«I am the voice dand voiceless. The housewife, the maid, the security officer, the caregiver, the domestic worker: I am all these invisible professions that from now on, at the National Assembly, will be visible ». Dohaving celebrated, danced and rapped her slogans, said Rachel Kéké, newly elected of Nupes, the alliance between France insoumise, Socialist Party, ecologists, Communist Party and New anti-capitalist party, since yesterday the first opposition force led by Mélenchon, the Chavez of France (someone already calls him that) that Macron had taken for a Civati and who, instead, managed not only to unite the left (yes: the left, the girl of the last century), but also to convince the French that, in these laws, it could have been brought back to the potere.
Kéké embodies, on a symbolic level, what the French center-left (as well as the Italian one) has never been able to involve: the electorate of the industrious marginal. Kéké, 47, who seen from here reminds a little of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and a little Teresa Bellanova, arrived in France, from the Ivory Coast, in her early twenties, and has always been a waitress ever since hotel, until, between 2019 and 2021, she led, with some of her colleagues, one of the longest and most uncompromising strikes in French history, the Mobilization des femmes de chambre de l’hôtel Ibis Batignolle (one of the largest hotels in ‘Europe, 704 rooms), to obtain better salary conditions, reasonable hours, a more equitable distribution of work, but also to denounce the harassment, abuse, mistreatment to which the employees were subjected. The majority of the strikers, especially after the first months of mobilization, were of African origin. Twenty-one months of protests later, last year, Kéké and her companions obtained a review of the terms of their contract. Libération wrote on that occasion that those women had shown how capitalism feeds itself by supplying itself from the service sector. From the beginning of the protest, those women had been joined by François Ruffin of France Insoumise and Danièle Obono, who was Mélenchon’s spokesperson and, in these legislatures, was elected in the first round. Obono had entereda in the National Assembly already in 2017 and, not long after, Valeurs Actuelle was depicted in a right-wing magazine, with a chain around her neck, accompanying an article that accused Africans of having wanted and / or caused slavery (something similar to Kanye West’s delusions, when he addressed the African American community saying that “slavery is a choice”). The newspaper was then put on trial, Obono had won, now he is back in Parliament.
The other important face of this Beyoncè’s video directed by Ken Loach that Mélenchon brought into French politics, is that of Sophia Chirikou, born and raised in France by Algerian parents, she too a winner in the first round and for some time active alongside the Chavez of France, of which she led the communication: it is to her that he owes much of his attractiveness; it was she who refreshed the socialist radical, giving him the characteristics not so much of the revolutionary, but of the good ferryman, of the reliable man who would have known how to make way for those who have been on the road for a long time.
I’m three perfect stories: they embody both the historical battles of European progressivism, those for work and social equality, and the most recent attention to the correct representation of minorities, to the integration pursued on every level, including formal and numerical, and which is not absorption but sum, community. Of course, when the scheme is perfect, and the victory goes to those who have been persecuted but only compensated by the recognition of that persecution, the suspicion that it is a mere cleaning operation, of simple appearance, is strong and, in this case , is made explicit by several parts. “Not a testimony, but a dummy pour se fair tres beaux”, wrote Marta Fana, “stubborn economist on the leftra »on Twitter.
Howevera, seen from above, or simply embracing the malice of analysts, the French left wins when it opens a gap, when it does not show itself inclusive, but it is, when it not only knocks on the doors of citizens, but opens its way to let them in. Rachel Kéké is «the working class that goes to parliament», wrote Igiaba Sciego. Because the working class still exists: if no one is able to represent it, it can very well do it from alone.
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