Valérie Pécresse seized the CSA to protest against the long interview with Emmanuel Macron broadcast tomorrow evening on TF1. She considers that this is a breach of the equality of speaking time. However, this whole story is less a matter of political debate than of historical reconstruction. Let’s explain: it sounds strange, but hang in there: at some point, this sentence will make sense. Valérie Pécresse therefore declared Monday, December 13 “You cannot have a candidate president who has television channels on demand and for hours campaigning.”
Tuesday morning, Gabriel Attal, the government spokesman, replied on franceinfo: “I hope that the President of the Republic is a candidate as late as possible because we need a president who acts. Today, we are in a period of crisis / And in any case the subject is the French / We are totally up to our task. And the presidential election, the time will come. “ Let’s see what Valérie Pécresse said in January 2012 on France Inter: “Today, we are in a period of crisis and for the moment, the subject is the French. The subject is the French, unemployment, growth, Europe. / Totally our task / And the presidential election, the time will come. “
At the time, Valérie Pécresse was herself the spokesperson for the government. President Sarkozy had just given a major television interview, just a few months before standing for re-election. She was therefore in a situation of having to respond to the criticisms that she herself addresses today and this is what Gabriel Attal does not hesitate to remind her. So, in technical terms, this is called an ad hominem objection: it comes down to attacking the coherence of the opponent’s line (not to be confused with the ad personam objection, which consists of attacking the opponent himself) . And a well-placed ad hominem… it hurts.
“At the time, emphasizes Gabriel Attal, she defended the fact, and I also agree with her defense, that the President of the Republic can speak in a context of crisis. She has feverishness as a motor and hypocrisy as a fuel, because the reality is that she is now saying the opposite of what she was saying then. “ There you have it: here you have the two immediate consequences of the ad hominem objection. The first is that it degrades the credibility of the person who is subjected to it. The second is that it provides whoever uses it with an unassailable argument. This is what allows Gabriel Attal to say: “As Valérie Pécresse says, the incumbent President is entitled to speak out in times of crisis.”
This is still a somewhat agreed exercise. Moreover, there is a passage that he was careful not to quote. Valérie Pécresse: “It’s also frustrating for us, you know! Me, I would like us to enter the presidential campaign. I would like to be able to say what I think of François Hollande’s project.”
“It’s more of a disadvantage than an advantage for us not to be in the countryside today. Because the reality is that we have less opportunity to respond to criticism.”
How strange: here are two spokespersons saying the same thing ten years apart! They are both frustrated at not being able to freely respond to their opponents … Note also that they say this in interviews where, precisely, they respond to their opponents, but let’s move on. In short: indeed, all this is desperately agreed. We are witnessing, from election to election, the same sequences written in advance of attacks and defenses.
So much so that the political debate ends up being akin to these reenactments of chivalrous jousting, where stuntmen engage in a demonstration of choreographed fencing while uttering loud angry cries, knowing that they are in no danger because their swords are blunt. And while we are entertained by these mock Herculean confrontations, endlessly replayed, there is one thing that unfortunately we lose sight of: the real debate of ideas.