Tag: glucksmann

The French presidential candidate Raphaël GLUCKSMANN has published proposals for how he would run the country – in book form, of course, this being France.

A striking proposal highlighted by Le Monde today is a Citizen Convention on Immigration. This would be a design challenge (to say the least) but, given how toxic and deadlocked the immigration issue is in France and elsewhere in Europe, it might be a way to change the conversation.

It’s the sort of issue for which citizen assemblies/conventions are well-suited – big picture, politically deadlocked, with a strategic or moral question at their heart.

It’s not simple, though. Given how immigration is used as *the* core issue by anti-system parties, it would be a challenge to disentangle the actual question from side-questions about rural depopulation, economic changes, demographic shifts, and people’s sense of the past.

But European mainstream politicians seem to have no solution to the immigration issue other than “copy the far right” and “hope it goes away” – this at least might move the conversation forward.