“At Médecins du Monde, we don’t know if we will be able to continue working.”
One weekday evening, at 6 p.m., we come across people we don’t usually see. Wearing the Médecins du Monde vest, Bernadette Cazeneuve, the head of the Angoulême mission, laughs. “It’s just that we’re more discreet.” The group came because the volunteers are worried. “We don’t know if we’ll be able to continue working.” So yes, she confesses that she’s scared. “We try to support each other,” worried because they deal with a lot of migrants, unaccompanied minors, worried because the threats to state medical aid scare them.
Like Florence Fabaron, at the Human Rights League. “There is something that scares me, perhaps the climate.” So she commits herself “to defend the rights” that the demonstrators who gathered to rally on the Champ-de-Mars feel are threatened.
On the square, there is a kind of aggregate of all the worries. Estelle and Gilles, the teachers, under their cardboard placards, motivated, because not a single point of the RN program reassures them. “Nothing but Bardella’s accession to power,” says Gilles, who is worried about his children, who cannot imagine himself “a civil servant with a fascist government.”
Go get hope
Around them, the associations follow one another, the improvised platform. The House of Peoples and Peace, France Palestine and then the Transistor collective of young transsexuals who feel particularly in the crosshairs. “Like many others, we are afraid of what could happen to our community.”
René Pilato, LFI, candidate of the 1stre constituency, alongside Virginie Lebraud, PS, in the third, is also worried about what all those who “voted twice for Macron, who played the role of beaver, who built the rampart” will be able to do. To the small crowd of demonstrators, he came to express his apprehensions about seeing those whose models “are Trump, Orban or Putin” come to power.
They all want, above all, to refuse what they do not consider to be inevitable. “Hope is up to you to seek it,” Michaël Lablanche, the secretary of the CGT, told them. He was in Germany these days: “They look at us quite strangely, they too are worried about seeing the extreme right arriving in the second largest country in Europe.” Like a final invitation to go vote.
