There are two phrases that perfectly condense the principle of political responsibility. The first is by Luigi Einaudi: ‘Those who seek economic remedies to economic problems are on a false path; which can only lead to the precipice. The economic problem is the aspect and consequence of a wider spiritual and moral problem‘. The second is by George Orwell: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two and two make four. If it is guaranteed, everything else follows from it‘.

Which means: there can be no ethics of freedom without an ethics of truth, and this truth does not have the capital ‘v’ of the philosophies of history, which have plunged the world into the hell of totalitarianism under the illusion of looking at human contingency from the side of the eternal, but the tiny one of the facts with which the experience of life in both the individual and social dimensions, must measure itself against and which it can try to modify in a more favourable sense, but it cannot delude itself into thinking that it can dissolve or repudiate with rhetorical abracadabra, postponing sine die the moment of redde rationem and thus paving with victims the road that should lead to the sun of the future.

The meaning of Einaudi and Orwell’s words is that where there is no truth, there can be no freedom, and where lies reign, a more or less disguised regime of oppression and violence can only rule.
The sentence that François Bayrou pronounced at the National Assembly, bidding farewell as prime minister – ‘You can overthrow the government, but not erase reality ‘ – should be read exactly according to this logic.
As has been the case in Italy for years, in France bipolarity is no longer articulated through the confrontation between alternative political proposals, i.e. between different ways of governing and changing reality, but through different forms of denial of reality, i.e. political lies. Bipolarism ceases to be an alternative between political alignments, to become a tension and ultimately a clash between politics and reality.

From alternation to denial of reality

The only difference between Italy and France is that in the French political spectrum there resists, albeit battered and in the minority, a coalition of numerically significant forces representing at least one Frenchman in five, which does not intend to abdicate the principle of political responsibility. In Italy, this political-parliamentary coalition is reduced to the few parties outside the poles of the populist left and the sovereignist right (Action, Liberal Democratic Party and… enough).
In any case, the similarities between Italy and France are widely prevalent, starting with theimpossibility of adapting democratic processes to the actual needs of government. In both countries, political hyperpolarisation has produced a sort of coincidence of opposites. France, like Italy, is a bipopulist country in which the struggle between equal and opposite sides arouses identity outbursts that are as rabid as they are impotent, which the impresarios of chaos ignite and satisfy with unattainable mirages and ideals of imaginary justice, destined to increase anguish and frustration, in an endless vicious circle.

The bipopulist imposture and the ‘dictatorship’ of reality

French bipopulism in Italian sauce is based on a paradoxical imposture. It protests against the ‘dictatorship’ of reality and invokes the need not to surrender to the present state of affairs, but by refusing to accept reality as such, it also effectively renounces changing it.
It is by no means the case that any reality – e.g. the situation of the French public accounts – implies intervention without alternatives; on the contrary, it lends itself to very different interventions, which may be considered preferable or inconvenient on the basis of a reasonable principle of coherence between ends and means. However, the repudiation of reality – e.g. behaving as if an adjustment of the public accounts is not necessary or is possible with a three-card game and no real money – leaves no room except for a political alienation that, although marked by different ideological colours, is fundamentally the same from one end of the populist political spectrum to the other.

This dynamic, in varying proportions and intensity, unfortunately now characterises the functioning of all democracies and represents their true existential risk.