You just have to read the newspaper to understand the vote that was cast on Sunday June 9, 2024. Everywhere on the ground, journalists fromWest France collected testimonies. Tongues are loosened. The vote is accepted and its reasons are clearly stated: lack of doctors, housing problems, feeling of not counting, that, far from urban areas, the rural world is downgraded, insecurity, purchasing power. Questions specific to Europe are rarely discussed except obviously the subject of immigration. This is what the European elections served to express, questions to which many French people are waiting for answers.
The running out of steam of democracies
Another reality should worry us. It is not specific to France but says a lot about the running out of democracies. While 49.5 million French men and women were called to the polls, nearly 24 million did not come. What will happen next June 30 and July 7 when the future of our country will be at stake? How can we understand that so many people can be absent when so many others have given their lives so that each and every one of us can vote, give our opinion, and have our voice count as much as any other? What are we ready to give for our country? Is it so hard to vote when so many people far from our borders dream of one day living in a democracy?
Our country is going through a major political storm and needs the mobilization of everyone. The choice of the President of the Republic to dissolve the National Assembly gives the French a voice again. We are going to elect our deputies and one of the scenarios is that the far right obtains an absolute majority. France would then be governed by a party, the National Rally, which proposed during the 2017 presidential election, through the voice of Ms. Le Pen, to submit to a referendum the exit from the European Union and the euro. The English did it and we saw what it resulted in. Since then, the speech has been revised and this proposal has disappeared from the RN program. But distrust of European construction remains. The stakes of the next legislative elections, in an extremely tense international context, are therefore very clear. The French are faced with a choice of values that a very short campaign will have to clarify.
A political landscape to rebuild
How will the future government, whoever it may be, find room for maneuver when France’s colossal debt amounts to more than 3,100 billion euros? Sunday’s election also presents us with another challenge: to breathe new life into political life, to strengthen our democracy. The political landscape must be rebuilt. The recomposition at work these days is perhaps the start of something. The old parties, worn to the limit and the RN is not to be outdone, are no longer reservoirs of ideas. It is urgent to release the energies of the territories, to trust local elected officials and to hear them, to listen to citizens and consult them more often than just during major national and European electoral meetings which serve as a release. And, why not debate it, shouldn’t we make voting compulsory (1)and ask ourselves about taking into account the blank vote, that is to say the vote cast without nominating a candidate?
(1) This is the case for example in Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece and Bulgaria.
