It would seem that there is a Roussel moment! Even beyond the polls, the Communist Party candidate is undeniably visible in the public debate, while many of his competitors on the left are struggling to be heard. And indeed, this dynamic goes hand in hand with a fairly clear evolution of its rhetoric. He was on Tuesday February 15 the guest of France Inter and, first notable change, there is a word that he now seems to avoid like the plague: that of communist.
“I am the candidate of France for happy days, presented and supported by my political party but also supported by tens of thousands of people from diverse backgrounds, without political labels. I wish to present my program to France and embody a France popular, generous, supportive.”
>> To read also: the rhetorical portrait of Fabien Roussel
Fabien Roussel puts forward the name of his program, “France happy days”, he claims to be supported by thousands of people without political labels, and in the middle of all this, only lip service, he talks about “[sa] political formation”without naming it.
It is clearly a strategy. The problem with the word “communist” is that it has a pejorative connotation. In the collective imagination, it still refers, rightly or wrongly, to the Soviet regime and its crimes. In such a situation, there are two possible rhetorical strategies. The first is redefinition: it consists in fighting over the word, to progressively empty it of its negative connotations. The problem with such a strategy is that it takes time. Fabien Roussel therefore chose the other option: substitution, which consists in abandoning the incriminated word in open country, to prefer others, with more neutral connotations.
It is a usual vocabulary, for a communist candidate. VSe are totem words from the left. But what is striking about him is the place they take in his discourse: “I want happy reforms. I want to believe in happiness, because it’s possible. It’s social justice, tax justice, a sense of sharing and solidarity, it’s the right to beauty, to good and clean. This is the heart of my fight: to defend the France that works, the France of good pay, the France of dignity.”
It’s beautiful, and I think absolutely everyone will subscribe. This obviously poses a problem since, in the political field, the only discourses with which everyone can agree are those which say nothing to anyone!
Fabien Roussel is content to juggle with a string of mobilizing concepts, these hollow words, devoid of meaning, which have no other objective than to mobilize the enthusiasm of the listeners. We see here that the work of substitution carried out goes further than just the word “communist”: it is all the revolutionary and even anti-capitalist ideological markers that he expurgated from his speech.
By dint of substitutions, the discourse ends up lacking in singularity: it is now based on classic left-wing rhetoric. But precisely, Fabien Roussel has found one, with his good wine, his good meat and, even, his “good wand” : “When you give 200 or 300 euros more to a citizen, an employee or a retiree, he’s not going to put it in tax havens! He’s going to serve the country, he’s going to spend his money on a good baguette, in a good restaurant, in an exhibition… I’m tired of a left that makes you feel guilty when you take the car, the plane, when you eat meat.
The origin of this expression was a statement by Fabien Roussel during the program Dimanche en Politique, on France 3 last January, in which he claimed to want to make accessible “good wine, good meat, good cheese”. It has since become his signature rhetoric, he brings it up in every interview… and it’s pretty clever. This allows him to distinguish himself from part of the left, which pleads for a less meaty diet and thinks of our fellow citizens who do not drink alcohol, while speaking to popular voters who, precisely, do not find themselves in these speech.
There remains, of course, this central question: replacing the class struggle with the praise of good food, it may be rhetorically effective… but is it still communism?