This Monday marks the resumption of Christophe Castaner’s campaign. Competing lists haven’t been as patient, but in such an exceptional context, everyone reacts in their own way.
Friday the 13th. Two hours before the attacks, we had organized a public meeting in Nice Nord, facing the office, at which I gave a speech that, upon rereading it, I can’t help but find prophetic.
“Like Nathalie and Véronique, I will try to be brief and effective using the time I have to explain the reasons for my commitment alongside Christophe Castaner.
Of course, I could have – it’s fashionable – distanced myself from this or that government reform, been critical of the record of the Region led by Michel Vauzelle (in that, I’d have been wrong: indeed, I’ve noticed that even a competing list doesn’t hesitate to praise this record). I could also have expressed my reservations (a mild understatement!) about the final structure of the list. But all this, my friends, would not be up to the stakes of an election whose result will have more significance than the election itself. Subsequently, as a good candidate, I could go on about the merits of the ZOU card, the punctuality of the TER or the Pignes train, or even the opportunity of setting up this or that high school. Let’s be clear: Christophe Castaner’s teams have done the job, and we have a very good program.
Probably the best. But everyone knows that this election won’t be decided on the program – nor on the record.
The stakes of this election are elsewhere. John Fitzgerald Kennedy once said that a true politician is one who knows how to keep their ideals even if they have lost their illusions. Indeed, how can one hold onto the illusion of a generous and humanist France in the face of a country being eaten away on one side by far-right ideas and on the other by integrist terrorism and communitarianism?
This is precisely why, faced with this deadly trap whose jaws are closing in on the Republic, we must brace ourselves with our values and enter into resistance. These values are numerous, but as a leftist republican, as a left-wing radical, two seem essential to me in these troubled times: fraternity and secularism.
- Fraternity because it is threatened by the far-right. “Marshal, here we are” and we find ourselves in a society of exclusion, denunciation, repression. The far-right is the complete opposite of a fraternal society. Today, Arabs are excluded, tomorrow it will once again be Jews, then homosexuals, Freemasons, humanists… And being funded by Putin will not temper this frenzy of exclusion.
The fashionable refrain is to say that once elected, they won’t be able to follow through with their projects because we are in a State of Law. Maybe, but it’s better not to take the risk because they will do everything to achieve their ends. We know there is a part of the population in this country that is genetically programmed for it. We know it since Vichy.
- Secularism, on the other hand, is the target of integrists and communitarians. They caricature it. For them, in the name of the right to difference, secularism must be a stacking of communities that imprison an individual for life. Especially if the individual is a woman. They often receive reinforcement from a certain left that, out of naivety, confuses right to difference with cultural imprisonment.
True secularism is freedom: freedom of worship and non-worship, with religions rightfully confined to the private sphere of individuals, with a public space for exchange and mutual enrichment.
Faced with this dual requirement of fraternity and secularism, the right is more than failing.
- It is a commonplace to say that, particularly in our Region, the permeability between the right and the far-right is significant. Olivier Bettati’s conversion is just the recent episode of a long saga. As a young opposition councilor in a region then led by Jean-Claude Gaudin, I clearly remember a perfectly united RPR-UDF-FN majority. The president of one of the two committees I participated in was even FN… Some right-wing politicians have so demoralized their electorate that they have rendered the republican front strategy, which could have been useful, unusable. Indeed, by functioning only in one direction – we know which – it has lost its reason for being.
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In the face of communitarianism and integrism, the right is downright schizophrenic. In the media, it is capable of using the language of civil war while on the ground playing the card of collaboration with the worst enemies of the Republic, negotiating an illusory social peace by giving in to a deadly clientelism.
Once again, our Region distinguishes itself. It specializes in these unnatural alliances.
So now, I ask you: as a left-wing republican, faced with the far-right’s offensive, faced with the right’s ambiguities, faced with the multiple dangers afflicting our neighborhoods and our society, what other stance could I have taken than commitment alongside Christophe Castaner? To defend my values, mobilizing alongside him was not a choice but an imperative necessity. This imperative necessity, my friends, has a name. That name is Resistance!
There are three weeks left until the first round of these Regional elections. We must use them to encourage voters not to enlist under a banner, not to endorse a policy – there will be other occasions for that – but to do what thousands of French people did in January after the attacks: defend the common values of the Republic. Let’s ensure they are present, we will be there. Long live the Republic.”
by Patrick Mottard
