Principles

Formal rights are necessary but not sufficient.

A person who possesses a right but lacks the practical means to exercise it does not enjoy the same freedom as someone who can actually use it.

Access to:

• healthcare;
• education;
• housing;
• transport;
• social protection;
• information;
• digital infrastructure;

can therefore increase individual freedom.

Public institutions should provide the material conditions required for rights to become practical rather than merely theoretical.

Equality of opportunity should be understood seriously.

It is not sufficient to declare that everyone may compete if some people begin life with vastly greater access to education, wealth, networks, housing, or security.

Public policy should therefore reduce the extent to which inherited wealth and social background determine future possibilities.

Education is especially important because it is one of the principal mechanisms through which equality of opportunity can become real.

Economic inequality becomes politically significant when it produces unequal access to power.

Very large concentrations of wealth can influence:

• political institutions;
• media;
• markets;
• housing;
• employment;
• technological infrastructure.

Progressive taxation, inheritance taxation, public services, and social protection are therefore legitimate democratic tools.

The objective is not complete equality of outcomes.

It is to prevent economic inequality from becoming permanent political and social domination.

Fraternity also applies across time.

Present generations should not improve their own material situation by irreversibly degrading the environmental, technological, institutional, or economic conditions inherited by future generations.

Long-term environmental protection, infrastructure maintenance, scientific research, education, and preservation of knowledge are therefore forms of intergenerational solidarity.

Citizens should be able to participate in political decisions between elections.

This participation should be meaningful rather than decorative.

When institutions consult citizens, the results should be able to influence the decision-making process.

Democratic participation should also distinguish between understanding and agreement.

A citizen may understand a proposal and reject it.

Conversely, a proposal that large numbers of citizens cannot understand should not simply proceed as if this lack of understanding were irrelevant.

Public institutions should be transparent by default where secrecy is not legitimately required.

Citizens should be able to understand:

• how decisions are made;
• what evidence was used;
• who advised decision-makers;
• how public money was spent;
• what interests influenced a decision;
• how digital systems process public information.

Transparency should apply to political institutions, scientific advice, public procurement, and technological infrastructure.

I support a strong state where collective action is necessary.

The state should not merely correct problems after markets fail.

In some areas, it should directly organise, finance, own, regulate, or operate essential systems.

This is particularly important for:

• healthcare;
• education;
• research;
• energy;
• railways;
• telecommunications;
• housing;
• strategic infrastructure.

The state should be strong where collective capacity matters and constrained where individual freedom is at stake.

A powerful state without democratic control is dangerous.

A weak state incapable of protecting public goods is also dangerous.

Essential public services should be evaluated according to the value they provide to society rather than according to whether they generate financial profit.

A hospital, school, railway, or research laboratory may produce immense social value without producing a commercial return.

Public policy should therefore distinguish clearly between financial profitability and social usefulness.

Not every valuable institution should be forced to behave like a business.

Some sectors are too important to be governed solely by private ownership and short-term market incentives.

Public ownership or strong public control can be legitimate where an activity is strategically important, forms essential infrastructure, or requires investment horizons measured in decades.

At European scale, this principle may justify common public institutions or public enterprises in strategic sectors.

Public ownership should be judged by its ability to provide resilient, efficient, accessible, and democratically accountable services.

Sovereignty means the practical ability to make independent decisions.

It is not limited to formal legal authority.

A country or political union cannot be fully sovereign if essential technologies, infrastructure, energy, defence capability, financial systems, or industrial capacity can be controlled from abroad.

Strategic autonomy should therefore include:

• industrial capacity;
• technological competence;
• scientific infrastructure;
• energy security;
• defence capability;
• digital independence.

Sovereignty should make cooperation more balanced, not replace cooperation with isolation.

Technological sovereignty is not achieved simply by replacing a foreign proprietary supplier with a European proprietary supplier.

European ownership is not sufficient; European control and user freedom matter too.

Users and institutions should retain the ability to:

• inspect;
• audit;
• modify;
• migrate;
• maintain;
• interoperate;
• replace suppliers.

For this reason, free software, open standards, interoperability, and open formats are political as well as technical issues.

When public money finances knowledge, software, infrastructure, or research, the resulting assets should remain as accessible to the public as reasonably possible.

Public investment should create commons that accumulate over time.

This principle applies particularly to:

• software;
• scientific publications;
• research data;
• standards;
• public datasets;
• technical documentation.

Exceptions can exist for privacy, security, or legitimate industrial reasons, but enclosure should not be the default outcome of public funding.

Knowledge grows when it can be examined, criticised, reproduced, and improved.

I therefore support:

• open science;
• open access;
• free software;
• open standards;
• reproducible research;
• public data where appropriate.

Publicly funded knowledge should not become unnecessarily inaccessible behind commercial or technical barriers.

Claims should be auditable where possible.

In science, this means reproducible methods, data, software, and experiments.

In technology, it means documented systems, open interfaces, and independent verification.

In democracy, it means transparent procedures and auditable digital infrastructure.

Reproducibility is a general defence against opaque authority.

The most sustainable resource is often the one that does not need to be extracted.

Between solutions providing equivalent social value, policy should generally favour those requiring fewer:

• materials;
• energy;
• non-renewable resources;
• land;
• replacement cycles.

Durability, repairability, reuse, efficiency, and sufficiency should therefore be central design principles.

Money is a useful accounting and coordination mechanism.

It is not a physical resource.

Every economy ultimately depends on:

• energy;
• materials;
• ecosystems;
• labour;
• knowledge;
• infrastructure;
• time.

Economic analysis should therefore remain connected to physical reality.

A financially inexpensive solution may be physically wasteful.

A financially expensive investment may conserve energy and resources for decades.

Monetary optimisation should inform political decisions, not replace physical analysis.

Continuous economic growth should not be treated as the supreme political objective.

Growth can sometimes represent useful innovation, knowledge, efficiency, or better services.

It can also represent greater extraction, consumption, waste, and environmental pressure.

The objective should therefore be balance.

A successful society should aim to improve quality of life, knowledge, security, freedom, public services, and resilience while remaining within physical limits.

Political institutions often operate on shorter time horizons than the systems they govern.

Energy infrastructure, ecosystems, education, scientific capability, housing, industrial competence, and technological sovereignty develop over decades.

Policy should therefore resist sacrificing long-term resilience for immediate political or financial advantage.

Short electoral cycles should not determine the lifespan of strategic infrastructure.

International law should apply consistently.

Political or economic convenience should not determine whether legal principles are considered important.

Allies, partners, competitors, and adversaries should be judged according to the same basic standards.

Selective application of principles eventually destroys their credibility.