by JULIA HAMLAOUI, LIONEL VENTURINI, and MAUD VERGNOL
(translated by GENE ZBIKOWSKI)
he end of the “cordon sanitaire” between the UMP and the National Front (FN) plays into the hands of the FN, which therein sees an encouragement of its own strategy. The Left Front warns against the “suicidal” enterprise of a part of the French left, should it persist in rejecting any social or economic “change of direction.”
Cross my heart and hope to die! The left won’t go along with the crowd any more. The end of Sarkozy-ism was to put an end to the dictatorship of emotionalism, to the strategy of scapegoating, to the one-upmanship in security questions, and to the instrumentalization of sundry sordid news items. The great con game of the National Front dynasty was to crumble in the face of “change” and in the face of the responses made by the left to the distress of the working classes, which are stifled by the economic crisis…
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The left government must not play with fire any longer. “With their abjurations, which cause despair, plunge the French into disarray, and provoke a rejection of politics, the Socialists bear a responsibility,” the national secretary of the French Communist Party, Pierre Laurent, declared at the Fête de l’Humanité, “a breath of oxygen for a left that is stifled by anger at all these abjurations.”
1. When UMP leader François Fillon, through political opportunism, sells off the Republic on the cheap.
How is one to understand François Fillon’s surprise aggiornamento on the National Front? Opinions are divided even within his own party, between surprise, condemnation and unconditional backing. On this point, the declarations made to l’Humanité by Mickaël Camilleri, the president of the so-called “social right” fraction of the UMP, are edifying. The young cadre, who was certainly given the mission of providing the after sales service, said he is “astonished” at the polemics aroused by the former prime minister’s words, and he confirmed to us that in the case of an electoral duel between the Socialist Party and the National Front, he would vote for the far right. So we shall have to get used to the new face of this “social right” which, for reasons of careerism and political opportunism, is ready to sell off the Republic on the cheap.
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