What allowed our democracies to establish themselves was that we told the middle classes they would live better and better. The idea of progress is therefore attached to our democracies and to this balance.

We stopped keeping the economic promise. That began with deindustrialization. Globalization from the 1990s onward weakened that consensus through waves of relocation.

The promise that the political economy would continuously allow you to live better was no longer being fulfilled.

The great blow was the crisis of 2008–2012. And who paid the bill? The middle classes.

Even in countries that were less affected, some groups have still not fully recovered the purchasing power and living standards they had before that crisis. There was a sense of betrayal.

There is a crisis of effectiveness in our democracies. We have made our systems more sophisticated, but we have become extremely complex, less understandable and slower.

Checks and balances and independent authorities were created for very good reasons, but they have slowed the ability of our democratic system to act.

That creates impatience in societies that want problems solved very quickly.

This crisis of democratic effectiveness makes our systems less acceptable and creates a fascination with authoritarian regimes or authoritarian systems.

The first answer is to re-humanize social networks. We have to take back control.

We have to take back control of social networks and of the artificial intelligence that is arriving. This is a European battle.

What I call re-humanizing means taking back control, putting everything back at the right pace and making democracy work again.

Europe has become desynchronized. It is too slow compared with China and the United States.

Europe’s battle for the coming years is to innovate much faster and much more strongly.

Over the last 20 years, in GDP per capita, we have fallen behind the United States, and more than two-thirds of the explanation is that we innovate less.

Artificial intelligence and robotics can be an opportunity because they can give our societies new room for maneuver.

If I want to weaken your leaders’ ability to support Ukraine, or if I want a particular party to win, I go onto your social networks, push content designed to provoke overreaction, and I can do it with fake accounts.

The madness is allowing masked outside actors to manipulate our democracies and allowing algorithms controlled by a handful of people to manipulate our tastes and choices.

We are crazy. That is not a rational choice for democracies structured like ours.

We want transparency in algorithms. You must explain how content is brought to me, who is favored and who is not.

Ban fake accounts. There can be a legitimate debate about anonymity, but I am radically opposed to there being no real person behind an account on a social network. That is unacceptable.

I must be able to choose my algorithms. That is what taking back control of social networks means.

As long as we continue holding elections and operating democracies with social networks functioning as they do today, we can complain about national populism, new demagogies and the extremes — but they will continue to emerge.

The so-called American "free speech" that some people promote today is the opposite of free speech.

There is no freedom if there is no limit to my freedom beginning with the freedom of others and respect for a common framework.

My freedom cannot mean hitting you, insulting you or destroying the common space for everyone.