In this period, it is rather the divisions (we can call them “different sensibilities,” if we want) that are displayed in the various political families, so this rapprochement between those who were divided some decades ago deserves to be highlighted and appreciated.
Not everything will be easy: “To paraphrase the lyrics of ‘La place des grands hommes’: You cannot put 45 years on the table, like you lay out your Scrabble letters… Today, after almost half a century of separate adventures, who can bet on resuming a life together?” – says Hervรฉ Cael, territorial president of the Valois radicals.
But to every demand, there is always an answer, and he himself expresses it: “Today, if the radicals are meeting and coming together, it’s because nothing separates us anymore. We know that being radical means first being independent, free to express our convictions. We have never been people of system or dogma.”
And to indicate the direction: “It is the disappearance of the right/left divide as a fundamental element of the landscape, replaced by the line of division between progressives and populists.”
The manifesto that follows gives the idea that the radicals have indeed chosen their place.
We, the “Valois” radicals, share a community of values with the radicals of the left: Secularism, freedom, solidarity, ecology, Europe…
Radicalism is freedom, and the economy needs it. The younger generations need it. And everything happening in terms of democratic renewal in the cities and territories shows us how much politics needs freedom as well.
Radicalism is justice. There can be no freedom without justice. If we want to modernize the economy, if we want to ask our citizens for efforts, because the country must transform, politics must be fair. We need more equality of opportunity, more equality of territories.
Radicalism is secularism. France must accept itself as a country of Judeo-Christian culture, welcoming at the same time many people who do not believe and a new, durably installed religion, which is Islam. To successfully embrace all this in civil peace, allowing everyone to follow their path of conscience, to flourish, and to engage in the nation, secularism is needed. We need stronger neutrality in public services and the public sphere than elsewhere. No religious precept should influence the law and public policies.
Radicalism is ecology. We are naturally ecologists because we have always been concerned with universality. If misery continues to grow, it will carry everyone away. In the era of Putin and Trump, as the bad wind of North Korean missiles frightens the world, when millions of human beings are driven from their land by climate change, violence, and war, preserving our only common good, the Earth, is an absolute urgency.
Finally, radicalism is Europe. We are federalists. We believe that Europe remains the most beautiful ambition there is, for our people and for all those of the old continent. If we want to finally end the technocratic deviation, the construction of a federal Europe must become the ideal of our peoples.
Today, the time has come for us to meet and gather.
by Hervรฉ Cael, president of the Radical Party 06
