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Flowers and candles this time will not be enough, says a priest interviewed at the cathedral of Nice, the “politicians must protect us”. Emmanuel Macron arrives in the afternoon visibly shaken by the “Islamist” attack. That word – “protect” – he himself had used just over twenty hours earlier on live TV to announce the new “confinement” (we in Italy, less nationalists, call it lockdown) in the face of the spread of Covid: 442 thousand cases in the last 14 days.
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It was a call for mutual protection in the face of the pandemic, heard live by 32.7 million French people. Just time to discuss it and a different request for protection arrives, equally vital, tragically more ferocious. More blood was shed in the name of the prophet Muhammad, after the beheading of the professor of Conflans, a fortnight ago by a young Chechen, a throat cutter by the name of Brahim, expiring the ritual “Allah Akbar”, he slaughtered and stabbed three other people to death.
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The holding of the Republic is severely tested. Just yesterday, the Foundation for political innovation, a liberal think tank directed by Dominique Reynié, in collaboration with Figaro, had released the results of his latest poll: 79 percent of French people think they will cast an “anti-system” vote in the next presidential elections (2022). That is: abstention, or white vote (null), or for the candidates of the extreme, left or right. Everyone has the feeling of living in an increasingly violent society; after work, the first concern is for insecurity and delinquency, much stronger than for social inequalities, immigration or climate change. In a disheartened country – writes Le Monde today in its editorial dedicated to the Covid emergency – the only “ferment of discipline is fear”.
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Emmanuel Macron, this political UFO who arrived at the Elysée at just 39 years old, without a party behind him, but a movement created in less than a year that literally undid the right-left pairing, Gaullist-socialists, on which the French political system after De Gaulle, is faced with the most serious institutional crisis since the Algerian war. Although very high (66 per cent) the consensus received in the ballot against Marine Le Pen, Macron had immediately raised reservations and suspicions, which exploded with the crisis of the yellow vests, the strikes against the pension reform, a very acute social tension. Already in 2017, in the first round of the presidential election, 40 percent of the voters had voted against the system, for far right or far left. The Fifth Republic is therefore at a crucial passage that applies to everyone. It is as if the whole of Europe had entrusted the young French president with the ability to hold the system against populism and extremism.
The crisis of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons about Muhammad is becoming the test of fire and, as he says Pascal Bruckner in the HuffPost interview, the “country is at war”. Attack on his secular school with the beheading of the Conflans professor, on the Catholic community at Notre Dame of Nice, on its international position.
All this blood weighs on the internal political debate, which has at times become hysterical between mutual accusations of Islamophobia, Islamogauchism and Islamofascism. And many feel constrained by the obligation of unconditional solidarity with Charlie’s cartoonists who do not give up on the exercise of an unlimited mockery, as in the last cover against Erdogan. Big and small failures have come over time. Browsing through the archives, it turns out that the Turkish president, in 2018, without anyone contradicting him, during his last visit to France, had met the Muslim community, calling himself a defender of Islam in the world. Signals that should not be overlooked, such as the punitive expeditions organized by the Turkish “gray wolves”, again the other evening, in Décines in the Lyon suburb against the Armenian community.
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“Less cartoons, more history,” the wise liberal political scientist said allusive Dominique Moïsi in yesterday’s interview with Anaïs Ginori on Repubblica. But no one feels like breaking national unity on principles. The transition for Emmanuel Macron is very narrow, but today we cannot help but be on his side
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