Speech by Jean Luc Mélenchon in Toulouse, two weeks before the first round of elections April 5, 2012

Hi everybody ! Hi to you all!
Hi to all those and all those who rushed to the call that was launched them!
¡Saludos a vosotros también de España, con respeto are gloriosa la bandera de la Republica!
[Hi to you too, who come from Spain, and my respect to the glorious flag of the Spanish Republic!]

There she is, the force that is assembled. It stretches, she says, and I call you to expand again, endlessly, until the appointment of the first stage of our civic insurrection, fixed on election night. I ask you to build more coherent force before this great politically educated, disciplined by free consent of joining a program, not a person. For what we propose in the country, the challenges that are ahead against all those who will come together in opposition to the movement that the French people will undertake, will require that each, each knows what is its place, his battle station The work it takes to accomplish it, holding hands, by the mind, the heart, the neighbor, the neighbor, knows how to make way together, do what has to be.

My friends, we are in the month of Germinal. The buds, full of life, bursting in bloom already, and this is the promise of fruit.

Similarly, our words, out of the cold winter of politics, returned; and flying from mouth to heart, offer everyone, each new reasons for living and hoping. Our word is "sharing"! Sharing! Sharing! Distribution of wealth, ecological planning, citizenship, fraternity, love, interest in the fallen, to raise, for the one who has nothing to be helped.

The words will, and are like keys that open the cages in which were locked human reasons for living, which merge with no abject accounts which we inflicted every day to see if we feed or if the 'we will accommodate, if we illuminate or if it will be this or that expenditure not yet round.

That, Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy, I promise you, at a time when you said that you do not share "any of my commitments nor any of my outbursts." True, we are not the same side, we are not the same France. When you say: "With Mélenchon who lobbied stronger each day is two days to put down five years of effort" ... These are not five years of effort, they are five years of suffering , five years of tearing, five years back, five years rudeness, vulgarity, lowering of the country!

To you who every day, powerful, come hold us accountable, and which now made in computing the big ladle that would cost our program, when he wants to give everyone a way to live her life, dignified and quiet, I will request me accountable for the evil that you spread. I ask you accountable for the cost of ignorance is that you spread in abundance by eliminating teaching positions, the cost of lost health because we will have to heal, the cost of 564 people every year, die at work, 43000 disabled by accident, the little forgotten childhood, delayed departures to retirement, the ransacking of juvenile justice!

I ask you accountable for this absurd society. I ask you account for the fact that life expectancy is declining in developed nations, whereas before it every year progressed. I ask you to have the accounts in question that the great and glorious Revolution of 1789 had recalled as the first of all rights: the right to exist. Oh no, it's not live only to spend its time to survive!

We can not live happily in an ocean of misery, one can not live happily with eight million poor people, eight million poorly housed in the fifth power of the world! We can not live with the fear of tomorrow, as is the case of the ten million precarious.

I make a confession: our program, indeed, is not realistic for your accounting standards, but it is realistic from ours, and ours are called the right to live!

See, all you who wonder what this phenomenon: the phenomenon that fills this place, the nearby streets and surrounding places, it is called civic revolution that has begun! We, we called this mobilization as we did before in the Bastille, and as we will do it in a few days in Marseille.

It's the same work, and we check, here, there, that you answer our call. For we know that tomorrow you will have already made the dress rehearsal, and that if I am elected, I will call you when you get there! And anyone who is elected in the end, nothing will get in bed the river that is now overflowing!

We call the second gathering to rebuild our Republic. And rebuild our republic, you know, in a nation like ours policy that defines neither a religion nor a skin color or even language - the Republic founded the Nation, and not vice versa - refound the Republic, c is refound the people themselves and the common homeland, it is disfigured by inequality and looting of any kind.

We want to be elected a constituent assembly, whose primary role will be to redefine the common rule of life. We can not accept that, to meet the enormous challenges of capitalist catastrophe that struck the world and productivist disaster that threatens the human ecosystem, powerful, unable to think of another world and another organization , abandon the movement itself and knows no standard other than their own interests. We can no longer accept that the hierarchy of norms be overlooked - in our country, France, or Europe - by free enterprise, free and undistorted competition and the competition of each against all. We want at the top of the hierarchy of norms in our society there is solidarity and cooperation. We can not accept that from now on free enterprise is treated as a fundamental right equal to the right to property, and that everything is therefore reported this freedom.

We believe, instead, that the time has come to establish citizenship anywhere, not only in the city but in the business, and therefore recognized as a constitutional right the right of first refusal, which would see the workers, when they ask for it, establish workers' cooperatives who become owners of the production tool.

We want the public interest is stronger than the special interests and when the situation requires it, because a fundamental economic interests of the nation would come to assert or prove, there is for the government that is to say for the country itself, a requisition law that allows that scandals such as Molex or Celanese are never possible in our country! Employees and establish a veto over matters concerning the strategic future of their company or the environmental impact of its products.

Here, we take the wire that the great Jaures woven for us in this region. "Political democracy, he has taught us, is expressed as a central idea, or better yet, in one idea: the political sovereignty of the people." The sovereignty of the people, that is to say, obey only laws that we each personally contributed by the ballot, not obey any hand other than the one that has determined what is the common standard because we all so decides. That is what sovereignty and, therefore, sovereignty, it is the other name of freedom. You not free when you are not're sovereign, because it means that decisions are applied you have been decided elsewhere and without you!

So at this time, remembering what was the forfeiture of the President of the Républiquelorsque, after the people voted no to the European Constitution in 2005 by 55% of the votes, he nevertheless negotiated another treaty that was the copy and has passed at the Congress of Versailles, with the complicity of those who abstained or voted for ... I ask him to account at this time: where is our freedom? And what is even, the meaning of this election it when you hide the French that, regardless of their vote, if they vote for a party of the Lisbon Treaty, as they prepare to vote next Merkel-Sarkozy Treaty - either by voting or abstaining as they have done for the European Stability Mechanism - the treaty will be applied?

Where is our freedom, what is the meaning of this election if you announce us that whatever we do, in any event, we will be obliged by international agreements to submit the budget of France to the prior approval of the European Commission to submit all our loans prior agreement? I said, "Since there is more freedom, more sovereignty, citizen uprising is a sacred duty of the Republic! "

Where is our freedom, where our sovereignty when, in secret and without ever speaking in any meeting or in any gathering, preparing month after month, by accomplices votes with one another, that you called "great transatlantic market" by 2015, which we vote, we will unite permanently without customs barriers, no legal barriers in the United States of America?

Where is our freedom? Where is our freedom, what if we vote this time, it should be recognized that continues what we do not want and we do not know how to tell you that we do not want is to say the continuation liberalization of public services, the continuation of the provision of poor workers from other European countries that are doing work here cheaply, thanks to which is added to social dumping internal relocation.

Where is our freedom? It is in our ballot paper, giving power to the Left Front, abolish all these measures because France no longer subscribe.

Where is our freedom when our sovereignty, confiscated by our involvement in a military command integrated within the Atlantic Alliance, connects us to all shipments of the proponents of the "clash of civilizations" in the United States of America, including we do not want !

Therefore, whether the European Treaty or whether this participation that we do not want in NATO, we, the Left Front, to proclaim that we will submit these two popular referendum commitments. France must leave, and the integrated command, and the Alliance itself; it must offer the world, according to its history, a new anti-globalization alliance, independent of the United States of America. It must involve the renovation of the international order that can only be legitimate in our eyes: not the one resulting from the G8, G20, and all these sinecures where the powerful intimately to the world what he has to undergo and suffer, but rather UN agencies renovated by the action of France itself.

A France that no longer would practice this variable geometry defense of human rights, used to interferences more than doubtful. A France that would finally, in all forums and face everyone, never look down, causes that drive and that make our revolutions have never been revolutions for the French but universal humanity. A France that would defend the universal rights of man, that is to say in particular would fight internationally for the recognition, in Europe as in the rest of the world, abortion rights, basic the freedom to dispose of course for half of humanity. To the world, to fight against the death penalty, not only in China but also the United States of America! Fighting in front of the world saying, "Here are the French! And they invite you to join the cause proposed by Evo Morales, the leftist president of Bolivia. France proposed to be set up as suggested, an international tribunal to punish environmental crimes against humanity. "

No, Mr. President, the first danger, contrary to what you said when you took power, not the confrontation between the West and Islam; the first danger is that France is transformed into a spare wheel of the imperial chariot which is the leading cause of world disturbances. The France of the Sixth Republic we want to build, France is not a "Western" nation, it is not because of its colorful people, nor the fact that it is present in all the world's oceans because it exists, lives and radiates near five continents, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Reunion, Mayotte, the West Indies, French Guiana has the longest border of France - 800 km! - With Brazil. No, France is not a Western nation, it is a universal nation!

We are, and we want to be, because of that history has bequeathed us, the first nation universalist model. So we need to live up to our principles, and it is to this great task you are called, not the miserable Gloubi-boulga politician PMU which call you to pick chefs!

Once again, we will have to be this hot crater from which will spring anew the flame of revolutions by contagion become the common cause of all the peoples of Europe. We will open the breach, we do not need guidance and Human permissions, now, because we are a mature power, conscious, disciplined, educated, politicized! We will open the breach through which our brothers and sisters in Greece will end the abject finance dictatorship that ravaged their country. We will open the gap through which will pass next October the German people themselves. We will open the breach in the wall that resignation everywhere took the people by the throat, which is again distilled all day long when you are told that it would be us, the ruin, when it is them who organized and have demonstrated wherever their rotten policy applies!

Yes, we are in the month of Germinal, swollen buds burst of life already in bloom, and with them the promise looks fruit.

France beautiful and rebellious, comes the cherry and happy days!

Long live France, long live the Republic, long live the Social Republic!
