The more the proposed law on assisted dying is debated, the less it seems self-evident, despite the final vote expected on July 15. In five years, parliamentary support for its legalization has fallen from almost 80% to just over 52% during the third reading on June 30, 2026 in the National Assembly. A drop of almost 30 points. A continuous, almost silent erosion, which reminds us of an essential democratic truth: ideas are never definitively imposed. They discuss, contest and can even back down.
These numbers tell a political story. That of a fight led not by the powerful, but by those who, on a daily basis, support human vulnerability: doctors, caregivers, psychologists, volunteers, lawyers, philosophers and committed citizens. For years, they have been writing, testifying, arguing and debating, refusing that the end of life be reduced to a simple technical management of suffering, or to an existence that has become in the eyes of some useless, too dependent, or even too costly.
Democracy is not the reign of the inevitable
Because this debate goes far beyond the opposition between the individual autonomy of some and the refusal of the ultimate gesture by others. It has become one of the great anthropological and political conflicts of our time. On the one hand, a certain neoliberal ideology for which the sovereign individual should be able to choose and control everything, up to the moment and manner of his own death. On the other, a conception of humanity which affirms that a life remains dignified even when it is vulnerable, and that the response to suffering is not the elimination of the sufferer, but the development of solidarity, care and support.
The paradox is that the legalization of euthanasia is often presented as the standard of progress. Yet many of those who oppose it are precisely those who stand closest to human suffering. They know that a request to die is never unequivocal and that it often says something else: fear, loneliness, a feeling of abandonment, a loss of meaning. They fight against the evil of illness while agreeing to remain there, with their patients, facing the irreducible reality of human finitude. Their clinical experience has made them cautious of grand promises of “freedom” that would suggest that there would be a definitive solution to the most extreme human distress.
By expressing his wish to see this law adopted before the end of summer 2026, the Head of State can give the feeling that the meaning of history has already been written and that all that remains is to remove the last resistances. But democracy is not the reign of the inevitable. It is precisely the space where human speech can still influence the course of things.
Power transforms language
On June 30, at the Palais-Bourbon, only 63 votes separated the supporters of legalization from its opponents. This narrowing says one essential thing: to talk about euthanasia is to discover its complexity. Listening to those who accompany the dying means hearing experiences that cannot be reduced to polls or slogans. Because words don’t just describe the world: they shape it.
We have known since George Orwell that power often begins by transforming language. We no longer speak of euthanasia but of “assisted dying”. We no longer give death; we “accompany a choice”. We no longer suppress an anthropological prohibition; we “create a new right”. Words are never innocent. They shape the world in which we accept to live.
Walter Benjamin wrote that modern societies produce men who count, calculate and administer, but become increasingly poor in stories and transmittable experiences. This remark resonates strangely today. Faced with the accountants of our neoliberal societies, those who support human vulnerability and people at the end of life remind us of an essential truth: humans tell their stories infinitely more than they count themselves.
The fight against the legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide is not that of conservatives focused on religious principles. He neither denies the suffering nor the impasses of certain situations. It aims to keep open, against any pretension to evidence or inevitable progress, the fundamental question of what we want to become collectively.
Words have political power: they can resist power, even when it seems irresistible.
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