Presidential: “It is unacceptable to put in the same bag the democratic and dictatorial regimes”

“We have what we call democracy, and we don’t take advantage of it.” The writer and Syrian political refugee, Omar Youssef Souleiman voted for the first time in France during the first round of the presidential election last Sunday. He was the guest of the morning of Europe 1 on Monday. He does not “understand the reasons” for the abstention, just like the disaffection of the French for politics. “We might not be happy with the result, we could demonstrate against the fact of living once again this situation between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron”, he explains. “But demonstrating by saying ‘Neither Macron nor Le Pen’, that I don’t understand”, assures the author.

“How could we be against the result” under the pretext of “defending democracy”, he wonders at the microphone of Sonia Mabrouk. “We can’t be ‘neither Macron nor Le Pen’, you really have to choose”, judges Omar Youssef Souleiman. “We must take advantage of this democracy”, asks the writer again, meaning that this can go through associations, or even through peaceful demonstrations since “we still have this possibility”. “Voting or having freedom of expression is also an opportunity, a privilege, which we do not have elsewhere, in Arab countries, for example”, he recalls.

France, a dictatorship?

In this regard, Omar Youssef Souleiman explains that he “does not agree at all with those who say that France is a country of dictatorship”. A phrase “heard in recent years” in the mouths of some demonstrators, he recalls. When the author told them he came from Syria, they replied: “We also live in a dictatorship, but a masked dictatorship: Emmanuel Macron is like Bashar el-Assad.” Words that deeply shocked the Syrian political refugee: “It’s unacceptable to put democratic and dictatorial regimes in the same bag.”

By making this comparison, “it gives a kind of legitimacy to Bashar el-Assad, who killed more than 500,000 of his people”, laments the writer.