"Against the cultural hegemony of the hard right, let us wage a political and budgetary battle"

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On June 24, 2025, a "Summit of Freedoms" was held at the Casino de Paris, which aroused keen interest well beyond the circles invited to it. On stage, Jordan Bardella, Eric Ciotti, Sarah Knafo, and Marion Maréchal Le Pen gave this gathering the air of a political rally. While the Casino de Paris is owned by Vincent Bolloré, the man behind the organization of this "summit" is Pierre-Edouard Stérin , already a sponsor since 2021 of the equally misnamed "Nights of the Common Good." Through its fund "Political intelligence," Pericles, the billionaire, a tax exile in Belgium with 150 million euros, is working to finance far-right candidates. His political project is summed up in the acronym "Pericles": Patriots, Rooted, Resistant, Identitarian, Christian, Liberal, European, Sovereignist.

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At the "Freedom Summit", however, it is less a question of a project than of France's "internal enemies" : the State, its "fiscal guillotine" and its agencies, the unions, "those who hate us" and who should be subjected to "remigration" , in a word all those "wokists" who have won the battle for cultural hegemony. The fault lies with this "left" which, according to them, has infiltrated French society through political parties of both the left and the right, the "intellectual elites" , cultural institutions, public schools, universities and even associative networks. And since it is everywhere, there is no longer any point in talking about "left-wing culture" or a "left-wing State": it is culture itself that must be fought, as well as the State which is supposedly its agent of propaganda.

First tactic: to control ideas, one must take control of their distribution media. The acquisition of media and publishing groups is a key step, generally followed by a more or less brutal, more or less uniform ideological realignment.

Second strategy: appropriating the language and symbols belonging to our common heritage. "Common good, freedom of expression, truth," but also de Gaulle, Dreyfus, Jaurès, whom the far right does not hesitate to invoke in speeches with perverse jubilation: they care little that each of these great historical figures fought their ancestors until their last breath. The very concept of cultural hegemony, developed by the Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s, has been claimed by the right and the far right since the 1980s: Marion Maréchal, who quotes Gramsci extensively in her speeches, is only one of the latest in a long series. Just as the Nazis, according to the classic thesis of Johann Chapoutot, had diverted the heritage of Antiquity for propaganda purposes, just as they subsequently alienated the epithet "socialist" to better dispossess the left of it, the extreme right is going to plunder republican principles to better empty them of their substance.

But it is the third weapon that should worry us the most – the budgetary weapon. If, at the "Summit of Freedoms", there is so much talk of "cutting off funding" to the "obese" State, if the "Nights of the Common Good" launched under the aegis of Stérin serve primarily to finance ultra-conservative associations proposing a "counter-model" , there is no coincidence in this. Of course, public finances are more unifying and less scandalous than the invocation of the legacy of Maurras. But the issue is elsewhere: 150 million euros of savings in 2025, 200 million in 2026: compared to the 44 billion savings proposed by the Bayrou government , these are literally kopeks. The budgetary weapon in fact has a political aim: to corner public culture in order to stifle it little by little. For fifty years, liberals have been using this weapon to kill public services which, for political or ideological reasons, have become undesirable to them.

Let's look at their rhetoric. Since culture carries an engaged worldview – necessarily left-wing – why should the taxpayer have to pay? Regions in the hands of the right and the far right have not failed to take a strong hand, castigating in passing the "militant ideology" of cultural actors. More skillful, however, than the diatribes of Christelle Morançais (president of Horizons of the Pays de la Loire Regional Council, which reduced the budget allocated to culture by 73%) against "highly politicized associations, which live off public money" , is the speech of her advisor Alexandre Thébault (LR): refuting any ideological decision, he draws on the lexicon of the economic responsibility of a good father.

As women engaged in politics and cultural actors, we know only too well how the cultural war waged by Putin (in Russia) and Milei (in Argentina) in the countries where we were respectively born was fundamental to the dismantling of their democratic structures. To dismantle cultural policies, the extreme right does not need to be in charge; the so-called "center" government does it very well. Passing off political choices as good management techniques; covering ideology with the veneer of economic efficiency; imposing conservative ideas under the guise of "neutrality": this is where the possible – and harmful – alliance between the right and the center could be formed. We cannot resign ourselves to seeing France slide down this slope in turn and call on all those in positions of responsibility to reconnect with a fighting spirit.

The crux of this war is cultural resistance as much as budgetary resistance. The cultural exception that the entire world envies owes us as much to Mitterrand and Lang as to de Gaulle and Malraux. When the latter, to whom the former had entrusted Cultural Affairs, inaugurated the ministry of the same name, he intended to protect art and thought from pure commercial logic.

This fight is not just a left-wing affair, but a challenge for the Republican right and the center. If we want to preserve our democracy, culture must once again become a common cause, and not a minor one. Before even thinking about elections, cultural policies must be immediately put back at the center of budget negotiations. If no agreement is reached, this is yet another reason to censure a government that has backed down in the face of the culture war now openly waged by the conservative right.

BIOS EXPRESS

Diana Filippova is a novelist and essayist, and a former advisor to Anne Hidalgo. Paula Forteza is a former congresswoman and founder of Artivistas, a committed Latin American art gallery.