The traditional New Year's wishes from politicians all have a hollow ring. Ministers who don’t know if they’ll still be around in a month's time are promising to succeed where all of their predecessors have failed.

The Minister of Agriculture says he is committed to ensuring that all farmers are able to make a living off their work. Darmanin, the Minister of Justice, has promised he will put an end to drug trafficking organized from prisons. And Valls, once Prime Minister and now back as Minister for Overseas France, has vowed to rebuild Mayotte. What a bunch of liars!

They've been repeating the same promises for decades. The people of Mayotte can testify to this. How many times has the government promised to solve the water problem and help the island develop? Even the most recent buildings, built by Bouygues and others were not up to anti-cyclonic standards and saw their roofs blown off!

All these bourgeois politicians couldn’t care less about hard-working people. They despise workers and the poor while admiring the rich and going to great lengths to serve them.

In Mayotte, Bayrou has complied with the demands of the Medef (the French employers’ federation): companies, including construction giants such as Colas and Vinci, will not have to pay taxes for a while. But it's a very different story for the poor, as Bayrou has ordered the eviction of all those who have taken refuge in schools and has forbidden the purchase of sheet metal by those without ID. Where are they supposed to sleep? In the rain and mud?

The same class contempt exists here too. Starting this year, all RSA¹ recipients will have to work 15 hours for free. The government knows that many of them are single mothers or people too ill and worn out to work. But that won't stop the authorities from striking them off the list of people entitled to the RSA!

For the righteous preachers who govern us, the thousands of job cuts planned by big and prosperous corporations are not even an issue. And when unemployment, which is on the rise again, beats a new record, they'll say that too many unemployed people just don't want to work!

Of all the promises made by politicians, there's one they will keep: the promise to attack foreign workers, whom they'll continue to point to as society's main problem. We can see it in Mayotte, where Comorian immigrants are blamed for all the island's ills, even though Comorians and Mahorans² are part of the same people artificially divided by the French colonial power.

To fuel the war between the poor and force them to fight for the crumbs left by the capitalists, you can count on the bosses and the politicians at their service! If Le Pen went to Mayotte, it's because she's made it her little laboratory for promoting her hateful, xenophobic ideas. And indeed, the deliberate confusion made between immigrants and delinquents, between Muslims and terrorists, has become just as unbearable and systematic in the mouths of many other politicians.

This will to pit worker against worker divides and weakens the working class. It constitutes one of the worst threats because it’s also with this type of nationalist policy that governments prepare their wars.

On a global scale, millions of men and women are already trapped in the wars waged by the great world powers to establish their domination around the globe. In Africa, millions of families spent the New Year in refugee camps. Many workers and peasants in the Ukraine spent it in fear of Russian bombing. In the ruins of Gaza, children continue to die. If they survive the bombings, they are exposed to famine and now to the cold of winter, while the world's top leaders turn a blind eye. Let's face it, from their point of view, our lives are no more valuable than the lives of Gazan children.

So, what we can hope for in 2025 is that workers use their strength and their indispensable role in the economy to defend their interests and lead the fight against the rapacious capitalist class, whose irresponsibility towards society is blatant. The domination of capitalists over a world so rich in possibilities is an immense waste, that insults both human intelligence and dignity.

Nathalie Arthaud