Irreconcilable lefts3 reading minutes

A few news items illustrate a little-discussed yet interesting and fundamental political reality: the presence in the contemporary ideological landscape of various irreconcilable lefts. Here are three examples.

Firstly, the law on the secular nature of the State of Geneva, accepted by the Geneva population on February 10, was the result of two years of debate in parliament. The Socialist Party, the Greens and Ensemble à gauche spent their time criticizing this legal provision as liberticidal, discriminatory and even Islamophobic. The reason? The adopted text prohibits the wearing of distinctive religious symbols by representatives of the State. However, some left-wing MPs, including Salika Wenger, have spoken out against their parties to defend a different position. This position, which we'll call republican, is that religious symbols should not be worn by public officials. convictional have nothing to do with an elected representative or a nurse. And the neutrality of the State.

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Secondly, the silence of the Swiss left in the face of the Chavist regime of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro for years had hardly been questioned by the media. They waited until the recent popular protests before rushing to interview their Swiss comrades, in a complacent manner. It took the weekly Valais newspaper The Confederate that these media failings be denounced by historian Philippe Bender, in his column of Friday February 8, 2019, entitled «A l'heure des comptes»:

«In Valais, no one has ever asked too many questions about Mathias Reynard's opinion on these political tragedies. Besides, why ask the tough questions? People prefer to ask him about the Fête-Dieu procession in Savièse, global warming, bike paths, equal pay or homophobia, all of which are more popular topics. But why this silence and complacency, given that investigative journalism should know no taboos? Is there a double standard, for the right or the left, or even the center? The reprimands reserved for wrong edge, the most flattering praises drown out the others, from the right edge?»

Thirdly, the terrible anti-Semitic insults to intellectual Alain Finkielkraut as part of the «yellow vests» demonstration in Paris on February 16 attracted welcome media and political support. But what contrasts in reactions on the left! On the one hand, the majority of socialist politicians and commentators of this sensibility have this time not hesitated to name and face up to this new anti-Semitism constituted by resentments in the suburbs and by an ultra-left merging with the ultra-right of Alain Soral and Dieudonné. On the other, a certain radical left represented by a certain Jean-Luc Mélenchon is frighteningly ambiguous. Instead of simply condemning the facts, read what this sad character tweeted:

«For the Macronists, the fight against anti-Semitism is not sincere. Just a political pretext to settle scores, create a diversion, profit from evil.»

By failing to condemn the blatant, filmed manifestations of anti-Semitism that took place in the French capital, Mélenchon is doing precisely what he pretends to denounce: the instrumentalization of this tragic reality. Emmanuel Macron, for his part, is unambiguous when he writes these words on his Twitter account, He, the progressive, certainly doesn't share many of Finkielkraut's ideas:

«The son of Polish émigrés turned French academician, Alain Finkielkraut is not only an eminent man of letters but a symbol of what the Republic allows everyone. The anti-Semitic insults he has been subjected to are an absolute negation of who we are and what makes us a great nation. We will not tolerate them.»

These three recent events, of which the third is obviously the most alarming, show that the Swiss left, like the French left, is not homogeneous, and that it brings together irreconcilable currents. A new, multiculturalist left is clashing with a less electoralist, republican left. Added to this is the rift within the Republican Left itself, between social democrats and those most critical of liberalism and the European Union. This pluralism is welcome. But there is a worrying element, which is beyond the scope of this debate: the lack of clarity on the part of a certain left-wing faction with regard to that unbearable hatred of being, anti-Semitism, which is taking on new forms.

Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com 

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