HC

There are two important themes, both of which stem from the question of democracy itself. The first is the fact that we refuse the kind of campaign that plays on people’s ignorance. By that I mean that we are faced with a Macron government that, for one of the first times in French republican history, has not set out its program before we go to the polls.

We are about to vote on Sunday, but only on Wednesday, four days before the election, did we find out about the content of the decrees Macron is going to issue to dismantle the Labor Code. And just three days before the vote, we found out that the government’s intention is to put the terms of the State of Emergency — with the exceptional security measures allowing people to be put under house arrest — into common law.

This means removing a judge’s role in the implementation of exceptional measures. So we have this incredible situation where just four days before the vote we found out about the decree to dismantle the Labor Code, and just three days before we found out that the State of Emergency is going to become normality. So in the final days, we want the cards to be laid out on the table, and to make sure that people know what they are voting for.

The second important aspect, of course, is the democratic system. Our own vision of democracy is not one where a party that gets thirty percent of the vote then receives 500 seats out of 577, as the seat projections by pollsters suggest. It is incredible that a party that doesn’t even get one in three votes can end up getting five-sixths of the seats. For us, that is impermissible. So that is what we are fighting against.

We are the only major force in this parliamentary campaign that clearly says what it would do in opposition to Emmanuel Macron. That is a fundamentally important point. In every constituency in France, people do not know what their representatives would do — except for us.

We have an incredible situation where people are standing on En Marche! lists who have no parliamentary experience — nothing wrong with that — but worse, no ambition or will to do parliamentary work. That is what is most worrying. Macron wants to just make decisions without them. We have called this a kind of social coup d’état, for it counts on getting people elected in order to remove any power from them, for the purpose of breaking the French social system.