Security is plummeting in France, but elites do not want to acknowledge reality

In a fortnight, France woke up an insecure country threatened by widespread extremism that uses the knife to threaten its citizens. On the night of November 18–19 in Crepol, a gang of young men of North African origin attacked a dance party shouting ‘Kill the Frenchman’ and left a 16-year-old boy lying dead on the ground. Yesterday, Sunday, December 3, an Algerian attacked tourists in Paris shouting ‘Allah u Akbhar’, killing a German and seriously wounding two people.

The government media narrative blames madmen, the uncontrollable mentally ill, while avoiding an in-depth analysis of the social reality of France today. It is a discourse that is imposed on all media in an absolute and pervasive manner but does not reflect reality

The narrative of the elites is strong, but it cannot change the reality of the facts  A state, political, and media narrative whose artificial dimension is all the more unbearable because it exposes society to a double penalty: the one it experiences in its daily life with the rise in violence and insecurity, and the one it suffers, more symbolic but nonetheless just as painful, through the denial into which the first is placed. The pincer grip of reality and its falsification are at the heart of regimes that no longer make the search for truth the matrix of their legitimacy.

A dramatic turning point

We are getting dangerously close to this tangent, the acceleration of which is the symptom of elites who have made a mistake, who know it intuitively but think they can retain their domination by not acknowledging it, on the one hand, and by doing nothing, on the other, to change their faulty software. In so doing, they run the risk of adding moral betrayal to their political mistakes. People can potentially forgive the first, as long as it is the result of a failure of judgement, but they can in no way accept the second, as long as its only aim is to maintain a failed power at all costs. Unfortunately, this is the dramatic turning point we have now reached.

From this observation follows an observation that many segments of public opinion will not fail to make. If we seek to characterise a power that is doubly at fault, politically and morally, we have to take it for what it is, taking into account the slope that is dragging it inexorably down, i.e., a power in the process of oligarchization. From being a political crisis, it is becoming a regime crisis. In the light of these increasingly worrying developments, the question is how we can continue for more than three years to lead a country in which the gap between those who govern and those who are governed continues to widen without accentuating the ills that undermine democracy and the nation.