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We must accept the reality that presents itself to us. The tensions running through the economic and political model that had ensured the prosperity and stability of France and Europe for three-quarters of a century are nearing a breaking point.
The preservation of justice, security, and sustainability is putting on the state, as an economic and strategic actor, a pressure so intense that it tears apart the reference framework inherited from the past. Technological innovation no longer automatically signals high growth, population renewal is no longer guaranteed, security is no longer assured by benevolent partners, ecological stability is no longer a free gift of nature. Everything that once formed the pre-political conditions of democratic legitimacy, and which we took for granted, now appears to us as a cost.
This cost the state must assume. Security, livable conditions, and elementary democratic infrastructures, education in particular, are public goods that the market, as we know, cannot provide. Yet the prospect of higher public spending to anticipate and avert these existential threats of the twenty-first century makes it necessary to rethink the adaptation of the state’s economic function to present constraints. Tax justice returns to the agenda, and with it a broader renegotiation of the social contract, between social classes, across generations, between industrial sectors. Faced with this problem that is continually deferred, the left bears a singular responsibility, since it must both inherit the social movement that demanded the democratic embedding of capitalism and initiate this adaptation to the crises of the twenty-first century.
The eruptive movements shaking society and the streets in this autumn 2026, with the prospect of high-stakes presidential elections in the background, are symptoms of a deeper legitimacy crisis that is smoldering. And this is all the more serious because it has not yet truly begun to be translated into political action. The two five-year terms of Emmanuel Macron, which were supposed to be France’s adaptation to the economic, technological, and geopolitical realities of the twenty-first century, end in a clear failure. In the President’s own words, in his victory speech of May 7, 2017, the retreat of the far right was to be the ultimate test of success for this adaptation; yet this adaptation has only progressed.
All that used to form the pre-political conditions of democratic legitimacy, and which we thought would go without saying, now appears to us as a cost.
Pierre Charbonnier, Stefan Eich
Faced with this failure, no credible and majority-supported response seems to be emerging at present. As during the summer heatwaves, most of us live and perceive the end of something without drawing a transformative impulse from it; 90% of French people have a negative view of the future, and it is in this political void that violence finds fertile ground. Society, unable to impose its own endogenous order through its economic and moral powers, seeks a semblance of protection in a police order, delivering at best a simulacrum of calm and concord, when it does not undermine it directly.
Five structural mutations
To grasp the dead ends, one must first realize the depth of the structural mutations facing the economic and political system in France and Europe, i.e., the gap between the conditions under which this system was established and the present conditions.
The entire set of pillars supporting postwar democratic stability is affected, beginning, of course, with the centrality of industry in the system of production and social reproduction. The factory, a place of exploitation and alienation, was at the same time the heart of Fordist growth, itself articulated with the system of redistribution and social integration. The factory was the site where the present sacrificed itself in part to the future and the individual to the group, the quintessential place where the relationship to time and social belonging was forged. The economic and moral phenomenon that is deindustrialization is neither a blessing nor a catastrophe. It has undeniable environmental advantages; it allows focusing on jobs of social reproduction and not only production. But deindustrialization is also accompanied by a weakening of the power of unions, poorly represented in service jobs often informal, and thus a weakening of social counter-power. The emerging model of green reindustrialization is widely seen as a remedy to this long-standing trend in European and French economic history; it is essential to combine employment, decarbonization, and the fight against the oligarchic logic of emerging sectors (digital and services in particular). But it does not seem to permit a return to a classic industrial society, so its virtues must be linked to other programs to redirect our growth model.
The formation of economic surplus and its social distribution are also tied to two other pillars today weakened in the national order, and directly challenged by the current movements: demographic balance and technological innovation. Between 1950 and 2025, France’s birth rate has been halved, deaths now exceed births, and the ratio of workers to retirees, once around four in the 1950s and 1960s, is now below two. At the same time, the shift from techno-scientific ideal to public investment strategy has fallen dramatically, and the technological frontier moves away. The nuclear program and the TGV, emblematic of planning and the national and European scientific radiance, are today relics of a technocratic utopia that resurges elsewhere, notably in the race for AI and the Chinese electro-technical revolution. The latter, ironically, is both the promise of a decarbonized economy and blamed for aggravating European deindustrialization, signaling a broader misalignment of our economic and historical benchmarks. In terms of demography as in innovation, the slowdown is in some respects welcome, because we must ease the burden on land and space, break away from the myth of infinite expansion. But we must also prepare for landing and adjust our ideals as well as our practices.
Most of us live and perceive the end of something without deriving a transformative impulse.
Pierre Charbonnier, Stefan Eich
The vigor of industry, demography, and research and development were themselves linked to another eroded pillar of the national balance, namely France and Europe’s belonging to the Atlantic security bloc. This affiliation is being questioned on the Ukrainian battlefield, in the Strait of Hormuz, in Greenland, and by the neo-imperial tilt of the White House that demands we remain in the orbit of their military and energy regime. Ordered to ensure our protection alone, to face new rivals, and to push European integration to its limit, we know we must again estimate the economic cost of peace, a calculation that had long left our mental universe.
Finally, the last fragilized pillar that compels revising our relationship to time and the exercise of political authority is of course the climate. The ultimate anchor of the modernization push had been the pact between emancipation and underestimating the ecological impacts of development. The last half-century can be described in this respect as a permanent negotiation with reality: ecological risk was denied, relativized, it was recast as a non-ideological public policy problem, as a mere question of technological reorientation; it was repeatedly placed on the shoulders of developing countries, of Asia, of the 1%, but none of these re-codings, diversions, and evasions truly change the game. The climate challenge is the intensified form of the mutations described above, because it lies at the intersection of the socio-economic problem of the growth and employment model, demography and intergenerational relations, scientific and technological choices, and major geopolitical divergences.
It is the ultimate test of political realism in relation to the long term. The filter through which promises once made must pass to become valid today and tomorrow.
Youth, at the heart of the volcano
Time speeds up for events, without going anywhere. High school and university protests, now European in scale, attest to a generational crisis that had long been smoldering and fits into the broader framework described above. The structural underfunding of education, training, housing, and the horizon of job destruction by artificial intelligence have produced a generation for whom the creed of integration through work and participation in a common political project loses traction. The republican promise, as Bally Bagayoko, mayor of Saint-Denis, reminded us, is in many neighborhoods but a memory.
Yet this movement has not taken the form of an intergenerational power struggle. The weight of pensions in public expenditure, income and protection inequalities between young people and retirees, the question of heritage and assets, the electoral weight of seniors and its consequences for recent economic compromises have not been linked to these discontents, neither by the movement itself nor by its political spokespeople. The contrast between a generation that seems untouchable and another abandoned to anomie is striking. Even if there is no need to view a zero-sum game between pension spending and youth spending, it is clear that the demands of some find easier access to the State than those of others.
This situation is only part of a broader misalignment between the immediate perception of social injustices and their political construction, both in terms of ideology and the electoral agenda, of political demand or supply. For what characterizes the present moment, and which is evidenced by the generalized discouragement we witness as well as the success of the far right, is the manifest impossibility of placing oneself within the degraded reality of general socio-economic conditions while forging a political discourse of democratic and social reconstruction.
The pace of events is accelerating, without going anywhere.
Pierre Charbonnier, Stefan Eich
The current French political drama is organized around two main actors: youth and the budget. On one hand, the socio-economic imbalance between generations, between the past and the future, what public debate designates as a misalignment of public finances. At the crossroads lies the debt question, the central field of the future debate. It is the subject of an interpretive conflict between those who see it as the manifestation of a wasteful state that deserves only the axe, and others, with whom we align, who prefer to see it as a strategic investment tool whose orientation, content, and distributive effect must be examined. In this second interpretation, the problem is not the level of indebtedness per se but the use made of debt, and its role in constructing the long political time. And in the new physical environment imposed by the climate crisis, the value of this investment will be measured not only in terms of growth rate, but above all in avoided damages, the preservation of habitability, and the living conditions passed on to future generations.
The economist Mark Blyth formulated the problem strikingly: “Different constituencies care about different parts of the social contract.” The penetration of society by the fiscal and regulatory state, which gives France the appearance of the Hegelian absolute state, even after neoliberal reforms, places society in a relation to sovereignty that can be read as a healthy balance of protection and regulation, or as a relationship of dependence. And the difference between these two interpretations, which is usually aligned with the socialist tradition on one side and the liberal on the other, takes on a special significance in the current context. Indeed, much of the competition between social groups is not so much about the level of state intervention in the economy as about the particular interests represented and satisfied by that intervention.
The reinvention of the French far right, and part of its electoral success, lies in its radical intervention in this debate. “Welfare chauvinism” is an operation that promises a total revision of the interests served by public power on the basis of ethno-cultural affiliation and blind obedience to financial and policing elites, two elements that are on the verge of gathering, if not an absolute majority, at least a relative majority of voters. The RN aligns with France’s dominant political culture by defining a group that can legitimately demand security and protection, and by adopting, in a so-called “decomplexified” manner, the exposure of the entire immigrant population to direct existential risk. The RN ultimately seems to have acknowledged the ideological and political centrality of the State, and prepares to wield all its power (which socialism had paradoxically granted to it) in a cultural and budgetary revolution, thereby obscuring the boundary between protection and threat according to a logic long described by Karl Polanyi.
The contrast with the youth movement’s demands is complete. While the far right defends the majority stance to the point of being ready to govern society against a portion of itself, the young form a minority that carries genuinely republican demands. Not only does this movement appear as a representation of multicultural France and as an opposition to building political legitimacy on force (in other words, a deeply republican movement), but it also signals the emergence of specific demands from a politically underrepresented group. It is underrepresented because of the electoral mechanism—minors do not vote—and because of demographic structure. Youth is underrepresented, and in some respects it is not even a clearly defined social group because it does not participate in the job market, it does not invest or save, it has no party representation, and therefore cannot form an interest group capable of elevating its own claims within the State except by translating them into the broader language of justice and equity. The absence of education and training programs thus goes unnoticed. This lack of investment goes under the radar, it may even be celebrated as proof of budgetary sobriety, but when its consequences appear, it is already too late.
That is why youth representation poses a singular problem in the context of conflict between groups tied to different parts of the social contract. When the State transcends its function of selecting interests to represent to steer the society’s development, the stakes are softened. But when political clientelism takes precedence, which is in itself a manifestation of democratic distrust, youth is mechanically the loser.
The art of not seeing problems
The question of youth, understood in the broad sense as the expression of a deep crisis of social reproduction and the sources of political legitimacy, is directly linked to the five structural mutations described above. Exposure to the risk of debt crisis, geopolitical crisis, communication and cognitive crisis (AI), and climate crisis is indeed unequally distributed by age. This is an obvious fact that currently escapes political debate and collective consciousness, because these crises are coded as future time horizons, and a significant portion of the population still considers itself to be winning from the status quo.
Nevertheless, the political forces as they are currently structured do not fully manage to compensate for this deficit of representation and to organize their agendas and political promises around this problem. The most striking testimony to this incapacity is the tendency within the French left and, in particular, within La France insoumise, today the main electoral rival of the far right, to maintain an ambiguous link with the five major upheavals of the contemporary world.
This lack of investment goes under the radar, it can even be celebrated as proof of budgetary sobriety.
Pierre Charbonnier, Stefan Eich
The current political heritage of socialism, anti-racism, and the solidaristic tradition seems unable to preserve the existence of these fundamental values except at the price of a more or less explicit sidestepping of these crises, or in other words, of reality. The most obvious case concerns the geopolitical issue, since building a hegemonic position on the left seems to go hand in hand with denying the risk posed by Russia, and thus the price of security in the current strategic environment. Legitimate criticism of imperialism does not necessarily lead to submission to another imperialism, so one must conclude that the challenge is rather to circumvent the geopolitical constraint that operates on the economy and political life.
Regarding the demographic challenge, the picture is less clear, but the promise of returning retirement age to sixty can be read as a rebuff to the intergenerational arbitration problem: all demands could be satisfied without conflict. This question is itself linked to the issue of innovation, industry, and the growth regime, since the political discourse of La France insoumise is not structured by explicit choices about future technologies, energies (as evidenced by its opposition to nuclear), or relations with China. The left makes a legitimate critique of public subsidies to businesses and of the research tax credit, without highlighting those that would be useful to foster low-carbon productive forces, as China has done.
The temptation of debt cancellation finally fits within a similar framework, since unlocking the future is theorized as liberation from financial and monetary constraints through an accounting trick whose risks are not clearly assessed. The paradox here is that the debt-cancellation project assumes that the State must no longer use the credit instrument to finance itself, even as transition, adaptation, youth, housing needs make massive debt more plausible. To proclaim, in populist style, that sovereignty is expressed by rejecting financial obligation risks making justifying the inevitable use of this instrument more difficult later. What is at stake is not the idea of easing the debt burden: postwar history shows that a regime of financial repression helped significantly reduce debts inherited from the conflict. But that requires political control of credit, not merely debt cancellation.
In short, a total welfare state, broadened with new functions, is promised without clarifying the problem of its productive bases, the international alliances that make it possible, and its financing.
The structurally core promise to meet the demands of youth and the climate crisis, if located at the right normative level, is therefore conditioned by a series of disengagements, political neutralizations, which partially artificially facilitate a return to justice. One of the most striking consequences of this structuring of the left’s promise is the shift of central growth regime, productivity, innovation, integration into the international architecture, and even youth investment, to the center. Yet, once captured by the center, these themes change meaning. Investment in youth thus becomes, for some economists, an argument to revise the pension system. The former governor of the Bank of France thus linked the gerontocratic tendency of the French political system to the weight of social protection expenditure, suggesting that the latter should be reduced in the name of youth interests. Here we see again the debt interpretation we argued against above. The future of youth is invoked to justify austerity rather than investment, pitting generations against each other where their solidarity should be reorganized.
The industrialist and modernizing heritage of the socialist left is thus, to a large extent, split into two: on one side a preserved ideological structure in its humanitarian, solidaristic, egalitarian, and anti-racist identity, and on the other a material and institutional structure blown by the winds of economic, demographic, and geopolitical events.
The risk associated with this situation is twofold. On one side, as seen, the far right may reappropriate the theme of the protective state by abandoning the vital values that drove it in the past; on the other, political caution and realism are pushed toward a liberal centrism, which seems to have demonstrated its inability to govern crises.
The Left’s Dilemma
We are ultimately led to a choice that is both ideological and strategic. Either we must consent to a forcing of geopolitical and economic reality to preserve the ideological structure of equality and justice. The Russian threat is denied, intergenerational inequalities are silenced, the financing question is dodged, and on these terms the path to progress tinted with nostalgia opens. Or, considering the stark constraints of history, with their tragic and painful aspects (war, climate, the return of empires, AI, demographic transition), we embark on a more ambitious political reinvention project that would provide a new material, institutional, and geopolitical foundation for justice and equality. The risk of the first strategy is immense, because if this bet—silencing reality to save progress—fails, the noble values it promotes may well crumble along with the program intended to support them.
This dilemma resonates strikingly, given the left’s central emphasis on rupture. The great historical turns we are living through undoubtedly call for ruptures, but in the French political framework this language coexists with the seemingly opposite language of restoration, of returning to the initial situation. That of a state that protects its population from the empowerment of market reasoning, but which seems able to do so only by partly silencing the current technical, geopolitical, and anthropological environment, or by transcending its tragic character through operations that minimize it.
One resolution to this dilemma is to reject the seductive promise of leaving the past behind to start from scratch. Such a promise has become an inaccessible luxury. This need not lead to resignation or cynicism. It should instead lead to a more experimentation-driven approach to change: a policy that leverages uncertainty, views its own tools as provisional, and at the same time does not fear to act boldly. Experimentation, in this sense, requires institutions capable of learning from failure while opening up prospects, without pretending to know in advance what form it will take.
Historically, nostalgia for rupture paradoxically cultivates a dream of continuity and restoration. Continuity with a time when the State could simply accompany, through taxation, the law, and public policy, the evolution of industrial and financial capitalism, in order to extract its modernization-power and to limit its human dangers. This political form is characterized by a relatively stable alignment between governance of modernization and the building of majority coalitions, sources of democratic legitimacy and wealth. The present confluence of demographic, budgetary, geopolitical, and climate crises reasserts a set of fundamental values that cannot easily be reduced to operations of this kind, nor recoded within the postwar embedded capitalism political economy. The price of demographic balance, security, and livability can indeed be estimated, and a classical economic calculation can be performed. But this cost is such, and its non-economic dimensions are so massive, that the historical alignment between the growth regime, democratic stability, and the compromise among different social and electoral segments awaiting services is compromised.
The youth’s interests do not necessarily coincide with those of pensioners, support for innovation does not necessarily yield massive employment, new commercial partnerships to establish are not symmetric (especially with China), and investments made for climate adaptation and security do not necessarily promise visible returns in national accounts. Sovereign power seems to have little choice but to confront the political dimension of its choices, to the extent that these choices are not necessarily profitable, whether electorally or financially.
The nostalgia for rupture paradoxically cultivates a dream of continuity and restoration.
Pierre Charbonnier, Stefan Eich
We thus enter a period marked by the problem of the economic cost of non-market values. John Maynard Keynes anticipated this as early as 1933 when he denounced the “self-destructive financial calculus” that governed, in his view, all areas of life: “We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the unappropriated splendors of nature have no economic value. We are capable of extinguishing the sun and the stars because they do not yield dividends.” The situation has since reversed: what financial calculation once ignored now presents itself to us as a cost.
All that we have refused to see, what we still refuse to see, sometimes in the name of justice and equality, is coming back to confront us. And the protests of the youth are probably one of the clearest signs of that.
The temptation is strong to deny this crisis of the horizon of democracy. To promise a new golden age at the risk of denying the problem of rational allocation of limited resources under strong geopolitical and demographic constraints. But this would probably be yet another way of postponing the urgency of the present and finding fictitious escape routes.