Tribune. After a global pandemic, the war in Ukraine recalls again the urgency and the extent of the challenges in the country: planetary ecological crisis, exacerbation of economic competition, increased inequalities of all kinds.
In the face of these issues, while it ends, the campaign for the presidential election of 2022 appeared well stunted. This atrophy illustrates both the weak theoretical corpus mobilized in political appliances and the impoverishment of the public debate in France.
While the country is proud of a tradition of intellectual requirement, while the mutations at work require to apprehend France in Europe and in the world with new and complex reading grids, the candidates , left and right combined, seized lazily of sociological and geographical caricatures to build their speeches and proposals. In echo, with some notable exceptions, a large part of the great media were content to relay them without the slightest critical thinking, or even feed them to organize sterile clashes rather than real contradictory debates.
These plane views in black and white have in common to consider France through major social, spatial and cultural categories supposedly homogeneous. On the one hand, France from below, “peripheral”, according to the expression of Christophe Guilluury, popular, decommissioned by globalization, refractory to ecology, but rooted in a terroir and values; on the other, France “from above”, elicitu and enriched by globalization, either cosmopolitan and protected by the State, but, in all cases, “archipelacial”, as described by Jérôme Fourquet, by the Nomadism, the loss of landmarks and the influence of woky!
As taken from a bad conscience or curiosity often imprint of condescension, some Parisian journalists, who are all belonging to the second France, tributary since the beginning of the campaign to the first; We send to the war reporters to try to see the country “opposite” (Anne Nivat, France of Face, Fayard, 384 p., 22 euros). In return, those who dare to question these stories are taxed to be blinded by the “real” or disconnected from the “people”.
New flaw lines
Grosselly opponent “forgot” campaigns and suburbs “watered”, metropolises “barbaric” and medium-sized “Revanchards”, most of these analyzes, produced on the basis of polls or quickly written tests, are indeed obsolete, erroneous and deleterious. They obscure all the acquis from the social sciences which show, on the contrary, that the socio-economic fragility crosses the territories and that France is now a tight woven mosaic of interdependencies, where cities and campaigns are confused, where local and global. intertwine, where wealth and precariousness juxtapose. These are precisely these new fault lines that should be analyzed rightly to be able to repair them with delicacy.
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