponents to the extremes, by belittling all political debate with simplistic slogans, by striving to make any alternative political proposal impossible, they pave the road to the National Rally.
READ ALSO : “Plea for enlightened sovereignism (because sovereignists can do better)”
It is high time to find a space for debate in which reasonable people, attached to intellectual honesty and mastery of issues, can exchange their arguments on how to serve the interests of France and preserve the promises of the Republic. Because the subject is not to know whether we are “sovereignist” or not, whether we are “pro” or “anti-European”, but to ask the question of the real conditions of democracy and the way in which we can guarantee the independence of France and Europe, of France within Europe, in a context of clash of empires. The rest is to political debate what “Les Marseillais versus the rest of the world” is to refinement.
