This Saturday, May 30, some 500 brave people braved the heat and gathered in front of the Olympia, a concert hall owned by Vincent Bolloré, to protest against the far-right propaganda carried out by the billionaire’s empire. The choice of the gathering place was not made at random. For Ghislain Gauthier, general secretary of the CGT Spectacle, it is a symbol of the billionaire’s control in the cultural sector. “When we list what Bolloré owns in the media and the cultural sphere, it has become an essential player who uses its dominant position to impose its point of view ”.
The power of a few billionaires
If the banning by Maxime Saada, boss of Canal +, of the signatories of the “Zapper Bollor” column set fire to the powder in the context of the Cannes festival, it is numerous actors and actresses of culture, unions and political parties, who are mobilizing today to denounce the control of a small number of billionaires over publishing, media, live performance or music. The CGT, the SNJ (national union of journalists), elected communist officials, Génération.s and La France Insoumise, as well as employees of Prisma, a press company owned by Bolloré and victim of a major layoff plan, took turns to speak.
Ghislain Gauthier does not only target the far right and billionaires. For him, ARCOM (Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication) and the government are not doing their job sufficiently: “We are calling on them to act, faced with the mass of racist lies deployed on Cnews and relayed on the networks of the Bolloré empire. We are also calling on the public authorities to ban the dinners organized by Stérin around the French Canon, punctuated with Nazi salutes. France is turning sour and the public authorities are looking elsewhere ”.
Sophie Taillé-Polian, élue Génération.s (parti créé par Benoît Hamon), rappelle que « culture and research are always attacked by the far right when it seeks to take power“. Because behind the attack on the signatories of the “Zapper Bolloré” column, it is also the independence of the Grasset publishing house which is threatened, as evidenced by the dismissal of Olivier Nora, literary director for 26 years. The ongoing purge at Prisma Media, with 40% of the workforce cut, is another symptom of the billionaire’s control over the world of culture and media.
Démanteler l’empire Bolloré
Matthieu Pace, SNJ-CGT representative at Prisma Media, recalls that “Prisma made six million profits last year, and 40% of the workforce was cut. As a reminder, the JDD loses 7 million euros per year, but there is no social plan“. A way of reminding us that “social” plans at Bolloré are not an economic matter, but an ideological one.
The elected officials present are not only calling for resistance to the far right, but for building the foundations of a new political project. “We must dismantle the Bolloré empire“, explains Jean Noël Aqua, elected communist to the council of Paris. “We support, just like the CGT, the demand for a special law to demand the dismantling of empires which concentrate cultural production, dissemination and information in a single hand. We must guarantee the independence of editorial staff in the face of large capitalistic trusts.“. Ghislain Gauthier recalls the deadline for the 2027 presidential election, and the dangers it entails: “The cultural battle led by the far right is a major risk for our professions, because we depend a lot on public authorities. We want to push the idea that there is a need for pluralism, cultural diversity, and that implies an anti-concentration law placed on the political agenda for 2027 ”.
Yes, we suspect it: you have had enough
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