Presidential 2027: the far right already sets the tempo, and everyone is dancing

According to Le Monde, the candidates for the 2027 presidential election seem more eager to bring down the other side than to respond to the gravity of the hour, marked by social mobilisations and the racist attack in Trappes. In his analysis, Matthieu Goar, one of the heads of the paper's Politics desk, sees the influence of a Trumpist strategy, imported from the far right. The dispatch we have is a summary: we do not know which candidates are targeted, which examples are cited, or what responses are given. What follows is our reading, not the content of the article.

Take the word chosen: "contamine" (contaminates). It is telling, and it is treacherous. Contamination presupposes a healthy body, ordinary politics, which an outside virus comes to infect. It is reassuring, but debatable. Gramsci would offer another image: that of a war of position, where one does not take the fortress in one blow, but wins the trenches one by one. Hegemony is the moment when a worldview becomes common sense, what goes without saying, what no longer needs justifying. When all sides debate on the ground set by a single one, that one has already won something, even before the first vote.

The method described, destroying the opponent rather than discussing reality, has one virtue: it is an excellent anaesthetic. While the candidates tear each other apart, the social mobilisations and the racist crime in Trappes become scenery, a backdrop cited before moving on to the essential, which is to say the brawl. The order of priorities is not natural. It is manufactured, and it serves someone.

This is where the press enters the story, us included. Political commentators are what Gramsci called traditional intellectuals: they think of themselves as above classes, neutral arbiters of the "serious" and the "reasonable". Yet framing is part of the battle. Speaking of a "polemic", a "little phrase", a "slip" or a "strategy of rupture" is deciding what counts as a political affair and what does not. As soon as a theme imposed by the far right occupies the morning shows, it becomes a legitimate subject, then an obligatory one. Denial itself keeps it going.

It should be noted, without excessive malice, that Le Monde's analysis at least has the merit of naming the mechanism. The question the summary leaves open is this: who, in this landscape, plays the role of organic intellectual of the social movements, that is, a voice that articulates what strikers and victims live rather than commenting on it from afar? The dominant ideas, as an old Marxist formula reminds us, are those of the people who also own the means of disseminating them. A campaign that talks about everything except what weighs on people's lives is not an accident of the road. It is a power relationship presenting itself as common sense.