Even the most fervent optimist can’t deny that Europe, surrounded by predators, isn’t up to the challenge: we work much less than elsewhere, pensioners are treated better than working people, few new businesses are springing up, innovators are leaving, foreign companies are investing very little in cutting-edge fields, we’re having fewer and fewer children, and we train far fewer engineers than on any other continent. And this is particularly true in France, which now resembles a crazy truck on a steep downhill slope, with four or five unlicensed drivers fighting over the steering wheel.
Without going into too many figures, just a few: while China devotes 9% of its GDP to research and innovation, and Germany and Japan more than 3.5%, France is, for the first time since 1981, below 2%. While Japan and Germany, ageing countries if there ever was one, devote 9.5% of their GDP to financing pensions, France devotes 15%, and much more if all age-related expenses are taken into account. In France, people retire three years earlier than in other European countries, which are in the process of further raising the retirement age; and almost half of France’s public debt is linked to the mismanagement of pensions, at a time when the school system is in dire straits, hospitals are on the brink of bankruptcy and the birth rate is collapsing, making it impossible to sustainably finance pensions at their current levels. While Germany is filling up its engineering schools, France is having the greatest difficulty finding candidates, and especially female candidates, to fill its own. While other countries have a government, with a budget, clear priorities and a sufficiently clear horizon for entrepreneurs to feel a little like investing, you’d have to be crazy to invest in France, a country with no budget, whose government abandons its rare courageous reforms to last a few more days, where all the parties are content with demagogic promises and insane concessions to all the interest groups, where we’ve reached the point of designating scapegoats, where the palinodies of a balkanized parliament are part of a collective suicide. And where there’s no one left to set a course and stick to it.
So it’s hardly surprising that democracy, and the elites who led to this disaster, are being called into question; and that many are coming to believe that an authoritarian, or at least illiberal, government, rid of the technocrats, would do no worse and at least put things in order. No wonder either that the parties advocating this are xenophobic, anti-European, nationalist and populist.
So the future is all set: a future victory for the Rassemblement National, which will assume the will to turn France into an isolated, average country with no desire for excellence and power, a country that will pride itself on being governed by non-graduates because the super-graduates have shown their incompetence. For this party’s program can be summed up, whatever its leaders may say, as: “More taxes. Fewer foreigners. Fewer workers.
Less Europe. Less excellence”. Its implementation, applauded by pensioners and all those nostalgic for an imaginary France, will only exacerbate the country’s financial crisis. The elites will leave, as will foreign investors and researchers. Public debt will rise. Until the markets, or the IMF, or Brussels, come to remind us of reality, as they have done to other countries, which have lost half their standard of living.
And this is what awaits France in less than eighteen months’ time. This is the fault of those who, for so many years, have lacked the courage to undertake the necessary reforms, preferring to enjoy power rather than use it to lift the country higher. And of all those who, today, cowardly, rally to the powerful to come, so as not to lose their privileges.
We still have the chance to react. Not to resign ourselves. Not to accept a strange defeat. To put the spotlight on a magnificent generation of young people, eager to get to work and open up to the world, enraged at seeing their place taken by rentiers of all kinds, retirees or supernumerary employees of bloated administrations, while we are so short of engineers, teachers, nurses, skilled workers, doctors, police officers, farmers and so many other professions vital to the country’s future and, in particular, to tackling tomorrow’s environmental problems. This requires courageous reforms. For example, retirees must accept that their share of national income will fall, and that they will have to live off their assets, if they have any, rather than the taxes paid by those who work. And we need to welcome and integrate a large number of foreigners, carefully chosen so as not to disappear.
There’s not much time left to react. To give power to the young. The answer certainly doesn’t lie with the current parties, who propose nothing and think only of continuing to profit from public prebends. It lies in an awakening of companies, associations, trade unions, researchers, young people, people of good will, who still believe that France and Europe must aim for excellence and remain open to the world. It is among them that the sources of an awakening are to be found. Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long.