Public services enter the scene!

Culture, education, justice, information, science... The National Union of Artistic and Cultural Enterprises is organizing a series of debates in 2025 to highlight the role and importance of public services in society. Libération is a partner in this series of events.

By organizing ten debates in France, Syndeac and its members are openly engaging in a campaign of convergence and promotion of all public services, with which we work in complementarity and weave projects together on a daily basis. With the "Our Public Services" Collective, we intend to reiterate the essential nature of our combined action, serving a policy of equal access to law, healthcare, education, art, and culture.

In an increasingly deliberately austere budgetary context, which serves as a justification for reducing the number of civil servants and cutting subsidies for social and cultural actors, we refuse to wait for the total dismantling of our public services to recognize their lack and need. Far from generating savings, the drastic reduction in spending will lead to a social disaster with inestimable costs. We are already seriously measuring the first consequences. And only a reflection on increasing revenue, which the State refuses to do, will be able to spare us from this.

Opening our series of debates in Montluçon, a rural area, on the subject of freedom of creation and dissemination is not trivial. Increasingly, these budgetary excesses are revealing their true ideological aims on public opinion. The populist and, let's face it, reactionary discourses that justify them leave no room for doubt. Denigration without foundation and without objective criteria for the quality of the service provided; absurd denunciation of an ultra-dependence on public money even though this public funding guarantees principles of equity and social justice for the population; an anti-woke crusade that has become a political obsession as blind as it is violent in the wake of the most unashamed Trumpism. The threat of stopping subsidies then becomes a weapon brandished as much against education as against research or culture. And this blackmail not only undermines our fundamental freedoms but also the execution of our public utility missions.

Just like certain scientists, teachers, and researchers, artists are now becoming increasingly direct targets of these ideological and financial attacks. Obstacles to the smooth running of artistic events or conferences are increasing, as are hateful and defamatory campaigns on social media. The Republican Engagement Contract—which the Cese recently called for to be abolished as abuses become widespread—which was supposedly a tool for defending the values ​​of the Republic, is now being used against the non-profit sector when it takes positions that displease the funder. The Observatory of Creative Freedom documents these situations perfectly, and we observe the difficulty of acting against these increasingly explicit attempts at censorship, sometimes even legitimized by politicians, which generate a form of self-censorship.

Faced with such a situation, where common sense is no longer enough to counter populist unreason and lies, we no longer want to be content with adopting a defensive posture. This is why we are launching this initiative, so that public services can fully enter the picture and occupy the heart of the campaign for the upcoming municipal, presidential, and regional elections.

These first ten debates will allow us to join forces to bring a common voice that will restore vitality to the progressive values ​​that drive us. We will continue this momentum of mobilization in 2026 and actively engage in propagating a desirable model of society that opposes the darkness promised by the far-right shift in political debate and the austerity budgetary policies that favor their rise to power.