Un Swissroll

The Times is behind a paywall, but by registering you get access to two free articles per week.

Intéressant, bien que je ne me reconnaisse ni dans l'une, ni dans l'autre des deux gauches décrites ici.

A comment I left on Twitter about the article below:

This is mistaking New Labour for success at all cost, when it was in fact about content for the modern world. So Corbyn's score is scarry.

Un commentaire laissé à la suite de l'article ci-dessous:

Attention à la confusion! Un lanceur d'alerte, comme le définit très bien Transparency International, c'est "une personne qui, dans le contexte de sa relation de travail, signale un fait illégal, illicite ou dangereux, touchant à l’intérêt général, aux personnes ou aux instances ayant le pouvoir d’y mettre fin"; qui n'est qu'en toute dernière instance un journaliste, manifestement.

La fuite de documents préparatoires et partiels, leur publication prématurée hors contexte dans un dossier en cours, ça n'a vraiment rien à voir.

On peut faire cela parce qu'on est contre et qu'on veut tenter de faire dérailler le train, éventuellement. Dans le cas précis, ça obéit probablement à tout autre chose: une relation d'amitié, un besoin de se faire valoir… En tout cas, ça n'a rien d'héroïque et ce n'est pas acceptable du point de vue du bon fonctionnement de l'Etat comme d'une entreprise, et le ministère a parfaitement raison de vouloir sévir.

Et même le média qui en fait son beurre ne peut pas sans autre se prévaloir d'un rôle d'intérêt public. Le débat public, il est déjà en cours. L'alimenter d'éléments prématurés et partiels, c'est juste de la chasse au scoop pour se faire mousser.

On the face of it, there is no pattern in the votes in Britain, the US and France over the past year.

With Brexit, a trading nation decided to break from a bloc seen as a meddling bureaucracy, hoping to strike deals with the wider world on its own terms. In the US, voters reverted to an old tradition of isolationism and economic nationalism.

Macron, in contrast to the other two, is very much a multilateralist: he embraces globalisation and sees France’s future firmly within the EU.

But beyond these glaring differences, a common thread runs through those outcomes – and it has implications for next week’s general election in the UK.

Those who have won so far were not afraid to stand up for deeply-held beliefs, however misguided they appeared to be (or actually were), no matter against the grain to seemed to go.

You may disagree with Trump or with the Brexit lot, but you can’t accuse them of equivocating or hedging their bets.

The same applies to Macron. He was dismissed by opponents as a mushy consensus candidate.

But if he had played it safe, he would have remained inside the socialist party rather than start a movement from scratch.

If he had played it safe, he would not have embraced open trade in a globaphobic country. And he would never had spoken face-to-face to striking workers in a factory threatened with closure, and told them that as president he would not spend one euro in public money to rescue their jobs.

His campaign was every bit as daring in the context of France as Trump’s in a US context (remember: I am not comparing the campaigns themselves – for one thing Macron’s was much better organised than Trump’s – but their levels of gutsiness.)

All this supports the old adage that most voters don’t believe in anything, but they believe in people who believe in something.

Of course, there are limits to the attractiveness of sheer conviction. Beliefs that are too weird will turn people off. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders was very much a conviction politician, but he still lost to an opportunistic centrist a couple of months ago.

In the second round of France’s presidential Macron convincingly defeated a candidate whose ideas were even more iconoclastic than his, but were just too far out for most. In Britain, a generation ago, Margaret Thatcher’s willingness to stand up to the establishment eventually backfired.

But when consensus starts to break down, risk-taking will be rewarded. You’re going to piss off a large chunk of the electorate whatever you do. Candidates who stick to their guns in the face of criticism have a key advantage over those who twist in the wind in quest of wider appeal.

This augurs well for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour and not so well for Theresa May’s Tories for next Thursday.

Le Monde et les belles âmes ont donc trouvé le moyen d’écarter le reproche de Macromania qui nuirait à leur marketing et à leur narcissisme. Ca peut marcher bien sûr, car il faut lire de manière critique pour ne pas se joindre à la meute et se rendre compte que les accusations portées à l’égard de Richard Ferrand ne sont guère convaincantes.

Pour l’article du Canard enchaîné de mercredi passé, il faut lire goo.gl/xY1Hk3. Le Monde, lui, s’horrifie que les successeurs de Ferrand aient passé deux commandes à la femme dont Ferrand était divorcé depuis plusieurs années… « Calomniez, calomniez, il en restera toujours quelque chose. »

Complément du 01.06.2017 à 17h30: Sur Authueil, lire l’analyse de Samuel goo.gl/UpVaRQ

V.o.: Tony Blair : «What Emmanuel Macron grasped» goo.gl/6lsm3H 

Best is the enemy of the good (especially with economically illiterate intellectuals involved): fascinating and sad story.