Not French here, but it’s a common tendency across many western countries. Public education means higher expenditure and some countries are choking with debt so they have to brutally cut funds (education and healthcare are the preferred target, with education being at the first place because consequences are not immediately visible). The problem is not the elites anyway, it’s the rest of people letting them do it and justifying it. If their children will become cheap workforce, their parents will be to blame too.

There are other countries following the same path, enforcing draconian punishment towards environmental activists (labelled by the press as “ecological terrorists”).

It was very popular in the 80s and 90s, indeed. With the new millennium it became slightly less “trendy” in favour of other “foreign-sounding” names. Trust me, Italians really like loans from foreign languages, even for peoples’ given names. This often create a comic contrast with very Italian family names e.g. “Jennifer Fumagalli” or “Thomas Bongiovanni” which sound a little kitsch but it’s also adorable.

You don’t like a product? You don’t buy it for you or for your kids as long as you materially provide for them. The company which sells it goes bankrupt and that’s it. No need for prosecuting / banning by law the ideologies you don’t like. As simple as that. Otherwise you are implicitly admitting you are wrong.

I was wondering how much time would have passed before anything like this happened. The history of that part of Europe is so blood-soaked that one just has to scratch the surface a little bit to find ethnic cleansing crimes. Profiting of it for political propaganda is terrible, though.

The one about the “10-seconds rule” for sexual harassment generated a flood of ironic videos on TikTok and was in general received very badly by younger generations because the girl was “one of them” and they could relate. The other one is received with total indifference. Plus there’s another: the son of the president of the Senate has been accused of rape and his father publicly declared that she was on drug/she waited 40 days to “remember” and sue the complaint so she is unreliable. All in a very short amount of time. To me it’s a generational clash, unfortunately the younger don’t have right to vote (and if they do they don’t go voting) and the one who rule are white/male chauvinists.

As an Italian, I feel truly ashamed. There is another case on the news in these days concerning the reduction of the sentence for a man who killed and torn to pieces his ex girlfriend due to “his being very affectionate but her being too libertine”. What has gone wrong with this country?