“However, I had blocked”: letter to the President of the Republic

Mister President,

I voted for you. And always in spite of myself. I didn’t want you as president, but I gritted my teeth. Twice. I looked at my children, I looked at my country, I looked at our history. And I did what I considered my duty.

Since I was 18, in five presidential elections, I have taken part in three roadblocks. On three occasions, I had, like millions of voters on the left, to silence my cultural convictions, my economic concerns, my social anger, because the only thing that counted in the face of the ballot box was the imperative need to prevent the extreme right from taking power. Protect the Republic, reaffirm democracy, drop divisions and ideologies so that the worst never happens.

” Never again “I was told in my childhood, when I was told the story of my family, Jewish, deported, exterminated, because the far right, one day in 1933, in a neighboring country, (January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor in Germany, Editor’s note) came to power democratically. Me, the republican front, I believed in it. Like millions of voters and voters on the left, I am made of this wood that you do not seem to know: I erased myself for the general interest. I erased myself because it was understood then that between the right and the extreme right, it was always better to the right. Yes, Mr. President, in vain you play us ” at the same time “, for me as for millions of voters on the left, you are on the right. But I answered present and I voted for you. Twice. In 2017, I made a dam. In 2022, I made a dam.

“This vote obliges me for the years to come”, you said to us on the evening of your second victory. Did you even think it for a second? Allow me to doubt it. Because a month after this speech, you began your work of undermining us. Trampling a large part of your own voters, you had chosen your battle plan: return back to back ” the extremes “. Thus, the very people to whom you promised concord for having defeated the extreme right on your side, were brutally put on the same footing… as the extreme right.

It was just the beginning. The left quickly became your scapegoat, your public enemy number 1. Until the irreparable was committed: two RN vice-presidents elected by 280 votes. That is to say with those of your majority. However, I had blocked.

For nearly a year, with the help of your ministers and your deputies, you have continued, patiently, meticulously, expelling from the republican arc those who three times have forged it. Today, you are criminalizing the least of our protests. You accuse us of threatening institutions. Today, you let your Minister of the Interior talk about the ” far-left intellectual terrorism” to designate the opposition, treat anyone from the left and environmentalists as a potential enemy within while denying the far-right violence plaguing your towns and villages, and – it just fell – threaten the funding of the League for Human Rights because it documents the use of force by the police in demonstrations. Yet I had blocked.

Your betrayal, I felt it in my flesh on the evening of February 17, a few minutes after midnight, when the debates on pension reform had just ended in favor of article 47.1, under boos of Nupes. It so happens, Mr. Chairman, that I am a documentary filmmaker and that day I was with my camera following the debates, installed at the Guignol – a pretty name designating one of the spaces reserved for the press, which tells the story that offer the tribunes of the Bourbon palace. Pretty name. Bad time.

I never thought that one day I would cry with rage in the hemicycle when I heard “La Marseillaise”. I did not think that evening that by turning my gaze and my objective towards the song which rose up against the left leaving its benches, I was going to witness the spectacle of shame: the presidential majority – ministers, deputies, president of the National Assembly – your majority in its entirety, standing, singing our “Marseillaise” in unison with the far right. RN and Renaissance, accompanied by the supposedly republican right, hand in hand against the Nupes, proclaiming the song of the Republic. Then clapping. As one man.

Yet I had blocked.

Mr. President, how far will you go? If it is really France that you want to protect, will you ever stop making the extreme right your stepping stone? In this game, you will lose. And all of us with you. Is this your project?

And you, “left” walkers, including some of my family and friends… where are you, exactly? You with whom I shared an ideal and values, you who called me to the rescue to stand front to front, I implore you: do not make yourselves accomplices by your embarrassed silence. I blocked. Now, it is your turn.