France: is friendship as important as family?
Clémence Guetté, member of the French National Assemblé for the party La France Insoumise, has published a book in which she makes the case for legal recognition of friendships alongside marriage, civil partnerships and family ties. In her newly published Pour une politique de l'amitié, she proposes that people should be able to enter into a partnership agreement in which they undertake to care for one another. The French media are highly critical of the book.
There are more pressing issues
The LFI is distracting from more important matters, economist Thibault Prébay criticises in Le Figaro:
“France is saddled with a colossal deficit of nearly 150 billion euros a year. ... When one of the party's economic experts takes the floor, we expect a vision for fiscal policy. ... Alas, what we get is a simplistic, caricatured view of friendship, of the 'good guys' on the left and the 'bad guys' (i.e. the far right). And additional spending. ... That's it. This book could just as well be titled 'The Evasion'. It fails to address any of the issues France is dealing with. ... Instead it merely seeks to monopolise media attention. ... That might work to win over the left, but not to help France.”
Exposed to state and market
This turns friendship into a service, criticises Pierre-Romain Thionnet, MEP for the Patriots for Europe group, in Boulevard Voltaire:
“With her proposal to transform friendship into a service, Guetté is merely extending the logic of contracts and the influence of the law – phenomena that have always paved the way for the market and led to the good and the free being replaced by that which has value. ... Guetté is turning herself into a mouthpiece for the prevailing ideology that has driven the fragmentation of those communities which offered protection from the market's greed. By institutionalising friendship, Guetté has identified the enemy: the family, but also friendship as a phenomenon that has so far been spared the simultaneous encroachment of the state and the market.”