A very noisy debate. Sometimes even inaudible. They expressed themselves through invective, incapable of letting themselves speak. It reflected the level of the campaign. With a Jordan Bardella who spoke loudly and who unfolded his themes. A Manuel Bompard more disciplined than what France Insoumise usually shows (it should also be noted that there were only Insoumis behind him, not a single socialist, environmentalist or communist). And caught between these two steamrollers, a slightly extinct Gabriel Attalalmost knocked out in the first part of the debate.
A few moments shed light on the debate. Particularly on pensions. It was a real moment of clarification. We understood, with a textbook case between a Frenchman who started working at 17 and a Frenchman who started working at 24that neither Jordan Bardella nor Manuel Bompard would fulfill the promise to leave at 60.
For the RN, the commitment to leave at 60 holds for those who started working very early, before the age of 20. But if you started working at 24, you will leave at 66. And for Manuel Bompard, you will have the freedom to leave at 60, but if you want to leave with a full pension, you will have to go until 64. The political display collapsed last night. As such, it was very informative.
Bompard, Attal, Bardella… Who is the winner?
That’s complicated, because everyone comes with their own arguments and convictions, which we’ve heard several times. There were times when everyone was better. Manuel Bompard, for example, on immigration avoided falling too far into caricature. Recalling that in France, 1 in 10 workers is an immigrant. And emphasizing that in Italy, Giorgia Meloni had to resolve upon coming to power to regularize 450,000 migrants.
Jordan Bardella was all schuss about school and very argumentative towards the Prime Minister whom he nicknamed “Mr. Prime Minister with 1,000 billion debts”. Gabriel Attal, who returned to the saddle in the second part of the debate, rather succeeded in showing that none of the other two debaters would perform a miracle. Without doubt, each camp will have found its account. And I’m not sure that this reverses the predictions.
