This article from July 1st, 2025, is excerpted from Patrick Le Hyaric’s weekly letter. Click here to read the full letter for this week, and here to subscribe to it.
What was christened the "Summit of Freedoms" at the Casino de Paris on June 24th must be called what it is: a Festival of Trumpian and fascistic rhetoric.It was an evening of fusion between billionaires, Stérin and Bolloré, and between a multitude of people who know how to conduct themselves properly at the table to better slide everything towards the worst.
One needs neither audacity nor audacity to name such an initiative a "summit of freedoms."The summit is the one where the proponents of big capital have arrived to push the tipping point. As for "freedoms"? Here's one more word, twisted, lacerated, perverted, branded with the red-hot iron of a fascist international whose mission is to save big capital. When they say "freedom," one must listen carefully. Listen for the freedom to undertake, freedom to dismantle public power and the State, everywhere, all the time, freedom to destroy law and justice. Freedom also to kick "foreigners" out.
And, to accelerate the tipping movement, behind the podium, we find individuals often presented in mainstream media as thinkers, trailblazers, vanguards who are merely the teachers of a pedagogy of accepting one's fate, of hating the other, and of destroying the welfare state: Olivier Babeau (Institut Sapiens), Arnaud Rérolle (Périclès, Stérin's "political intelligence" company, standing for "Patriots, rooted, resistant, identitarian, Christian, liberal, European, sovereignist"), Nicolas Perruchot, a weather vane who has been in all right-wing parties and is implicated in the Pandora Papers, Louis de Raguenel from Europe1, a journalist at JDNews, Stéphanie de Muru, a former journalist at Russia Today, Benoît Perrin, Contribuables associés, Charlotte d’Ornellas from Journal du dimanche and Cnews, and a host of characters working for "the alliance of the rights": Jordan Bardella, Éric Ciotti, Sarah Knafo, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan. Then there are institutes from the small French libertarian milieu, funded by the US-based libertarian Atlas network, alongside the Heritage Foundation—the very one that prepared "Project 2025," Trump's program.
A program currently being implemented: centralisation of executive power with a view to obtaining full powers, weakening of justice and oversight bodies, purging of the administration, questioning of science to destroy any ecological project that opposes oil magnates and rare resource tycoons, hunting down foreigners and building a prison surrounded by alligators while awaiting their expulsion, denigration of the press including CNN, drying up of international aid that will put millions more people in serious difficulty, militarisation of the capitalist West.
Thorough reflection is needed to name things for what they are. What did we hear during the evening?
Eructations against "paper tax"—administration, the duty of vigilance that hinders businesses, regulations, and everything that "locks down growth, growth, growth!" "Trust our entrepreneurs." A word on Gaza, one asks: not another penny for the Palestinians. "A measure for freedom?" Close ARCOM, reopen C8.
Attacks against the obese State, the expensive agencies. Bicycle paths too. And unions? – let them fund themselves, "if they're really useful for something."
Cries of hatred, "We have welcomed people into our home who hate us, who act against us, who want to conquer us." One hesitates between the internal enemy and the clash of civilisations.
Theses on the necessity of reconstituting an "imagined community"—"family" dominated the evening to annihilate all social conflicts, the call for the destruction of unions, human rights or environmental defence associations, to prohibit all forms of protest, especially "wokism," a functional substitute for cultural Marxism, to exclude ethno-racial communities from the landscape, those "who hate us" as they say, the organisation of "remigration," a new word replacing deportation. These, then, are the main characteristics of fascism.
We need to discard old images and old clothes. They are often disguised in new attire, such as former ministers like Luc Ferry and his honeyed voice to help swallow the venom, deputies, start-uppers and stockbrokers, permanent television guests, corporate or state executives.
Research has well documented how long-standing far-right parties no longer explicitly embrace political violence as a strategy.Islam has become the functional substitute for anti-Jewish hatred. As for militias, they are beginning to parade in the streets, but en masse only on the big night. The party of fascism will claim it can do without them as soon as the State acquires all the means, technological and legal, to monitor, repress, censor, dry up the opposition, associations, unions, and the progressive press, starting with L’Humanité.
I share the work of researcher Ugo Palheta, who explains, "it is therefore somewhat irresponsible to refuse to think of contemporary far-right in light of fascism (…) one thus foregoes learning how movements of this type, once created, manage to take root, gain power, and wield it."
That, under these conditions, the current leaders of what is called "the left"—that is, only the political parties—are losing themselves in conjectures, insults, tripping each other up, refusing to respond to the majority aspiration of those who wanted the new Popular Front, is more than worrying. We are no longer facing a threat. The threat is here, it has a public presence, it infiltrates every corner of society. To stop it means to fight together. To stop it means to jointly open other windows of reflection; other perspectives, other transformative viewpoints.
Illustration image: "Pierre-Edouard Stérin en 2018", photograph from November 13th, 2018, by OtiumCapital (CC BY-SA 4.0) – cropped image
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