We need to talk!

It’s a Sunday in February in the south of the capital. Between the fruit and vegetable stalls, the smell of roast chicken and the bargains up for grabs at the fishmonger weighing anchor, leaflets of the municipal elections circulate. I slip them into my canvas bag with applied neutrality. Conversations start quickly: cleanliness, safety, transport, nurseries… Tied to their stroller or walker, dressed in jogging pants or an old-fashioned overcoat, everyone has their own diagnosis.

Then the scene occurs: an exasperated forty-year-old accuses an elegant sixty-year-old of “doing harm to the country and the Republic”. Defending herself from any extreme conviction, the latter tells her interlocutor to “lower her voice” if he wants to continue the discussion. The man tries but his emotion takes over. And that’s the word too many. “We can’t argue with you, that’s enough!” » retorts the lady, turning on her heel. Outrage, anger, a few insults: close the ban.

The stakes seem tiny. Two strangers in a market, no candidate, no camera. A few onlookers stopped to listen from a distance to a familiar scene, already played out a thousand times with family, friends or colleagues around a table. Deep down, everyone feels that they could one day find themselves in one or the other’s shoes. Their paths would probably never have crossed, although they live in the same neighborhood. Municipal elections have this particularity: they require you to meet the person you have not chosen. On the sidewalk, politics does not primarily pit parties and ideas against each other, but neighbors. And we discover, with a pile of leaflets under our arms, how difficult it becomes to carry on a conversation with someone who thinks differently.

The recent political violence in Lyon gives an extreme image. But the divide often begins more discreetly. In these dialogues which end too quickly, when disagreement turns into suspicion.

Local democracy does not solve everything. After the elections, we will have to continue to pass each other in the street, live in the same buildings, wait at the same bus stop. Perhaps our Republic still holds a little to this: despite weariness and awkwardness, men and women continue to talk to each other.