Brice Teinturier is Deputy CEO of Ipsos. In an interview at Worldhe returns to the criticism that is rising in public opinion against the welfare state.
In your surveys, do you note a particular concern about the welfare state and the social system?
In France, there is a very strong attachment to social protection, but also a rise in criticism of a system that gives too much weight to certain parts of the population. We are currently around 50% of French people who consider that there is too much “assistantship” in our country, an equivalent share considering, on the other hand, that there is not enough solidarity towards the people who need.
The increased uncertainty about the purchasing power of the French – their first concern –, about inflation or the question of wages sharpens this tendency and a feeling of injustice between a France which would fight to work and a France which would receive unduly certain allowances. A feeling and a frustration that can turn into resentment. A fortiori in a country where the idea now prevails that the threat has changed, that unemployment has fallen considerably and that companies can no longer recruit.
Does this criticism have a specific political coloring?
Yes, the criticism is much more pronounced among supporters of the Les Républicains party and those of the National Rally. But it also affects more than 40% of supporters of the Socialist Party and environmentalists! Among the popular electorate and especially the lower middle class, it is also particularly widespread.
François Ruffin (LFI) and Fabien Roussel (PCF), who claim, in different ways, to be on the labor left, are therefore not out of step with their electorate?
Rather, it is another part of the left that is out of step with this electorate. One can wonder how to say things, but if the left abandons the field of work and the question of just solidarity, it misses something essential. The idea that work is an intrinsically right-wing value is a historical and philosophical misinterpretation and the risk for a left that would only value the decline in work is to cut itself off from whole sections of society. And that, Fabien Roussel and François Ruffin understood it well.
When Paul Lafargue publishes his right to laziness [1883], we must not forget that he is the son-in-law of Karl Marx and that he understood perfectly, beyond his criticism of work as alienation, Marx’s fascination for it. There is a tradition on the left that makes work an emancipating, cardinal value. What gives the proletariat its value is that it works while the bourgeoisie is parasitic. You find this in the dialectic of master and slave in [le philosophe allemand] Hegel.
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