 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome. I'm Meroen Kilili. We are DM25, a radical political movement for Europe. And this is another live discussion with our coordinating team and special guests featuring subversive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. And today we're talking about France. The last few weeks have seen an explosion of violence across the EU's largest country. 5,000 vehicles burned, over 1,000 buildings set alight, about a billion euros, according to one estimate, in damages. Now, France was already contending with protests. It's most recently against President Macron's pension reforms, but this latest round has produced the worst violence in the country in more than a decade. The spark that ignited this recent unrest was the tragic killing of Nahel Mezouk by police, a 17-year-old delivery driver during a routine traffic stop on the 27th of June caught on video. This is just the latest chapter, though, in a long-simmering crisis, tensions that have been going on in France for 40 years, fueled by rising inequality and a state that has effectively abandoned its poorest citizens, most of them like Nahel of North African origin. So beneath the headlines, beneath the violence that grabs all the images and gets people emotive, what are the roots of these problems? What implications does this all have for politics, for Macron, and especially for the rising far-right in France? And what lessons could those elsewhere in Europe draw from what France is experiencing now? Today, I would like to welcome a special guest that we have the honor of having with us in this call, Stathis Kovellakis. He's a friend of DiEM25. He taught for 20 years at King's College London in political theory. He ran with us, Mayor 25, our party in Greece, and he's an independent researcher based in Paris. So welcome, Stathis. And of course, welcome to our usual panel of activists and thinkers and doers from across Europe, and of course, our own Janis Varoufakis. And of course, there's you out there watching us live on YouTube. If you've got thoughts, comments, questions, rants, anything you want to throw at us, then please put them in the YouTube chat and we'll go through them and may put them to our panel. Let's kick off with Stathis. That is the floor is yours. Put us in the picture, please. Right, OK. Hello, everyone. Hello, friends and comrades. So let me, I will just begin with a brief introduction to leave enough time for us to discuss. I just want to make actually three points. The first is about the authoritarian drift of the French state and of the various governments that have been in place since, let's say, the last 15 years. The second point is about the social crisis or the deepening of the social crisis in France since the start of this year. And the third point is about the state of the French left. So I will finish, hopefully, with a more positive note. So let me start with the authoritarian drift of the French state. I think there are two aspects here that need to be stressed. The first is that, obviously, there has been a hardening of the neoliberal policies in France, which is a familiar trope for everyone, I think, in Europe. The French specificity in this is that probably the neoliberal reform, let's say, starting in the early 1980s with the 1983 turn towards neoliberalism over Mitterrand and his government accelerated in the following, in the years that followed. But this neoliberal turn was met by strong resistance from below. And I think that France is rather unique in Europe in the scale and frequency of those big social movements that, in some cases, have been at least partly successful in blocking or mitigating at least some aspects of this neoliberal turn. This means that the social and political situation in France is probably even more polarized than in other European countries, which is probably familiar for those of you who know a bit about French history and the importance of social struggles and the radical and revolutionary traditions of French society. Now, this neoliberal turn goes hand in hand with an increasing authoritarian turn of the French state. And a very important part of this authoritarian turn is racism. Racism as a systemic phenomenon, the roots of which go very deep in French history. Colonialism, of course, is very important here. The racism is something that is familiar in nearly every European society and beyond. Obviously, the French specificity is how the French society, the official narrative of France as a nation, the French political system, the French state constantly deny the very existence of this problem as a systemic problem in French society. There is the myth that Republican France is somehow colorblind that, as the announcement, I think of these debates, stresses France is the country of liberty, equality, and freedom of the ideas of the French Revolution and that the French republicanism knows nothing about those fragmentation and divisions that supposedly characterize Anglo-Saxon societies that somehow France is big other in that respect. So it's not, of course, a recent feature. But once again, there is a turning point in that respect in 2007, I think, with the presidency of Sarkozy. When Nicolas Sarkozy really took a substantial part of the agenda of the far right of the National Front and Jean-Marie Le Pen at that time, integrated it in the discourse and program of the mainstream French right, made it legitimate, adopted a language of internal war in French society, castigating Muslims, ethnic minorities, racialized layers of French society as internal enemies. Things went worse and worse. And Macron, in that respect, represents a new stage. Despite his initial, we have to stress that when Macron was elected in 2017, he didn't put forward a Sarkozy-type agenda. Quite the contrary, actually. He wanted to combine a strong pro-business new liberal agenda with a kind of modern and open to social issues such as racism, LGBT rights, women's rights, and so on. But very, very quickly, actually, he appeared just as a continuation of what his predecessors have been implemented since. Macron's hard neoliberal policies, and it has to be stressed, represent a minority. They represent a crisis of consent in French society. Neoliberalism is rejected by increasingly larger layers within French society. The whole trick of Macron is to have the far right as the only political alternative facing him and succeeding, therefore, to be elected in the second rounds of presidential elections. The narrow basis of Macron's social support explains the rising authoritarianism that has characterized his presidency since the start. You probably know the brutality with which the Gilets jaunes protests have been met. We can say exactly the same about the social movement against the pension reform that started this year, which brings me to my second point that will be very brief. Here, the six first months of... Can you follow me? Because I appear... OK. The six first months of the current year have been characterized by a very massive protest movement against the pension reform, a movement led by the trade unions, but which took an even broader, let's say, broader aspect, broader scope after the... Macron's decision, actually, not to put the reform in vote in parliament, to bypass it by a trick allowed by the French Constitution, which meant that from late March onwards, the movement was not only against the pension reform, but also against Macron's authoritarianism and the anti-democratic structures of the French Fifth Republic, the current political regime of France since the gold-taking power in 1958. This is the context of a strongly challenged from below political legitimacy that explains, at least this is my analysis, the extent of the protests that followed and the revolt of the Bourg-leur. The Bourg-leur are the deprived, the impoverished suburban areas of France, mostly populated by racialized sectors of French society. So the revolt of the Bourg-leur, its exceptional strength, the only comparable one was happened in 2005, when, once again, two teenagers actually were killed while trying to escape the police. So these were the biggest wave of riots, of urban riots that France experienced at that time. Now, this wave was even stronger. It happened much quicker. It spread much more in the French territory. The scale of the damage was even greater, violence reached new levels, police repression and brutality reached new levels as well. This happens because of this very strongly and problematic political legitimacy of Macron and of the whole political construction of which Macron is the expression. I will finish with some brief remarks about the French left. And here, there is something positive to say. In 2005, during the first big wave, the first wave of urban riots reaching most of the French territory, taking really a kind of unprecedented scale spreading in the entire territory, the French left at that time dominated by socialists with a very diminished communist party remained silent. It condemned the police repression but didn't go further than this. There was no attempt somehow to intervene politically in the situation. There was no attempt to emphasize the structural racism which combined of course with the deterioration of the social conditions is the fuel of this revolt. Things are now quite different and the political debate appears as extremely polarized between the largest sector of the French left led by François Soumise and the board in France and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who since 2019 strongly challenges the Islamophobic and racist consensus of the French mainstream. And indeed what we have seen these last days in the streets of Paris and in a very powerful way in Paris, La Saturday is the convergence of an unprecedented spectrum of forces which includes big trade unions in France, François Soumise and the Greens and a broad spectrum of anti-racist organization. And despite the fact that the government wanted to suppress the demo, it took place in Paris. It was of course repressed brutally by the police but there will be a continuation. There was a common statement making very strong points signed by, as I said before, a very broad spectrum of organizations of the political and the social left asking for the suppression of the 2017 law voted by the socialists which facilitates police shooting against individuals refusing to follow the orders actually of the police or supposedly doing so, asking to support actually to address directly the social problems of the banlieue and of course to change and to address directly the structural racism of the French police which has to be said, and this will really be my last point, the police is a very specific point in that whole picture of the authoritarian drift of the French state. The authoritarian drift means that the police becomes more and more an autonomous force with the so-called police unions playing a major role here and they dictate the policy which the various governments and the ministers of the interior have to follow. And because the governments depend more and more on repression to pass their measures, they have to follow what these police unions and the police which is more and more penetrated by the ideas and the networks of the far right are doing. And this creates of course a very dangerous situation which combined with the increased electoral weight of the far right leads us to a very worrying, polarized political and social situation but hopefully with some positive signs of a surge, let's say, on the side of the radical left. Thank you, Stafiq, very much for drawing that for us. Jannis, Thor is yours. Thank you, madam. Thank you, Stafiq, for this brilliant briefing and introduction. Being Greek, you and me and several others today, you reminded me of an exclamation by a former conservative Greek prime minister, Konstantinus Karamalis, back in the early 1960s when he realized he was not even in control of the brutality of the police back when they were killing members of parliament like Grigory Drabrakis. The exclamation was, who controls this state? He didn't even control his own police. So there's nothing new here. What I believe is profoundly new in especially the case of France is the political economy supporting this sensation of the police from the state and the new authoritarianism that we now see in France. We see it here in Greece too. It was my experience that during the last four years when Manor 25 was in parliament, that the right wing government was not completely in control of the police. The police and even the Coast Guard, they're on their own show. They have representatives, they have ambassadors in government, but the government itself is not running the show. But I want to speak about this theory of mine, at least about what the political economy behind the current events and riots and unrest is. I want to go back to the early 1980s, especially when François Mitterrand rose to power. For the first couple of years, everybody remembers that, I think that everybody remembers, I assume that everybody's holding up, that Mitterrand tried the Keynesian policy. The standard social democratic Keynesian policy, it was the time of the popular folk government, socialists and communists were in the ministries together. And that didn't go well, and it didn't go well because it was not a really a real socialist policy. It was an attempt to inflate the economy during a period of inflation anyway, of stagnation. During a period when the Anglosphere was trouble charging, the austerity policies that used very high interest rates, attacked the capital into the Anglosphere. So when Mitterrand started pump priming the economy in a standard Keynesian sense, what happened if it was an exodus of capital from France and the whole project really collapsed, Mitterrand overthrew himself, his own government and turned into a staunch Australian, a staunch Dutch right. And I remember that back then, the narrative of the socialist party was that, okay, we're not giving up on our Keynesian social democracy, but we just realized we cannot do it in France alone. We have to capture the Buddhist bank, we have to capture the German finance and public finance and put that to work because it is far more stronger as a monetary system and a capital accumulation mechanism. So we need, that was why the Mitterrand government was so gung-ho about the year. As it turns out, given that France is structurally in deficit to Germany, and it couldn't be otherwise, because capital utilization, capital concentration in Germany, that is the proportion of goods and services, particularly goods, particularly export goods, in Germany, that are produced by capital goods, as opposed to labor, is structurally higher than in France. So we have two economies fused together by means of a common currency or a common monetary policy, a monetary policy in France that was aiming for the hard franc in order to achieve parity with the Deutsche Mark before they developed the Europe. What happens is there's always going to be vendor financing. So there will be net exports from Germany to France. There will also be a net export of capital, of profits from Germany to France. And that will mean that the French state must be Australian by definition in order to keep the balance given that the exchange rate becomes fixed and cannot take the stack. My view is that the rise of the ultra-right in France is absolutely connected, causally connected, to this decision by the Mitterrand government, essentially to bind monetarily France, a country that was always trailing behind the German economy in terms of capital utilization to the German industrial machinery. You can trace the macroeconomic imbalances caused by this decision and they correspond beautifully. I'm not saying that you can prove causality, but you can certainly spot the correlation between those macroeconomic imbalances which were the result of the Mitterrand strategy and the rise of the ultra-right, the industrialization or the industrialization. The declassification of working-class areas, especially around Paris, especially up in the north, especially in Marseille, to this process. So as to put it in a kind of schematic way, France was moving away from industry to Louis Vuitton for its capital accumulation and to its banking sector, which was becoming increasingly large, speculating and playing an almost Anglo-Saxon role in central European, Northern European finance compared to the German banking sector, which wasn't, which was playing a more traditional funding of industry role and then speculating in the United States, but not across Europe. You have the beginnings of the circumstances that we find ourselves in. The Bandeuil, remember that fantastic movie, Hatred, L'Haine, I believe, was already mapping this process out because in France, republicanism, the idea that we do not even take note of skin color or religion and so on, which sounds like a lofty, beautiful idea. Everybody's under liberty, quality, fraternity and therefore you don't even take statistics based on race, based on religion, based on ethnicity. That lofty ideal developed under Mitterrand and then later much more so under Hollande and I think Stathis alluded to that into racist authoritarianism, which society was not allowed ideologically even to discuss because it went against the official ideology that we don't talk about race and ethnicity because they're irrelevant because they're all colorblind and there's no such thing as racism. So this process was deepened during the Euro crisis after 2009, 2010, because the great macroeconomic imbalances that were inbuilt into French society and the Eurozone as a result of the Mitterrand decision effectively produced circumstances of two different rebellions, a white rebellion and a non-white rebellion. We saw the, more recently, we have, well, actually the Le Pen front national rise is a kind of rebellion of the white Petit Bourgeoisie and the white working class who turn away from the Communist Party. You can see that in the electoral results. The Gilles Jaune to some extent as well. And then you have what some of us refer to as the French in the Father, the rise of the Barlier, the rise of the blacks of the Muslims of the dispossessed on the basis of their origins. We saw the authoritarians of the Hollande government that changed the law to be able so that the state can remove even citizenship. Isn't that so static? I mean, it was the socialist that reduced that. It wasn't the right, it wasn't even Macron. And I want to finish because I could go on forever that this institutionalized macroeconomically boosted racism which is part and parcel of the design of the whole Eurozone not just what's happening in France is a remarkably effective implementation of the Jim Crow racist laws in the United States. Remember that the racism in the United States was racist. Racist laws segregation was a way of dividing the working class and giving the white working class in the United States white trash as they called them themselves a reason to become part of the paramilitary forces that we're turning against the unions and against the blacks. And we see this now. We see this institutionalized under Macron. And I want to finish by saying that my great concern is the urbanization of France because urban in Hungary offers a chilling example of what would happen if Le Pen or somebody like Le Pen won government in France and implemented their policies. And what I fear the most is that they could work or bonds policies worked a treat. I was in Hungary some a year ago or so and I talked to people there in government or bands people. And I was absolutely astonished and horrified by how with it they are. They know exactly what they're doing. What they are doing works. They have offered a new social contract to the white working class on the basis of racism on the basis of banning any migration. And it's Mussolini to the nth power. I'm talking about, I'm not using Mussolini as a scare figure. But in terms of the social contract that the fascists put to the people, to the working class, which is very simple. We are going to look after you. He trebled the minimum wage or ban trebled the minimum wage without inflation. Massive increase in the working class standards. He looked after the working class. He, unlike the liberals, the Austrians, the social democrats, he really took care of pensions. He increased pensions massively. He improved the health system. He doubled the living standards of the average working class person in Hungary over the course of the last 15 years or so. But the nasty part of the contract is, you will have no voice. We will look after you. You shut up. No trade unions rights, no voice. The voice you will have will be through fascistic interviews, interviews, not interviews, collections of signatures in support of the government. Every time Orban goes to the European Union Council, he has millions of signatures supporting all the misanthropic policies that he proposes to the EU Council. And they are genuine. They are not made up of signatures. They are signatures that they collect because they give voice to people by playing on two things. Firstly, they are prejudices. So for instance, when it comes to migration, we have to stop the European Union from bringing us the world economic forum agenda and so on. And they create a huge amount of support. They create town hall meetings in which in a fascistic Mussolini-esque kind of way, they do gather signatures and the signatures empower Orban to go to Brussels and say no to what the European Union liberal establishment considers to be rule of law stuff. But in that process, there's no genuine voice. It is simply the working class giving its consent to Orban to do whatever it is that he wants to do in exchange for a fascistic kind of social welfare system that flattens everything but elevates the basic living standards of the majority of the working class. Now, I've seen this go to Hungary and you will be horrified to see that this works. Imagine if that happened in France. The only impediment to the success of this urbanization process in France are the people who rose up as part of the French Indifada in the last few weeks and the trade unions and France insumis that are still holding the line, keeping the candle flame of progressive left-wing politics. That didn't exist in Hungary because of the legacy of the Soviet Union and the Soviet era. But that candle can be extinguished. Let us not take it for granted. And on this note, allow me to plug a film, another film, because I didn't mention dying by a good friend, Roman Gavras movie Athena, which came out, what, a year and a half ago, a completely futuristic film in the banlier's war between the police and mainly North African or children from North Africans. It's not a political state. It doesn't try to tell a story about what's going on in France, but it is an interesting limiting case of what would happen if urbanization and macronization, if macronization gives rise to urbanization and urbanization succeeds in France. Thank you. Thank you, Yanis, for those very valuable thoughts. Moving to the latest round of protest, just looking at the reaction actually from Macron, some things that you said is alluded to, one of the things he did was he dismissed the protests as the fault of video games and bad parenting and made a rather unprecedented threat to shut down social media. There was also some discussion of using spyware in people's phones in order to spy on protesters. Judith Meyer, as a resident technologist, I'd love to get your take on that and whatever other thoughts you've got on what you've heard in this course so far. Judith. Thank you, Mehan. Yeah, I guess Macron has had this experience firsthand of having his phone used to spy on him and now he wants everyone to share this experience, but it is, of course, no justification for calling for this law. So his government is currently trying to pass a new law that redefines the relationship between the state and digital actors and telecommunications. And it's something that various European governments, including the EU, keep trying to do and keep being met by resistance from those who are more digitally illiterate. I mean, this has been going on ever since my very first dabbling in politics with a pirate party because for us, there was simply no reason and it didn't compute, it didn't make any logical sense to treat the digital communication in any way differently than offline communication. I mean, when a postal service moved from using horses to using cars and sometimes they transport the mail by ship or whatever, it does not make any difference. There should not be different laws applying to the privacy of communications, whether these letters are transported by horse or by car or by ship or now digitally. So when governments first suggested that because email is digital, there should be a completely different sense of privacy rights or rather no rights applied to it, there was always another matter. It could only work with voters who don't use new systems, who think that Skype is somehow different from phone calls, who think that email is somewhat different from letters. There is no reason to start to cut up our rights just because they happen to have moved to a new technology. And this of course also applies to social media which are just another way of communicating on a marketplace. So there are some situations that would not occur on an actual marketplace like someone saying something and being hurt by a million people. But other than such real edge cases which really don't happen all that often, I don't see the need to have different laws applying to the digital space compared to the offline space. For example, when it comes to freedom of speech, just whatever you are allowed to say on a market square, you should be allowed to say online and what you shouldn't be allowed to say on the market square, you shouldn't be allowed to say online. I mean, we have to, we can always argue whether a particular country has found a good standard for freedom of speech when it comes to offline communication, whether they are too liberal or too restrictive when it comes to what you're allowed to say on a market square. But there should be absolutely no difference between what you're allowed to say there and what you're allowed to say online because it's just the times changing technologies, changing our rights do not apply to a particular technology but a particular act, the act of speaking, the act of communicating with each other. So, yeah, that's my response in brief. There should be no, well, next to no case in which the government is allowed to spy on people's communication. An exception I could see is if they're trying to get a mafia boss or a mass murder who has been on the run for a while but there are already laws that allow the police to get access to our communication in those cases. We are a judge that allows them to do search of house, for example. And the exact same laws can be used for that. There's no reason to start legislating something different just because some people don't understand the digital sphere. Thank you, Judith. I note the hypocrisy whenever there's a authoritarian ruler or dictator that is limiting or curbing social media, the outcry in the West is quite loud and here's my call saying it and there has not been very much outcry in the pages of our international newspapers. Panos, Panos, Stenos. Four is yours. You have a question, I believe. Go for it. Thank you, Meijan. The question is for status. I'd like to ask, if we take all the measures that the French government has taken, starting from sidestepping parliament to pass the pension reform and then going to the banning of demonstrations and the measures regarding the control of social media and this whole rumor about activating microphones and cameras on people's devices. I know Judith just gave a very structural and global analysis of that, but I would like to ask, particularly in the case of France, I mean, all those measures together and the direction where this is going, can it be said that the French government is gradually dismantling democracy? Can this be said? And if we can have an idea of how that is with respect to other European countries, I mean, the institutional measures to banish basic democratic rights like the right of assembly, the right to privacy, the right to demonstrate and all that. Is France going in a way of its own and is it like something unprecedented? Thanks, Panus. Stathis, could I bring you back in to respond to that? And of course, anything else you've heard? I think you're muted. Yeah. Is that okay? Right, thanks. Just three points. The first is historical. I don't exactly agree. I don't, with one point, I agree with most of what Yannis said, except perhaps one point. I don't think that the plan of the French socialist was Tunisianism on a European scale for a very simple reason is, and this reason is that the economic policy from 1982-1983 onwards was not decided by the prime minister's say of the time, not even by Mitra in a sense. It was delegated by Mitra to Jacques Delors. And Jacques Delors is really and has been the key architect of European integration as we know it. He was clearly the mastermind of the turn to neoliberalism and in 1982-1983. From the outset, he was against Tunisianism. He was against the nationalization. He was against the program of the basis of which Mitterrand was elected. He was the guarantee somehow that very little of that would remain untouched during the Mitterrand's presidency. And from 1986 onwards, with a single European act, it was quite clear that the acceleration of European integration was to follow the path of European neoliberalism and was the privileged means through which neoliberalism penetrated actually European nation states. And therefore the policy, the very coherent consistent policy followed by all the socialist led governments in the 80s, 90s and early 2000 years followed exactly the same line, internal devaluation, privatizations and the reversal of everything actually left wing that was done by Mitterrand during the first year of his presidency. The second point is about the urbanization of France. Of course, there is much in common between let's say Macron's extreme center with a more and more clear authoritarian face, the French far right, which is a major political force in France and let's say Auburn. And I will come back to some specific measures in answering Panos's question. However, what we have to keep in mind is that the French political landscape is divided in three parts. It's a tripartite, let's say landscape of a more or less equivalent size. The far right of Marine Le Pen currently, Macron's neoliberal extreme center and a left that is dominated and this is a unique case in Europe by the radical left, by Mélenchon, Francesco Misa, Mélenchon got 22% of the vote in the last presidential elections. The second left-wing candidate, not that left-wing actually, but let's say, let's be generous, the ecologist Yannick Jadeau got 4%, the communist candidate 2% and the socialist candidate less than 2%. So that's the balance of forces we inside the left and the common slave, the alliance of the left, the so-called Nupest, the program, the core program of which is, was incorporated most of the program of Mélenchon and Francesco Misa got exactly the same number of votes as Macron. The reason for which Macron got a relative majority in parliament, but not a clear majority, hence actually the need to sidestep parliament to pass the pension reform. Well, that occurred only because far-right voters preferred abstaining or voting directly for Macron's candidate and also because Macron's candidate massively abstained when candidates of the left faced in the second round of the general legislative elections, candidates of the far-right. So we have a tripartite, so very unstable balance of forces in France. There is a race between the left and the far-right as to who will represent the alternative actually to Macron. The scale of, so the existence of such a left and the existence of social, strong social movements mentioned in Yanisat this also makes a crucial difference with Hungary and other European countries, as I said. It also explains the violence of the state and of the government. It is because these movements are very strong somehow that also the state reacts in such a brutal and authoritarian way. This is also why the French far-right is a much more combative far-right, let's say, than Meloni, for instance, in Italy because it has real adversaries on the ground, both on the social and on the political ground. So France is a much more complex, fortunately, in a way, much more conflictual situation than Hungary. You have to realize that particularly since 2016, every year in France, we have a major wave of social protest and mass movements. When I say mass movements, it means movements mobilizing one, two, three million people taking the streets. This is unique in Europe in the last years and we had only this in Spain and Greece just after the 2009, 2010 crisis, but in a central non-peripheral European country, this is a unique place. Now, to answer Panos' question, things are even worse than what you mentioned in the sense that what happens with Macron is that he has banned organizations of social organizations and now political organization or social political organization. He started with associations defending Muslims. He, what was banned was the collective against Islamophobia in France, which was a network providing legal help and assistance to victims of Islamophobia in France and just 10 days ago, he dissolved the biggest network of radical ecology, which promoted the big demonstrations you have probably been aware of in Saint-Soulin in May. And this was banned and about 15 key cadres of that network are currently under arrest and legally persecuted. So yes, of course, there is an authoritarian turn of the French state that predates Macron's presidency, but now has clearly accelerated. When the French-Greek Marxist Nicholas Poulanzas talked about authoritarian statism in the last years of the 1970s decade, he had something incomparably milder in mind that what has happened since, but I think that his concept is very useful for us to analyze how not just governments taking measures, but European states are gradually abandoning democracy as we knew it in post for Europe. And the reason for that can be summed up in a single sentence, the social contract on which this type of democracy was based, the so-called social compromise of the welfare state and Tunisianism has been destroyed by neoliberalism. It is the heart of the process. And of course, I strongly agree with what Yanis said in that respect. Thank you for that status, Yanis. Can I bring it back in to respond? Yeah, that is just very briefly. Undoubtedly Jacques Delors was the architect of neoliberalism in France. And there wasn't a smidgen of Keynesianism in what he did, but I have spoken to him years ago. And it was very interesting how he presented himself and his own projects. The way he presented it was to say that at the level of the state within the European Union, and that was before the Euro, when he first became finance minister after the toppling of the Pierre Morroir government by, you don't know, at the level of the state, it is impossible to have anything other than austerity. That's how he put it. You need to have austerity because our states are essentially monetarily neutered. So we do not have the autonomy whenever we proved, I remember him saying, in the first two years of our government, we proved that if you try to do Keynesianism in a state like France, everything leaks. The money you pump into the economy leaks outside in the form of imports and the whole thing collapses. But his claim was that his vision, and that's what he presented to Mitterrand, and I know that he did that, was to say, look, at the level of the state, we operate as pure neoliberal such a rights. We use this in order to gain credibility with the Germans. We convinced them to have a common currency, which we then use in order to have a Keynesian investment program at the level of the federation of the currency union. That was his, and he hasn't actually proved that. He actually meant that, yeah, yeah, because he submitted in 1991, when he was already in Brussels, he submitted a green paper where he was arguing that against having just the European Central Bank and having the European Investment Bank as the second pillar of the giant that will be the Eurozone. And the idea there was to do Keynesianism using the European Investment Bank, it's, well, I don't think it was a bad idea. It was never implemented and the Germans would never accept it and Mitterrand shot it down because Mitterrand had a written agreement with Kohl and he didn't want to mess up this agreement about the Euro, the Master's Treaty. So I'm sure that Jacques Delors did not lose much sleep over that, but it was, if you read that green paper, at the level of the Eurozone, it was quite Keynesian. And the argument was, do the right neoliberal things at the level of the state in the same way that, and I remember the argument, the argument was that in the state of California, in the state of Michigan, you have to balance your budget. You cannot do Keynesianism at the level of the state, but the level of the federation, you can have. Anyway, look, this is just a historical thing, but it was an important component in the way that idea, that narrative. I remember it affected the Greek socialists, Pasokia, and they were telling similar stories in the 1990s. The argument was, look, we have sold out, remember Pasokia in the 1990s, especially after Papadreou died, we sold out, we turned neoliberal to get us into the Euro because once we get into the Euro, we'll do good Keynesian stuff at the level of the Eurozone, which of course never happened. And when there was a clear need for it to happen in order to stabilize this horrible currency, after 2008, 2009, that's when they clamped down on even more austerity, but that's just a historical footnote. Thank you, again, it's two quick comments from the chat, Caroline, in reference to our discussion previously about the police reaction of this protest, notes that militarization is in fashion across the world when the poor earth and life itself need the opposite. And Bargin Ninja notes that from Islamophobia to Russophobia to the growing fear of people in China, notice the pattern. David Castro, Belgium, not from Belgium, of Portuguese origin living in Belgium, the floor is yours. Thanks, Merlan. I know we don't have a lot of time. I hope everybody can hear me better now. I just wanted to have a comment, which is that, you know, I really hate to be that guy, right? That says, I told you so, or that we told you so, but for what it's worth, this is something that we've been warning about, the use of this integration in the rise of the far right since DMO set up back in 2016, right? We were saying how Europe is experiencing a similar situation that happened in the 1930s, obviously in a different historical context and so on and so forth. And the rise of the far right and Brexit and everything that we've been seeing across Europe, politically and in France, particularly with the rise of the far right, which has been exponential. I mean, meteoric, if you look at it, to the point where if things remain as they are, it is very possible that they'll be in power come the next election. And this is something that was always, nobody ever believes as far as I can remember, even my friends, every time I was in France, talking to people, reading about the situation in France. And while the far right and the liberal establishment, as we call it in DM, are seen as opposites, they're actually part of the same, two sides of the same coin, right? They need each other to survive. If it wasn't for the failures of my call or successes, depending on how you want to look at it, the far right wouldn't be where it is today. And if you look at the latest voting intention data, it tells you the whole story. And that data, what it says, as far as I can tell, is that the French president's approval rating is now standing at a near 30%. And his party, La République en Marche, is probably lower than ever, 22%. When you look at the far right, and also the left-wing moops alliance led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, for the first time in many years, both the left and the far right now rebranding his rassemblement national instead of France national, they're both pulling higher than my call, this is my call's republical match. And support for the left-wing alliance called Moops, specifically, has remained steady over the last 12 months, at around 24 to 25%. Whereas Hans-San Blimo National, which is the far right party as ascended in popularity, going from 19% to 24% in one single year. On the question of police brutality, I think status in the UN is pretty much coveted. This police brutality is nothing new. For a long time these accusations of brutality have plagued French police, right? Even the Council of Europe has criticized excessive use of force by state agents, I'm quoting here, during protests against my calls on popular reforms, pension reforms in January. And similarly, if you look at Amnesty International and other human rights groups, they've also accused the French police of ethnic profiling and have called for systemic reforms to address structural discrimination. And again, touches pretty much on what status was talking about in terms of how racism is kind of structurally impregnated within the police force and beyond. But look, unfortunately, that's where we are now. Just a last comment about the future of France, and I guess of Europe, while in France, different strands of the left have come together in this noobs alliance, it's obviously not mean certain that A, the alliance will last, given also whatever happens in European elections, right? As far as I heard, they may be running separate lists and not necessarily one single list. And even if it does survive this alliance, there's no guarantee that it will be able to counteract the rise of the far right, which is being fueled again by the pillars of my call, as I mentioned earlier. So unfortunately to me, even though I truly hope that it succeeds the left alliance, and I think we have leftists have the duty to stand together and be able to support them against this struggle and support of French democracy at the end of the day. That's attempt to salvage it. It's a worthwhile pursuit, but I think it's one that I fear very personally that we might lose. Although having said that, and just to finish off, we must not give up, right? And we must support our comrades wherever they are against this insidious, unfortunate events that have turned Europe into a continent that is feared, not feared, but you know, constituted by fear is what I mean to say. Thanks. Thank you, David. And to your point about police violence, I read a report that showed that police in France killed and injured more often than any other police force of Europe, so you're absolutely spot on there. Juliana, Juliana Zitter in Germany, who is yours? Thanks, Mehran. Can you hear me well? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Very good. Yeah, for me, it was very interesting to hear so many things about France in this live stream because to be honest, there's not much media coverage in Germany about it. As it was with the last protest, every protest, maybe the Yellow West protest had the most coverage at some point, but now I know what happened, like how it started, but I don't know how it's developing. If you go on social media, it's really hard to know what's real and what's not real because there were videos of the protest, but then you figure that some videos were old videos and matched up, you know? So if you're not researching and you're not taking time to go into maybe French media and translate articles and so on, you wouldn't really know what the status quo is right now about the protest, to be honest. Interestingly, if you come across articles in Germany, like from popular newspapers and shitty newspapers like Built, for example, they are exploiting what's happening in France to target migrants even more so. So they're using it to say, you know, this is future Germany. And now the right wing, like this pool of pictures from France of, you know, the young migrant boys who will destroy our cities in the future. And now you have like also, of course, like always people falling for it and getting scared. And now you have like, yeah, a total new pool for the right wing, I think in every country to exploit this for their purposes and to prove their theories right, so to say. So I think everything that happens in every country when the governments and even more so if it's a neoliberal government or it's a social democratic governments, if they fail, the right wing in every country wins because they take it as an example for themselves. It's not like it's happening in another country and they don't care about it. And I think I'm really getting scared of the new alliance of the right wing because if, for example, the pen gets elected in France someday and the RFD might get into government in Germany, then, well, then I think the U has actually a good, a good prospect to stay together because then we will have only right wing governments in the U and especially with big countries like Germany and France. I think this is like the most dystopian future of Europe I can imagine. I have actually two questions. We had a French friend over on the weekend and he said that, yes, he also sees that Le Pen might have really chances to get into government at some point, maybe not the next election, but as it's going and she has time because she's still young, but he says that it also possibly is that Hollande is building up again and that he's gaining favor of people. So I don't know how realistic that is that he's coming back. And the second is that now with what happened in France because I mean, I assume it's right that it's very young people on the street, but could this not be more inspired by what happened in the U.S. with Black Lives Matter? Like if George Floyd didn't happen, would this happen? I mean, I see it as they saw it now happen and they're like, okay, in the U.S. we've had this burning police station and so on and now you're seeing this in France and I think there is a connection there that the young people take this as an example to say, okay, it's time for us to stand up and to not let ourselves be treated that way because racial profiling is really, as Stathis said, one of the very common things in France but it's also very common in Germany. If you're a young man and you have a bit of color in your face, the police will stop you before anyone else on the street for sure. So this is like, I assume a very European thing. Oh, yes, thank much. Thank you, Juliana. I know Judith wants to respond to something you just said and then Stathis, if I can bring you into response to Juliana and we'll close. Judith? Yeah, there is another parallel of course, I've also noticed what Juliana described that in Germany, we're not really talking about the causes of these protests, namely the police violence, but rather about the so-called problems of society that includes young men from the Middle East. So it's really worrisome that we're not talking about the police violence because here in Germany, we've also seen an increase in police violence, not just at protests, but especially with guns as well. We had a case recently of a policeman, not one policeman, there was a young man with a knife and 11 policemen surrounded him and shot six shots against him. And this really struck me because when I was debating gun culture with Americans around 2004 or so, I looked up the statistics of gun use by German police and it was like 14 shots fired a year, right? So going from that to just having six shots fired on one boy in one case, and then there was a similar case in a neighboring city and more cases in other places, I think that after 9-11 with the arming of the police, we're now seeing the result of police using all these deadly guns against the population much more commonly. And then it does not even become a topic and this is really worrisome. Even when we have the case to talk about this excessive violence, it does not become the news, it does not become the conversations that we talk about multiculturalism, I don't know. So that is something that we need to watch out for. And then in Germany, there's also this sense of corruption that they chose this one police station that had just killed this one boy with six shots and they chose this particular station to investigate a similar murder in a neighboring city and that said, they investigate the police in the other cities. So of course, both of them will come out completely innocent as already anyone can tell that. So what we need to find a solution for is how to disarm the police and tougher police force more operating like they used to because they didn't need, they didn't use to meet such heavy arms and to find more accountability as well. Well said, Judith. Stathis, who is yours? Right, thanks for your questions. I don't think there is the slightest chance for a revival of the, let's say, moderate actually converted to neoliberalism left in the style we saw in the past. I mean, these people completely belong to the past. Their plan actually is not to appear as a credible force, as a credible alternative for government. Their plan is to inflict as much damage as possible to Mélenchon, France Assoumise and particularly to divide as much as possible the Nupès, the alliance around Mélenchon and to attract to them the most moderate supposedly sectors of the Greens and of the rest of the socialist party actually, okay? To attack the weak links if you like of this alliance, that's their plan. No one can rule out the possibility of the pen winning possibly even the 2000 and the next presidential elections. It's not that easy for them. There is a race, as I said before, between the left alliance and the far right. The far right is more homogeneous, less divided than the left. It has been accumulating forces since decades. Let's not forget that in 2002, the second round of the presidential election was between Chirac, the candidate of the mainstream right and Jean-Marie Le Pen, right? The father of Marie Le Pen, already in 2002 and that already in the 1980s, the far right was scoring above 10 or 12% in elections already. So they have been accumulating forces and the reconstruction of the left is a much more difficult, torturous and complex affair than this push of the, this rise of the far right. Now your, sorry, can you remind me of your second, the second point was about, yeah. The protests being inspired. Exactly, okay, I remember. Look, the riots would have happened even without Black Lives Matter because there are enough domestic causes actually for this unrest and we don't need nevertheless, nevertheless Black Lives Matter and more generally African-American activism and radicalism have been inspiring and inspiring source and resource for anti-racist activism in France. This is absolutely true. The impact even of George Floyd was significant and it was combined with an equivalent French case which is the case of Adama Traoré, something like the French variant, if you like, of the George Floyd case and immediately after there was a kind of return of the wave of protests around the Adama Traoré combined with the George Floyd effect at an international scale. However, once again, I want to stress the specificity of France which is the fact that there is a convergence between social and political forces on the left of a type we haven't seen actually in any major European country recently which means that the stakes are very high and that of course a failure of those forces to offer a credible alternative will have a tremendous cost for French society and more broadly for Europe, obviously. Thank you. Thank you for that, Stethis, and thank you to all of you. We've gone over the hour but what a very important discussion that we're concluding here today. Thank you especially to Stethis as our special guest and to you out there for listening. If you would like to join DM25, if you like what you hear, we'd like to be part of the solution. You've got policy ideas. If you've got campaign ideas that could raise awareness of these issues or change anything or would just like to join to get closer to the kinds of things that we're doing this one address. It's very simple, dm25.org slash join. I would also direct you to a post that's on our page right now on dm25.org which is a listing of members' contributions that are based in France who have quite a unique take. People that are on the ground in France giving their views from our membership base. Thank you again to all of you and see you at the same time. No, not at the same time, an hour earlier because we started now and later today but see you at the same place two weeks from now. Thank you. Take care and stay safe.